Hi Marie -
After his last set of interactions with the mailing list, Derric has decided to leave it for the time being - so he won't receive your message unless you specifically send it to him. I honestly hope he chooses to return to the list in the future; after having some private conversations with him, I believe that his heart is very much in the right place, that he has a genuine desire to help improve the gendergap, and that his participation would likely benefit the list - and Wikimedia as a whole - more than the participation of many other men who have been on gendergap-l at one point or another (including quite recently.)
I don't know if you meant that you felt that my recent posts about changes in moderation seemed too topdown, or if you were referring to other things. If you were referring to my posts about moderation - the reason why the last few messages may seem top heavy is because in the past when we primarily tried to use an almost completely hands off approach, it led to a lot of women feeling unsafe participating in the list. We eventually transitioned to a more hands on approach than most other Wikimedia lists use, but one that was still significantly less hands-on than that used by many communities focusing on gender problems in tech and similar groups - and it lowered our the amount that the list felt unsafe to some participants to a degree, but still led to a lot of problems.
After talking with Liz (the other currently active list moderator) and a number of list members in private about how to try to create a safer space, there was fairly broad agreement that more active moderation could help. It's definitely more of a top-down approach than has been taken here previously, but the approaches that have been taken here previously have failed significantly at letting the list fulfill its purpose - mostly because of situations that Carol and various other people have described in various places, where a bottoms-up approach to organization has resulted in large numbers of women either leaving the list, feeling uncomfortable contributing openly to it, or just tuning it out and not reading it. Strong moderation goes against my gut feeling in many cases, but if it has a chance of minimizing the number of times that potentially valuable contributors are forced off the list because of the unregulated behavior of other contributors, I think it's something worth trying.
At the same time, we're not intending to set up an arbitrary set of community standards alone, but are intending to draft a basic version and then post it somewhere publicly for comment, discussion, and collaborative editing until we reach something that seems like it will be a useful document for the listserv. I guess it's also worth clarifying that although I sometimes voice my private opinions on an individual basis to the list, in the time that I have been a moderator there has never been a mod decision made that didn't have discussion between all active mods and their agreement that it was a worthwhile action to take. Decisions are usually announced by whichever mod feels like writing up a public message, but most mod decisions have represented the consensus of at least three mods (and we'll be announcing a new addition to the mod team shortly who I am incredibly glad volunteered to join us.)
Best,
Kevin Gorman