Follow-up from last Friday.

In my past experience with community moderation, being a part of communities, and seeing dynamics like these play out, it's hard to overstate just how difficult it can be to identify when a problem is simply what it looks like, and when a problem is someone trying to make someone look like a bad person, for social manipulation reasons, especially for people within a community trying to make good decisions.

The decision-makers become subjected to miniature propaganda campaigns directed personally towards them, and without being aware that that's what's happening, it's easy to fall into going along with the loudest voices, because "I'm hearing this side a lot more than the other side, so that must be what's happening"

It's difficult to develop the skill of learning to recognize what a situation is vs what a situation looks like because sometimes those two things can be very different.

While it may be important to recognize what a situation looks like, and it's reasonable to take that into account in decision-making, for the sake of members of a community, it's very important for community decision-makers to get to the bottom of what a situation actually is.

Where was the conversation about content moderation that this seems to be in response to?

I feel like I'm missing a lot of context.

@Dynamic Community Working Group ops team meeting last friday.

@Katanova

I think there are a bunch of problems with the way communication is occurring here.

@Dynamic You know, that's completely fair. I was responding to the ideas presented by Billy in the top-level post, and those ideas had a lot to do with how sometimes people within communities can take on dysfunctional and manipulative interpersonal habits in response to certain circumstances.

Are there any ways that you see how I'm communicating that I can improve on?

@Katanova

I'm most concerned about the fact that this thread appears to be public, and a top-level Social.Coop post. Maybe it's not and I'm just seeing it because I added myself to the CWG list at some point? In any case, the thread feels like a private conversation being held in public without any effort to bring in people who weren't at the meeting.

Your second reply at least provided some of that context, so thank you for that.

Bigger picture, I'm have some pretty big concerns about the degree of fragmentation of communications in this community.

What are those concerns, and what do you think could be done about them?

@Katanova

My general understanding is that first and foremost social.coop's function is to provide a Mastodon platform for our members. But (for fairly obvious reasons, I think), we don't use Mastodon for decision-making. Instead there are at least three different tools for democratic process: Loomio (which I joined late, realizing that I needed to follow it to understand what decision-making was going on; see my January thread about proposals https://www.loomio.com/d/vzhQxDHA/how-we-use-proposals), Matrix (which I still haven't joined, although it's starting to feel like I really need to in order to know what's going on), and the video meetings of the various working groups. And of course, each working group has its own Loomio groups. That's a lot of different places that conversations can be happening and there doesn't seem to be a clear centralized place where minutes and updates are posted.

I'm annoyed to feel like I might need to independently set up a Matrix account (presumably on the Matrix.org megaserver) to keep up with what's going on, partly because I already went through this with Loomio, and partly because we don't host our own Matrix server. I do realize that the best way to keep up would be to attend the working group meetings, but thus far I just haven't had energy for it.

Also, sometimes someone post's a collaborative Etherpad document to Loomio (and I imagine maybe to the Matrix chats and and video calls as well, although I don't know), and people get into conversations in the Etherpad comments, which are not transparently relayed back to Loomio. It's really, really easy to miss things.

And there's the Wiki, and I don't know how bad it is that I haven't read the entire thing. I don't know what the process is for updating the Wiki, and don't have a lot of faith that any updates are being done in a manner that is easy to keep up with.

There seems to be a perennial problem with people not knowing what is going on and not knowing how to find out what is going on. I think there's hope that the Organizing Circle will fulfill that role, but the more I'm seeing, the more I feel like the most important thing it will do is provide a centralized forum for the members of the working groups to check in with each other. I'm part of the group that is trying to kick off that process (identifying who will serve on the group that actually sets up the OC), it seems that currently there's not even a clear picture of who the members of the various working groups are (although we do have some partial lists).

Meanwhile, there have been frustrations with Loomio, and some people have suggested switching to another platform such as Discourse, but at this stage I feel like "trying out" another platform would likely lead to having yet another venue for conversation and even further fragmentation.

There are a bunch of things that could conceivably help, such as active onboarding of new people, and better publicity of the working group meetings beforehand and where to find meeting minutes afterward (the Mastodon announcements tool might be the best way to reach everyone?). However, I'm increasingly thinking that our group might just be too big for efficient conversation.

Low-hanging fruit that individuals could easily take on would be to keep in mind that we do have all of these different forums, and that not everyone is on (or up to date on) all of them, and that it would be helpful to loop people in.

So in a perfect world, this thread might have started with "At the Community Working Group ops meeting on Friday ([possibly adding a link to the minutes, if minutes exist]), we had a conversation about moderation, and I mentioned the Mastodon thread by [username]." That would do a lot people who weren't at the meeting to know what is going on.

I'm not trying to cast blame on anyone here. People will forget this kind of practice, but if we had a shared understanding that this kind of context is important, then maybe people who were at the meeting could then chime in with comments like "By the way, for anyone who isn't sure what we're talking about, this thread is building on a conversation that we had at the CWG ops meeting on Friday."

Does that make sense?

@Dynamic Yeah, all of that makes sense. I'm new to cooperative organizing myself, after a failed attempt in organizing for a housing cooperative a few years ago. I think that a fundamental issue at play here is the misalignment between the service the cooperative provides (masto instance) and the organizational needs of the cooperative. Mastodon itself is a kind of communications platform, but it's not enough of a communications platform to meet the cooperative's needs, and so over time we've ended up with several different layers of communications to serve the needs of the cooperative on an organizing level.

Even though it's still not ready for full 1.0 release yet, I've been following Bonfire for a while and I think that it would go a long way to addressing a lot of the issues that you brought up. It's flexible enough to be used for both public conversations, and private decisions within the organization. The "groups" feature especially would address a lot of the issues of communications fragmentation, making it a lot easier to distinguish between different organizing sub-groups, while keeping those communications on a common platform.

This is somewhat getting out-of-scope for the discussion started in this thread, though. The issues you brought up seem to be very broad issues regarding the way the cooperative is run. Why not post your concerns as a top-level thread?