Forum Moderators

If you belong more than few online fora and groups and if you have belonged to them for some time, you probably are familiar with the kind of "moderator" I'm about to describe.

Usually male, 35-55, claiming to be a professional something. Very energetic and charismatic, he pours all his enthusiasm in sharing resources and providing links and opportunities for fellow members, which of course would never dare shooting on their meal ticket *grin*

If you belong to the same groups I do, you could identify at least three persons fitting such description. In fact, this entry was thought for the three of them, after spotting their "sameness".

Saints, you might think. Not nearly so.

The "professional" moderator, turns out, either spams other fora/groups or recruits members vigorously. He can't wait for being praised for all he does. And here's the problem: what if he doesn't get all the praise he wants?

Techniques I've seen these characters using:
1) "another member" posting compliments for the mod from the same IP address;
2) "another member" arguing with the mod again from the same IP address;
3) the moderator lashing out at whoever doesn't praise him enough, and throwing suspicion on these "uncooperative" others, meanwhile praising gentleness, kindness and forgiveness (that of course don't apply to him).

The lashing out is particularly revealing: it's callous, it allows for no reply, it is a character assassination that mocks at others' ability to be a professional and is totally unexpected by most people (except from online veterans).

By this time, some members of his group (usually the ones with the longest online experience) has already checked many IP addresses and figured out how "sweet D, V, or - say - another D" are a wolf in sheep's clothes. Then these persons commit the mortal sin: they face him and ask for explanation.

He broadcasts the "attack" to his faithful friends (which, may I say, usually correspond with his co-moderators), of course without providing any explanations on what set the other persons off.

The co-moderators, usually, have a few time to spend checking the group let alone checking on whether those accusations are right or wrong. They are completely in good faith and believe in the cause of the group as well as he says, so they regretfully side with him till a person they really trust opens their eyes.

Most members of groups moderated by moderators like him, are like wild cats. Unable to achieve any kind of discipline, disguising insults into polite statements, heck, even unable to read the guidelines and behave accordingly.

When you look at one of these moderators and his group, it is like looking at those women with 30 cats in a 100 squared meter apartment, claiming they would give their life for their cats, while they can't even give them discipline, and the cats dictate her life "gimme more gimme more".

I used to get mad at these moderators.

Now I've understood they are punishing themselves by giving in to the stereotype of the codependent nurturer. They can't say no for fear of being abandoned and yet they can't behave decently either because they want no rules for themselves and that's why they don't give rules to others. And when you yourself have no boundaries for how far you can go, you have no boundaries for how far others can go on you.

So when I look at a group like that all you can see is a bunch of creatures, arguing over nothing, twisting words and concepts, beating a dead horse, just to "show off", precisely like him.

And, precisely like him, to have nothing else to do than posting to this or that group.

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

Online Mediation and Culture

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

Read here

Online Criticism

Just today Jayne Cravens' in her newsletter expressed her take on how to handle online criticism:

"There's no way to avoid it, but there are ways to address criticism that can actually help an organization to be perceived as even more trustworthy and worth supporting. To be successful with online activities, a nonprofit organization MUST be able to honestly and openly deal with online criticism, particularly from supporters and participants. Otherwise, the organization puts itself in a position to lose the trust of supporters and clients, and even generate negative publicity -- and, once lost, trust and credibility can be extremely difficult to win back."

To Jayne's detractors, I can respond by pointing them to Palloff and Pratt's seminal book (p. 27):

"If conflict is not such a bad thing, and if it is necessary in order to achieve group cohesiveness and intimacy, why do so many fear it and attempt to avoid it, especially in this medium?"

Moderating and Facilitating a VCoP

When you moderate and/or facilitate VCoPs composed of "professionals", the most important word is: beware. And the second one is: beware.

In particular watch out for the warning statement: "how can I get onto digest".

That might mean many things, I concede it, yet one of those meaning can be that the person that says it just wants to search for the "meat" without acknowledging the meaning and importance of negotiating meaning thorough conversation and thinks of an "online community" as a list of links, resources, repositories.

The first danger in that is, this is but first generation KM (definition coined by McElroy) with a codification approach only. The codification approach alone fails, period (see Huysman & de Wit, 2002).

The second danger I see is all in the difference between legitimate peripheral participation (ie: enjoying reading conversations, threads, and the like as well as how insights are generated and shared) and egocentric "what's in it for me, me, me" (ie: adversarial conceptualization of the reader with respect to the community, where the reader has to "bear with" ongoing conversation in order to "get something" out of it). The "proper" legitimate peripheral participant is one that enjoys reading the threads and the conversation so much that sets aside some time to delve into insights/opinions/ideas that are offered, even if s/he participates only occasionally.

What I always do in these settings is:

1. I remind whoever protests about "too many emails" that conversation is precious because it is in conversation that new knowledge is generated (and I add referrals and pointers to the social learning theory, if I really need to shut the dear one up);
2. I remind this very same vocal person that s/he is supposed to enjoy the conversation or else it's no place for him/her to be.

That usually weed out many persons that would later be troublesome for the proper "nucleation" of the CoP.

