Maintaining Communities
An interesting approach to keeping a mailing list, or in-person group, active and desirable. I have noticed on more than one occasion the "bad pushes out good" phenomenon in groups. In a small enough group, which is completely open, the people who I go to see will stop attending because they don't want to be around the people who I don't go to see. Soon, mostly the bad apples and the very forgiving are left. Very few people are willing to un-friend someone, or push someone out of anything. They prefer to start over with some other community. The approach described in the article allows them to start over in the same community. What are your thoughts?
Edited to add: www.calebclark.org went down and the link was broken, so I am linking to the archive on the Wayback Machine. I'm also adding the full text to Caleb Clark's original post, below:
Hot Tubbing An Online Community
Caleb Clark, January 12th, 1999.
Email listservs often parallel in person group growth patterns and grow very fast, too fast. Sometimes this will lead to a situation where pleas to the list have no effect and the list is in danger of degrading into flames and lots of useless noise.
Here’s a proven way I’ve come up with to get a list back on its feet and back to its core misson and people.
In Oakland California there’s a hot tub in the back yard of an early producer of the Grateful Dead. You have to go very quietly along an ally next to his house, and then punch the code on a redwood door to get in. My friend did not let me see the code.
There’s a changing room, a hot tub, a redwood deck, a hammock, and a few small redwoods and plants on a lot behind his house that he never developed. Talking is discouraged. No drugs of any kind are allowed. Clothing is optional.
I have an image of the friend I was with during my visit. It’s burned into my brain. She is quite an attractive woman and was standing buck naked in a light drizzle of warm summer rain. The ex-producer had came down from his house (which is inches from the tub) and they had struck up a conversation.
So here’s this soft friendly 50 something original hippie, fully dressed, talking to this young naked woman, at night, in the rain, beads of misty water dripping from his hair, and her body, and all among redwoods in the middle of Oakland. I just swung naked in the hammock I was in and marveled at the scene. We ended up going into his house and he played some jazz on these new speakers he’d just got. They were 8 feet high, three inches thick, and looked like the Monolith in 2001. They sounded smooth as the slick redwood decking of his hot tub.
Later that night my friend told me about the hot tub. She said it had been around for years and at first there was no gate. But then a few incidents happened. Negative things, like drugs or violence. So a gate was installed with a code. The code was then given out to only a few long time users of the hot tub. They in turn shared the code with close friends they trusted. Eventually the code would spread over the years and something negative would happen. Then the code would be changed again. This had happened a few times in my friends long experience with the tub.
I took this over to email mailing lists and thus we have “hot tubbing”.
When a list gets too big, has too many flames, and won’t respond to cries for sanity from it’s core members, hot tub it by doing this:
1. Send out a well subject headered message saying something like: “in 24 hours this list will end. A new list will start up. The new lists’ address will be given out at local meetings in person only. If you want to start your own local list, please do so. We are sorry for the this but this list can no longer support the number of people on it.”
2. Kill the list.
3. Start a new one.
4. Give out the address at an in person meeting.
5. Your core group will immediately subscribe to the new list and email out their close friends the new address. In a few months you’ll have a good list again, albeit much smaller.
Comments
nicegeek on Apr. 26, 2011 4:43 PM
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The approach described in the article allows them to start over in the same community. What are your thoughts?
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The approach described doesn't seem like starting over in the same community; it's still moving to a new one. The only difference is that the list admin also moves, and kills the old list when they do.
Whether this is ethical or not depends on the charter of the list. All mailing lists have one; the default is a dictatorship in which the person with the list admin password is king, and the community is defined as "those who the list admin deigns to include."
Potential problems occur when a list is supposed to be inclusive of some real-life community, but has no rules to define and rein in unacceptable behavior. In such a case, the admin, while possessing the technical power to dissolve the list and/or expel people, has no social authority to do so.
Creating and enforcing rules for appropriate conduct and discipline is one way to tame an unruly list. Leaving and forming a new list is another way to deal with it, but unless the "core group" really has the social authority to define the community, I think it would be better to turn the old list over to someone else when they leave, rather than simply killing it.
amanda_lodden on Apr. 26, 2011 9:30 PM
I agree; this isn't the same community. And authority isn't the same on mailing lists as it is in the hut-tub example given-- the hot tub owner ultimately has the final say on who comes and goes by virtue of owning the physical and singular hot tub. But anyone can own a mailing list, and if the "designated admin" has a habit of killing lists, there's nothing stopping multiple people from creating new ones. What happens if Person A trusts Person Z, but Person B doesn't? A gives Z the list address, B complains and starts a new list? You can end up with thousands of lists, and maybe Person C doesn't have an opinion on Z and ends up joining both A's list and B's list.
I'm not saying it's not an option, but it's the option of last resort.
sarahmichigan on Apr. 27, 2011 12:54 PM
I don't have a lot to say about the link, but boy-howdy do I get your bad apple analogy...
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