RE: Democracy for Online Communities

Over the past few months as the product manager for blogs and forums, I've had the pleasure of meeting some incredibly talented and passionate folks.  Joe Morel, over in the Developer Division is one of them.  He recently wrote a post that is near and dear to my heart -- forums -- and I can't help but chime in here.

Before I offer some thoughts to his post, it will be helpful to provide a little bit of background.  Prior to joining the Communities Technologies Team, I was working with the MSN Games community.  Specifically, I helped design and run a "hyper-affiliate" program for MSN Games.  Think of it as part moderator, part welcoming committee, and part gaming expert.  Prior to that, I worked with online communities for AT&T WorldNet and CareerPath.com (now CareerBuilder).  I'm also quite active in the (offline) community as a volunteer with various civic and issue specific organizations.  Needless to say, community is something of particular interest to me.

So it is in that light that I offer up some thoughts spurred by Joe's recent post. 

Creating a new forum -- I like the concept, and frankly I would take this a step further.  That is, rather than having these hard and fixed definitions of what is or is not a forum, what about having a forum with permeable sides?  That is, instead of forcing content to fit into one pre-determined (either by moderators, site owners or the like) how about making sure that content currently found in forums can be surfaced through any number of contexts?  It might be in the context of one forum, or it might be in the context of another.  Regardless of where it is surfaced though, it exists as one solitary "object" behind the scenes.  In short, the specific view of a forum can be defined by anyone.

Monitoring Answer Rates -- Sharing of data is a good thing in my book.  My only caution here is that communities really live or die by those who "own" it.  As much as I like the notion of empowering the community as a whole, I strongly believe that there is no substitute for active participation on the part of the owners of a particular community.  Can we make their lives easier?  Certainly...but that seems to be a slightly different conversation

Adding new moderators -- From prior experience, I caution against the friend of a friend (FOAF) recommendation.  While more than likely the folks suggested are cool folks, there is something to be said about ensuring a broad and diverse community.  Rather than a popularity contest of sorts, I'd rather see moderation type things better distributed.  What if things like flagging a message for abuse or movement is opened up to all users?

Removing moderation rights -- Beyond moderation, as with any system there will be some who chose to abuse the system.  Having the necessary checks and balances is important to have.  What Joe proposes is interesting and I'll have to bear it more thought.  Just to throw out for discussion...in what ways could this be abused?  What's to prevent a small group of moderators from ganging up on others they deem unfit for whatever reason?

Banning a spamming user -- There are two sides to this from my perspective.  One is that of people who would see said spam.  The other is the system from a pure performance standpoint.  I think having a global ignore messages from said user helps combat this from the user standpoint.  Better filtering of languages and client customizable key words also help.  Simply put, if you don't want to see spam (or other bad content) you shouldn't have to, period.  From the system performance side of things, that's a bit different as ignoring it won't make it go away.  Instead, a holistic system that helps remove the user, the content, etc needs to be in place.  While there will be forums specific implementations, I anticipate there to be lots of shared learnings between different products that deal with spam.

Nominate a user for commendation -- awards can be a tricky thing that should not be taken lightly.  I love the intent of public acknowledgement and recognition of community members, however it can also be disruptive to a community.  There is a fine balance between a grassroots award, and a popularity contest.  Related, perhaps it might be more appropriate to have individuals define their own characteristics where they wished to be recognized or acknowledged?  In other words, while Joe might get recognized by some as being a great basketball player, that's not something I would ever want to be acknowledged on.  Instead, I might want to be recognized as a "good party host" or something.  Why should we all fit into the same box upon which to be evaluated / perceived?

Anyway, that's all for now.  I'd be curious as to what others think about all of this.