[Foundation-l] Moderate this list

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 9:31 PM, Eugene Eric Kim <eekim at blueoxen.com> wrote:
> A bit of an aside: One of the best ideas I've seen in a collaborative
> tool in the past 10 years was in a project called H2O that came out of
> the Berkman Center in its early days. The idea? People could only post
> once a day. It's built-in, self-moderation that encourages cleaner
> discourse and fewer flame wars. It's reminiscent of letter writing
> back when instantaneous communication wasn't an option.

:) The only problem with such approach is that it would be impossible
to follow discussions. If I want to comment on five emails during that
day, I would make ~100kB long email with all comments on various
topics.

However, it may be useful per topic. However, again, various topics
may fork another topics and that possibility may be abused.

Wiki approach is very good: "Article about geography of Italy is not
the right place for talking about political history of Italy, so,
please don't use this talk page for that purpose..."

And, finally, I think that Google Wave will give to us such tools.

> Simple constraints encourage useful behavior. Wikis are great examples
> of this (a single, largely anonymized common space that helps
> depoliticize conversation and encourages convergence). Microblogging
> is another (140 character limit, plus the ability to see who's
> listening).
>
> In general, I don't think tool developers have experimented enough
> with these types of constraints. Facilitators use tricks like this all
> the time. Impose time constraints. Use only three words. Put people in
> a circle. When you pay careful attention to space and time, moderation
> (or active facilitation) is less necessary.

Technocratic approach made free software and open source projects. To
be honest, social structures around those projects remind me on
Ottoman Turkish bureaucracy, which has the important role in the
contemporary Serbia. And I think that it really sucks. So, please,
don't even think about giving right to developers to make policies :P

> Just some additional food for thought for folks thinking about
> developing other alternative discussion tools. :-) In the meantime, I
> think what Andrew is doing with LiquidThreads is pretty cool, and
> we're planning on testbedding it on strategy.wikimedia.org when it's
> ready.

May you describe it in brief here? [[w:en:LiquidThreads]] article is deleted.