Full Circle Associates

Continuing my stream-of-conciousness on community indicators, I was caught by a post on Napsterization about "Honor Tags." Of course, tags can be community indicators. More often than not I think they are more like indicators of a looser affiliation like a network, but I think of the nptech tag and how it has emerged as an effort of the community of folks interested in technology in the non profit sector.

So what are honor tags? And why might they be community indicators? Here are a few extracts from a great post by Mary Hodder that make the point beautifully. I have pulled out the "community" bits! Bolding is mine.

Dan Gillmor and Bayosphere have worked up an interesting tagging system, to differentiate the types of blog posts people are making, if they choose to self-tag their posts. They plan to pull those tagged items into their site to reflect back activities in certain categories. This has some advantages but also presents some problems, though I think there are community solutions that can moderate the problems.

Benefits of Honor Tags include:...
- community affiliation, closeness and participation due to special tag understanding and use...

Problems that might creep up with this tag system:
- people are often either not honest about themselves, or simply don't classify themselves well because they are not very self-aware, or understand the definitions of the classifications differently, so they may state something different that what the community perceives them to be
- some outside the Bayosphere community may feel it's elitist...

I think the community should moderate the use of these tags, to solve some of the problems that may arise from Honor Tag use. Some things that might help the community do this include:...
- Users of the tags should make it clear that this Honor Tag system is for a particular community, and specifically for certain acts, not defining people, but that anyone can use the tags and is welcome to participate in this community through their blogs and use of these tags
- Users and the community as a whole could help make it clear that people can use any and all tags on a post by post basis.. meaning.. one post is journalism, and another is advocacy, depending on what's in the post
- Users and Bayosphere together could create some community moderation for the tag use so that if the community sees a bad actor, they can report it, and if there is a dispute, allow the community to decide what to do about it, and even how to handle it.

community, indicators, tags, honortags community_indicators