Online Moderators and Their Communities

Online moderators have to be autoctone leaders, that is, they have to emerge from the community. However, they very often are "staffed" in a way that reminds me of that game "if you were a fruit which fruit would you be?". No screening, no recruitment, minimal training, minimal supervision, few sources of informal learning (usually other moderators mentoring, coaching, counseling new ones). The hidden or open sponsors of such communities are grossly miscalculating the role and the moderator/facilitator community impact.

By "instinct" (I really don't know how "natural" this is, it could be superimposed out of living in a culture that fosters extrinsic rewards), moderators tend to identify themselves with the community they moderate. Therefore, they tend not to allow it the freedom to make mistakes, because they tend to take the community's failure as their own personal failure.

It takes time (lots of time) and experience (lots of experience) to learn to just let go of the community results while preserving accountability for what really depends on us moderators. I saw some apparently skilled moderators backchannelling feverishly in order to pretend that the community has a "spontaneous life", like in the Wizard of Oz: "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", while I saw other seemingly seasoned ones rushing into each and every conflict with the intent of "smoothing it" (to the point that the troll asked her to moderate him!).

The problem is, leadership mandates the capability of taking a stand, whatever it is, and to be able to submit it to logical scrutiny. So, whoever won't be able to take a stand and back it up, will have no real leadership but just the power to click some buttons. Without leadership, there is no authority, and without authority (as in authoritative, not as in authoritarian) people don't respect one another. And communities (especially communities of practice) get subversive when it comes to incompetent leaders (either permissive or controlling).

Allowing a community to make mistakes is therefore a basic competency of a skilled online moderator. The ones that "play nice" (aka smooth conflicts asap, invites to agree to disagree etc) usually are histrionic persons that can survive as long as the "show" is short-lived, such as in face-to-face meetings. They crave and need the public eye in order to perform, they sense it and put themselves in a position to meet their needs.

However, whenever the moderation/facilitation becomes 24/7 (or 2/3 hours every day), the drama queen needs more and more private time in order to keep on herding cats while keeping him/herself together, and the problems start emerging, especially in asynchronous facilitation, notoriously the most reflexive. All of a sudden, it takes more than a good voice, some charming ways, some right move and a pleasant look to "run the show". However, many don't, can't or won't see it ahead of time. It's like the difference between a theatre and a film performance: the former can be instinct-driven, excessive, groovy, but the latter just has to be precise, factual, professional or else you're out. While in the former tantrums can help you run the show momentarily and fake it till you find a way out, in the latter they hinder the development of an optimal performance and faking its simply not a professional option.

But on-fac is far more challenging than f2f facilitation for other reasons as well. You get to "know" your creature, spend more time with it, you loose lucidity, get more involved and.. find out things about you (like your relationship with power, control, anger, other assorted feelings plus your personal pet peeves) that you won't necessarily die for exploring ;)

I try to always let the group bicker, fight, yell and... solve the conflict amongst them as much as possible. Unless I see insults going on, I don't intervene. If I intervene, I intervene as a member, I don't use my power/authority unless I just have to, because I think that a facilitator that isn't a primus inter pares KILLS any CoP, or collaborative community, or even "mere" online group.

Sometimes, members publicly ask for my intervention. There is NOTHING more empowering to the group as a whole than just calling them to a responsible act! So I say "I'm not your babysitter, I won't force [such and such] to do anything." Then I express my opinion whatever it is as an act of group membership (something like "I think [such and such] is wrong because [this and that]") and reiterate that I can't oblige anybody. At this point, either the disruptive person all of a sudden "gets it", or
s/he will feel empowered and get more disruptive. Now, the group will take
ownership on its reactions and assume leadership. In other words:
governance.

However, there are times in which communities get disbanded because
members, not mods/onfacs, behave like kids.

I can't help noticing how some persons can go on and on about inside jokes without having the slightest idea of the potential they have for originating feelings of exclusion in whoever isn't part of the joke.

