This is from the days when the committee was forming. It was meant to be posted in one of the many discussion threads that was locked while I was working on it. So, "this thread" alludes to one of those threads, but the statement made below is applicable to any of the discussion threads.
What looks like an introduction are remnants of a preface I added when I PMed it to someone later. I have left a few things out of the preface, since it wasn't written for public consumption. The body is unfinished and untouched since the night I decide it was pointless to post.
I really don't expect anyone to adopt my view. It was written to explain the perspective and the logic behind the statements I had already made.
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Jnyusa wrote:
The issues themselves do not seem to have really changed – there’s transparency/accountability vs. personal hurt.
It is that simple. Any pretense that doing anything, at this point, can have any impact on the “personal hurt†aspect is unrealistic.
The only thing I think that is the least warranted is removal of RL names. Anything else that has been done or discussed violates my concept of transparency and accountability. This includes
ALL of the deletion that was done that
Wilko agrees gutted the thread. It was an important thread.
The board agreed on the most correct of the approaches that was being entertained. Since I already thought that was a travesty, I have been more and more appalled every day as the discussion degenerated.
I hope the following informs you of how I think about the general issue. I wrote this as my last post on the issue, but I never posted it since it seemed pointless. It hasn’t been edited, so it probably doesn’t read well, but I decided not to spend more time on it.
Please keep in mind that my concern is not so much “what†people think as “how†they think. I expect to disagree with people that I respect and the disagreement shouldn’t have any impact on that respect.
1. Background
Words and the related freedom of speech and intellectual property rights have been important issues in western culture. Once words are expressed, there are rules that are followed concerning their treatment and the consequences of them having been said.
Imprudent use of them can cost you friends. Prudent use of them can win you love. Words can put you in prison. Words can get you out of prison. Fluent use of them can make you rich, even if they belong to someone else. Incorrect use of them can cost you money. Words have power and power is to be respected.
My respect for words and their power leads me to certain opinions about the legitimate treatment of them by myself and others. The internet allows a kind of interaction that was not possible before its existence. In my mind, the nature of the internet adds some responsibilities that did not exist for previous media.
E-messages are the trinary relationship between personal conversation, letters, and published works like magazines. Their scope may be the message board, but they are public discussions with persistence. Spoken words, unless recorded, are transient. E-messages, unless deleted, leave a quasi-permanent history.
This persistence creates the responsibility of custodianship. The e-messages are a record of what someone said and as such, no one should have the ability to blithely change them to indicate something else was said or that something was not said. Whatever happened, happened. It not only happened, but the community reacted to it and a micro-structure of related messages was created that is no longer coherent if a part of it is removed. That is a disservice to the rest of the community in that it devalues their effort. It also detracts from the integrity of the community, since the only manifestation of the community is the collection of the words that have accumulated. Changing the words is lying about who we are.
2. Who are we?
We are a group of people feeling damaged to varying extents by a relationship with a community with a dysfunctional leadership. For those who have affection for TORC, please recognize that at least a few now on B77 were abused after asking for a dialog concerning what appeared to them to be arbitrary leadership decisions, and were invited to discuss it elsewhere. I am not trying to pass judgment on TORC. I’m only saying that, as is common with many human relationships, some felt and still feel abused.
That feeling inspired the creation of this board. Please correct me if I am making any of this up, but I have a memory of the desire for transparency, fairness, honesty, and self moderation.
All of these are derived from the feeling that they were missing from the place from which we were exiled. Irrespective of the impetus, they are all honorable values. When I was invited here these feelings were very much alive and I expected them to survive for a while.
3. What are we trying to do?
It was the correct time to capture these in a founding document. A founding document is important. There is something called entropy, which acts on everything that you know. It essentially means things, when left unattended, fall apart. That’s true of your car, your home, and your relationships. There is no escaping it. All that you can do is expend energy to slow it down. An objective of the Charter is to slow down the deterioration that must occur by creating a set of rules and procedures that are appropriate and enforceable for preserving our view of what an on-line community should be. This isn’t easy and there are many compromises that must be made.
