Full Circle Associates

After the 2006 Etech conference (see great notes by Nate Torkington), Clay Shirkey et al's wiki on online moderation strategies has been linked to in a variety of places, discussed on the online facilitation list and of course, piqued my interest. Like related efforts at CommunityWiki and Meatball Wiki, it seeks to notice patterns about online interaction, this time from the software perspective. In other words, what should tool builders be aware of as they buid tools for online interaction. At Etech, from Nat's notes, Clay said:

Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we're supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having the language to talk about this is the right place to start.

I'd quibble and say software is nto the experimental wing, but rather the design and implementation of software. I'd also quibble with the word "users" but we'll save that for another day.

That said, I do believe we encode our values in the tools we build, so we'd damn well better pay attention. However, we encode far more (or less!) than the principles of freedom of speech. We code in our cultural biases, our believes and values. So when we remember that we are part of a global interaction, the US-centric model of tool building needs to be examined, and our practices discussed with our peers in other places.

For example, after hurricane Katrina there was a series of efforts by tool builders to better capture and organize missing persons data, connect people to material and volunteers to tasks. The tech turks invented some cool stuff. But did we look beyond our borders to know what international relief organizations have been doing now for some time? Did our focus on local response cause us to recreate the wheel a bit? Probably. What if these patterns had been on the table in easy sight?

Finally, there is the piece that is not coded in the software. This is not mechanical moderation. It is human facilitation. As we look at online interaction supported by internet based tools, we must keep an eye on our very basic human interaction patterns, born offline, and carried online in both successful and dysfunctional ways. Software does not trump our basic skills, but it can augment our intentions.

Tags: moderation, facilitation, online_interaction, online, community, social, etech,