My experience is, jokes are tolerated better when either they come from a
small group of tight friends, or when they come from many subgroups. In other words, they are felt as ok when they are either perceived as signs of "few people with higher status", or as signs of "many subgroups with similar status". When the jokes or hints are about a large subgroup then ingroup/outgroup dynamics are unavoidable!

Nothing harms a community (online/offline), more than a clique. One would think participants would know and yet there are long-term communities I know and have been part of, that keep on being cliquish because "they like it" and get regularly puzzled about the "perception from the outside" ;)

Again I would say I can't fathom how people that have participated in other
fora for years managed not to look and listen enough to previous and past exchanges and experiences... so much that they behave as if they have missed to observe such group dynamics, which I'm not sure could be blamed on others.

I can't help thinking that as long as we (generic) decide to engage in community exchanges our own identity doesn't all belong to ourselves only any more. It becomes a negotiated concept, therefore it doesn't depend on one subject anymore, it depends on the group as a whole set of subjects. It gets out of the realm of subjectivism, where the individual is king AND referee, and gets into the relativism, interplay of the perception (right/wrong) that one individual has of him/herself and the fact that the rest of the world will ask him/her for a reality check.

So if the group decides it doesn't like your (generic) idea of yourself (generic again), reality (in the sense of "negotiated identity") will bite.

This will especially bite many (supposed, self-defined) fans of Vygotsky, who somehow manage to hint at the fact that "negotiation of meaning" should/would/could/might imply subjectivization of meaning. Those persons just miss the point, in that Vygotsky's negotiation of meaning implies an iterative dialogue among subjects that keeps going till a mutual agreement on its meaning is reached (note: the mutual agreement doesn't have to happen in a particular way, and it's not objective... these are the many differences with Argyris' framework).

However Vygotsky, in no way, shape or form, leaves room for agreement as "casual encounter of two or more subjects that happens to agree on the meaning of their encounter". I do understand that to a person in pre-operational thinking, the two things might seem the same though LOL

Trainese

I can't do it.

I've been reading a lot. Namely, I've read a lot of website blurbs written by people with a business in my same topics (online communication, facilitation, volunteer management, CoP implementation, knowledge management and the like). All I was able to extract out of it were two, three, four pages of "content" that wouldn't deliver one single clear concept.

That is especially true for Italian sites and "trainese", bogged down with statements like "proposte innovative per percorsi formativi che stimolino la spontanea espressione dei saperi" that, in English, would translate as "innovative proposals for forming pathways that would stimulate the spontaneous expression of knowledge".

You name it. The only possible reaction to the above statement is WHAT IN THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU.

Hence the conclusion: I can't do it. I seriously need a content management provider. And after having put all my stuff in the wise hands of him/her, I need not to read the results of the translation in trainese or else I'll puke. I don't understand why people hide their ideas behind smokescreens, mirrors, petty words, embellishments, distortions. Just say what you mean and mean what you say. Is it that hard? What's the fun of talking a person into buying something s/he doesn't understand, need, want, agree with? Which satisfaction can a professional get out of making money in situations like those above?

Somebody calls it honesty, somebody else calls it Asperger traits. I don't really care which one is the best fit. I've always been this way, since when I can remember. And I still think that not only one should always be as honest and concise as possible with the client, but also that somewhere on the planet there are guys that are willing to pay you nicely as long as you don't try to sell them some total bs.

In these times where charlatans have monopolized holistic medicine, biologists and engineers have taken over traditional medicine, complexity is used as a pass' par tout to mean "nonsense", sincretism is applauded as a symptom of open-mindness, quantum physics is used to justify irrational beliefs and subjectivism is venerated like God the Almighty, I might very well be dead wrong.

Online Mediation and Culture

So much for those defining CMC in deterministic terms...