The objectives are transparency, fairness, honesty, and self moderation. Transparency and self-moderation can be controlled through the right set of procedures. Honesty should be the easiest, but several members are currently struggling against it. In spite of a lengthy discussion and a vote for honesty, here we are. Fairness is one of those things truly in the eye of the beholder. I believe we all want it. We disagree on what it is. We aren’t the first to struggle with it.
4. Who owns the words?
A member creates a post for the purpose of sharing thoughts with other members of the community. There is no control over content at this point. There is no assessment of value, legitimacy, or morality. The member is free to say whatever they please. After it is composed the user submits it. At that point it no longer belongs to the member, it belongs to the community.
On B77, as elsewhere, there is a twilight region between the physical submission and the acknowledgment of the community. There can be some freedom here. The degree of freedom varies between when the first member, who is not the author reads the post and when the first member, who is not the author responds to the post. In the twilight zone, systems allow varying degrees of freedom for what can be done with posts. Unfortunately B77 allows posts to be gutted, only leaving an edit count after the first response.
I strongly believe that no one, including the author, has the right to change a post after it is acknowledged by the community, unless a rigid and conservative set of procedures is followed.
I agree this isn’t the view of most here, but it does help explain my opinion.
5. Censorship
This is a strong word, as it should be. It is a serious matter to undertake the changing of someone else’s words. It is also sometimes a necessity. Alterations should not be allowed to be done lightly and they should never be done without a record of the justification for them and a private record of the original content.
Legitimate reasons for changes are:
- violations of agreed upon, publicly posted, and clearly stated rules.
This is usually limited to obscene, racist, sexist, and libelous material.
- unanticipated events that point to a hole in the existing rules for which there is a legitimate chance of a new rule being created.
It is impossible to predict all the mistakes we can make, so there needs to be an escape clause for serious unforeseen issues that arise. Plagiarism is an example. The issue that TORC faced with the estate is another that could cause changes to be necessary.
There must be procedures for minimizing the abuse and avoiding the destruction of words that were inappropriately considered possible violations.
Illegitimate reasons for changes are:
- “If someone finds out what I said about them, they won’t like me anymore.â€
- “I wish that person hadn’t said those things about my friend.â€
- “It’s gutted anyway.â€
6. What can we expect from members?
The aspect of fairness that is at the heart of the current discussion is the balance between freedom of speech and abuse with speech. There are many precedents for obscenity, racism, and sexism. However, even for those there can be a lot of disagreement. Other kinds of abuse are even more difficult to assess. This thread itself contains what I consider abuse and if I were the Imperious Leader, I would have acted on it. I’m not and no one is on this board (except maybe
V). How do we set our limits? How do we measure them? It is almost impossible. There are legal limits, which allow behavior I dislike, but they have functioned in our culture and are our best guide as to what should be allowed. They can determine what we as community are willing and able to enforce.
We can ask and expect members to be nice to each other, but we are all human. Some day someone is going to say something that either:
- the member wishes they hadn’t said
- the target wishes hadn’t been said
- a third party wishes hadn’t been said
One unarguable point is that it will have already been said and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to make it otherwise. All we can really do is what people do in RL situations. We can say we wish it hadn’t happened and we can ask for an apology. We can’t force someone to apologize. We can just hope that if someone brings it to their attention, they will recognize they went too far.
They may not agree, which has been the case for what inspired this discussion. Think about what is the real problem here. Is it the words that were written? I don’t think so. It’s the unrepentant attitude of the poster. Am I going to decide if they are justified? I have no way to know. Even if I take it on myself to judge the accused, I should be judging and punishing the accused. The words are just the evidence of what they did that we judged as being incorrect.
If the parties involved cannot straighten it out between them there is nothing we should do to interfere, other than to move their behavior to the bike racks if it becomes disruptive. We decided that already. It is in our Charter.
There is a part of the current situation that is a little off center from a dispute between members. Several of the injured parties were not members at the time the statements were made. Some are still not. What does that cause?
Among other things, the biggest case of hypocrisy I have witnessed in several years. It was OK to have the words around when they couldn’t respond to them but it is criminal to leave the words exposed now that they can read them and react to them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What an insipid idea of fairness.