CoP facilitators/moderators, differently from facilitators in other settings, enforce negative rules mainly: that is, like in Carver boards, they set a rule on what has not to be done, the rest is for free experimentation of the members to find out. Occasionally, posting articles and links elicit some dialogue in case the CoP is kind of "dormant", but a healthy CoP does not need the facilitator to participate, even if s/he might want and/or like to do so.

A CoP facilitator also needs to try to resist the idea of engineering the community life. Sometimes backchannelling with members about the community helps, but it does backfire if you use it too often. A CoP faciliator does backchannel, however, in order to establish a personal relationshipwith those members you find more in tune with your moderation style. If s/he asks something, s/he does it naturally, NOT out of the blue to people s/he has never talked to, and NOT to the "old same buddies", otherwise members would have the impression of being kidded around by a clique.

In order to have a group of people helping the facilitator, complimenting with them privately for something they spontaneously said or posted feels much better, to them and to the group, than it feels to "schedule" the conversation. I am a member in a community in which the moderator often backchannels to ask members to post summaries (still the old repository/codification approach!!). The funny thing is that summaries do get posted, but without *anybody* saying "hey I thought it would be neat to post this" (aka spontaneous contribution), and the posting of the "assigned homework" sounds very artificial.

In short: depending on which kind of members you have and which kind of person you are, you will have different results, however:

1) Always be your natural self: do not play a role
2) Do not distort yourself or your community in order to follow an artificial scheme
3) Keep in mind where you want to go and let go of the controlling attitude most moderators have (enhancing/slowing email flow, having people posting requests/summaries/questions, getting afraid/p*ssed toward whoever posts "too much" or "not enough")
4) Let people be themselves with a list of basic donts.

A community is like a tissue: it will "create" and "heal" by itself whether you are there or not, but if you do your job you will make it easier (facilitation comes etymologically from the Latin word "facile" that is, in fact, EASY).

CoPs or CoBs (Community of Bias)?

The role that intrapersonal and interpersonal biases have in the life of a person has always fascinating me a great deal.

Emily Pronin is a nice looking person that wrote some very interesting pieces of work. For example, a book chapter whose title is Understanding misunderstanding: social psychological perspective.

Among the many things, she points out how low tolerance to ambiguity makes a person go beyond the real facts and information that s/he is given. It would sound like low tolerance to exploration of ambiguity (that is, presence of more than one meaning in a word/statement) doesn't match with having a meaningful interaction (where meaningful means one that can generate meaning) either.

If men and women are, as Katz claims (1960, explained here), more rationalizing than rational, and therefore more influenced by their attitudes than by logic or evidence, and if we humans have the tendency toward accepting more easily what is congruent with our interest (Edwards & Smith, 1996; Ross & Lepper, 1980), then CoPs can be a source of bias. I am wondering if that plays a role in how a CoP has to be facilitated.

Pronin - and this is verrrry interesting - suggests that such bias fosters harsh evaluations. I would add that it might be worthy addressing this very issue when speaking about CoP facilitation.

Collaborative Disagreements: Negotiating Clashes in CoPs

There is a lot of fluff over cooperation, namely how to contrast those situations "when the pursuit of self-interest by each leads to a poor outcome for all". Of course (and I say of course because some people, to my astonishment, still doubt about it), if you (generic) want to be part of a group, you have to learn to be cooperative, can't possibly expect the group to do what you want (or not to do what you don't want do).

A CoP is something more than a group. When we look at a bunch of books on a shelf, we might refer to them as a group of books, for sure not as "a CoP of books", and that is because they have no personal relationship with one another.

Some could say that a CoP isn't necessarily the best outcome for all the involved parties, however. I claim - and this is an opinion - that being able to generate meaning together with other people is always better than generating it alone, because one mind is always more limited that many minds, even when your mind (supposedly) know more.

Then the issue becomes a methodological one: is cooperation a better way to have many minds generate meaning, or is competition a more appropriate means? Again my opinion is that cooperation is always better because it harbors the possibility of a more balanced solution to a dilemma, over a one-sided black-and-white I-won-it-all one.

This being said, the focal points become:

1. Is consensus the best way to foster a cooperative behaviour? That is: do we have to disagree first and compromise after, or try to reach an agreement as first thing in the morning?
2. Which topics (if any) should be solved by consensus?
3. When does consensus become groupthink?

Consensus might be dangerous, especially for a CoP, which is said to be (by many) a place where debates and innovations are possible because of a trusting climate that allows members to engage in experiential learning without fear of being corrected, discouraged or reprimanded. So if consensus is the first target, members will go for the agreement right away, rather than being themselves first, and then negotiate.

On the other hand negotiation, handled by an expert facilitator, is mandatory whenever some real problem arises.

I'll go beyond this: if you are a CoP facilitator, whenever clashes don't happen, engineer them. That is: ask controversial questions, post controversial material and let the CoP raise its wisdom above your facilitation skills to learn how solve the clash in action, in a creative way.

Lead your CoP members to:
1) treat other members the way they treat themselves
2) learn to cooperate with one another
3) crash happily
4) enjoy the process
5) be happy with whatever the outcome
6) learn something out of mistakes

They will have fun and better themselves, you will have fun and better yourself too.