Read here

Dutch Soccer and CoPs

In Dutch "total soccer" players follow their natural role but *stretch* it
to serve the community (team) and the one having the ball (say, speaking at
a given moment, or having fame etc) has to be willing to pass the ball to
the one in a better position. Plus, when a player is wrong, he better learn
from it or next time the coach kicks him out of the team. Which btw that's
how I see moderation/facilitation in CoPs.

If we espouse the "everything goes" theory we play like Brasil: virtuous
soccer, 85 minutes of *sleep*, 5 minutes of action and no fun on the
observer (lurker) side, a bunch of primadonna worried about them, the, them.

If the lurker doesn't read and enjoy what he reads, something in the "CoP"
is wrong (Miguel?). That's also why inviting people to skip messages is
deleterious (for a CoP).

Mumble mumble

Humanism and Humanists

There are some persons that are quite puzzling. Defining themselves as humanists, which theoretically should deal with human potential and self-determination, they exhibit troublesome behaviours.

Some advocate psychology as a science, that is, a hard science. What would be the difference between psychology and psychiatry then? And, supposing psychiatry does not exist, what would be the difference between psychology and neurology? But above all, if in psychology you want to find science, why do you go transpersonal?

Others write weird sarcastic poems directed at whoever happens to disagree with them (in full respect of the other person's self-determination I guess), thinking they have proven to be humanists just because they either have

(a) been students of May, Rogers and/or Maslow (as if all the students of Einstein understood what he formulated...);
(b) consistently campaigned for some (pseudo)left-leaning cause (does humanism imply leaning toward the left? I don't think there is an equation that proves a causal relationship between the two things and if there were many of these persons wouldn't have the mathematical background to understand it HAR HAR), and
(c) studied humanism for all their lives (which would, optimistically speaking, JUST prove that they know what humanism means, it still doesn't say jacksh*t about their ontology... but since they are psychologists rather than philosophical guys they miss the difference and dress up the logical findings and implications with a huge lot of rhetoric).

On quite the opposite stand, but with similar consequences, there are the ones that put all human experience in the category of humanism, including absurd stuff like "insight during psychotropic drugs" which is an oxymoron in itself (again, read Parmenides: "the not-being is not, and can not in any way be" --- either "insight" or "psychotropic drugs" folks, but they have to absolutely keep their anti-science dogmatic stand).

Another subatomic pair is the angered pessimistic one (did I say gender-biased, left-leaning, victimist, whiney "professional" that in the name of humanism bashes a human creature -- often George W Bush -- who she happens not to agree with???) and his/her joyful superficial counterpart. The latter systematically overlooks pain and negative situations, speaks of self-actualization while starving or being at war as if s/he has personally endured all those situations (and it's true that most of what one does depends on how s/he decides to react to it, but a little bit more respect for people in pain would be expected from a humanist).

But the angered and pessimistic one goes along with another quark as well: the "I'm-so-holier-than-thou-then-everytime-I-get-p*ssed-I-blame-it-on-your-culture-or-what-you-said-or-what -you-did-or-how-you-understood-Rogers-because-it's-impossible-that-the-problem-is-me" (by now everybody knows she has no problem HAR HAR).

How about self-actualizing, but for real? Not following that relativistic cr*p that we are spoon-fed from each and every school of thought on the planet (religions excluded)... I mean business, real business.

I mean adults able to look at themselves and at their patterns, able to correct them, able to take and give feedback in an HEALTHY way, able to survive and thrive without resorting to the classical defense mechanism (Freud's) and see humanism as a "la la" land where everybody can spit nonsenses and be claimed right, sense-making, or intelligent.

I mean adults "buying" into humanism and self-actualization because it makes sense to the bottom of their hearts, not out of fear of rejection/judgment, fear of being wrong, lack of capability of accepting feedback and criticism, and impossibility to grow up!

I mean adults buying into humanism despite being able to correct one's own patterns (ie: even when they wouldn't need to "forgive themselves", "value their ideas", etc etc).

I mean, adults.