Managing Anti-social Behaviour Online

Ruthie, this is a dismissive response to me - signalling no true intention to engage with the potential wisdom of what I'm pointing out to you. Do you assume any wisdom or value in my comment, or even my person?

What compels you to choose to interpret my comment like this?

It seems you're replying with frame-shifting and a kind of false acknowledgement, an attempt to divert the awareness loop my comment opens. The subtext of your reply is "you're trying to get to me, and I'll dismiss you".

Herein, you also seem to assume I'm playing a power game - I'm absolutely not. I'm making a genuine comment as an observer.

Thomas, I'm sure Ruthie is more than capable of answering for herself (and may well do so), but please consider that you may be restarting something that appears to have been resolved.
You have cherry picked elements of a conversation and placed them together without context. Perhaps your observations could be preserved for another occasion or situation.
You are after all, sticking your oar in 2 days after any of the comments you have cited!

Love the idea for Controversial Topics - what a GREAT concept @tomallen4... Let's definitely add that to the proposal!!

Btw, i'm not sure what you mean by 'finally' agreeing to work with you...? without wanting to reactivate any animosity it's a tad condescending, all told... maybe we can both commit to being nice to each other? i was never not going to not work with you and have been actively working with you in this discussion... it is just not in my nature to not work with people. it's precisely because i want to work with everyone on this that i started the discussion here in first place. :) Anyway, moving on...

So, its great you have experience too re forums... as i've explained already, the decisions taken by both myself and Charlotte were absolutely last straw ones. It's not what we would normally do at all. Yes, whenever there is censorship (which i actually don't agree with at all) there is anger... But there was absolutely NO consideration or thought given to the organising team nor the newbies by the established members of the community being very aggressive to each other online. We've had newbies contact us and say 'i don't want to come, can i return my ticket?' Which makes me SO very sad. We are all of us responsible for that. So i have felt very much stuck between a Censorship Rock and Newbies being Terrified Hard Place.

In the spirit of moving forward - i think if we can reach a set of guidelines about Community interactions altogether, including:

• Nest official facebook (with parameters and community platform facilitators)
• Nest anything goes facebook (zero moderation)
  • Loomio space for Controversial Topics

... then we will be on our way.

@thomasoduffy i'm gonna second @olicarlislebrown here. We've largely drawn a line under the arguments and are now agreeing a way forward in a beautifully constructive way. Can i suggest that you read the whole thread and the actions i've taken away at the bottom and add your suggestions to what you would like to see for next year so that we can move forward?

Incidentally, Thomas, Neh was communicated to several times, had numerous people explain to her (both in and out of the comms team) what the issues were with her posting, and she has declined to respond and declined to join this discussion and planning, so i'm not sure what else we can do? Your suggestions on this are also welcome. :)

Unfortunately the way social media works is humans can't differentiate in their head between the human (and member of community) versus the role they do at burns.

That is both on and off social media. Once the association is made in someone's head, it's there to live.

When a core member speaks, no matter what you will attempt to do, people will see that as Nest speaking.

It sucks, but it is how humans work.

In some of the BM volunteer guides, that unfortunate side effect of volunteering is discussed. No one has come up with a solution, apart from as a lead your voice and actions carry more weight on, or off duty.

Thanks so much for this insight @bradjayakody I will have a look on BMOrg pages for some info. I think this will help everyone on all teams.

The issue Brad highlights is I think more an issue with vol orgs given the passion and blurring of usual structures involved. At work we are more used to the personal/business split but vol orgs require lots of unpaid work. This means staff are usually passionate about topics and it can be hard to shift out 'official' opinions from personal ones, especially when their is a split within the staff team itself as to the correct way forward and their hasn't been agreement.

I helped run a personal development charity for five years in China and the solution we had was to have core staff not give personal opinions online but instead act as the org had agreed. We had very heated debates behind the scenes most weeks but agreeing to have a consistent line on things helped massively. Confusion is easy to have when people post as both themselves and officially, especially when the personal view contradicts the official one. We took regular surveys and feedback from the staff and vols we were working with to ensure accountability and also that we were doing what the community generally wanted and attempted to clearly explain when popular measures were not feasible.

I realise burns are rather more complicated than normal charities with the co-creating anarchic atmosphere. Some may feel core team not being able to personally comment limits their freedom of expression or that they should not be separate with 'official' views. All I can say is what worked for us as it limited personal attacks and confusion.

This is really interesting. i think if we were to adopt that for Nest, it would then mean the Core Team weren't part of the community, which isn't fair either... Hmmm... i don't know what the answer is.

I wish there was a way to have it so that admins could pick from multiple titles when they are about to post something. So for example, when Lou-Lou is posting as an admin, she posts as "Siren" but when she's just commenting as another community member she posts as "Lou-Lou". It wouldn't hide who the admins are but would at least create a symbolic visual aid to separate the two.

Siren personally I think in vol orgs core members have to give up certain things to make the damn things work easier for all. For me I have no trust at all that alternative viewpoints will be reasonably listened to both due to online and personal experiences at Nest. I realise I am definitely an outlier at burns as a free speech extremist/lexiteer. I would feel happier with clear restrictions being made though if they had come through offline anonymous community surveys that all people could participate in and I had felt my view had been equally weighted among others.

At the moment it seems to me that personal opinions get involved to much in decision making, with the loudest shouting getting their way even if they are not representative of the general view. This may not actually be the case but perceptions in a community do indeed matter.

I do understand your doing your best and I appreciate all your work but wanted to throw my thoughts in as this seems the most productive place to have this conversations.

I'll dig up the info from the Rangers manual when I get a chance. It did create a big debate, that we're always seen as the role we do instead of participants when we're not working. It's just how humans brains work, we tend to pigeon hole people into an area in our heads. And with social media, it tends to reinforce people's views of the role we may do.

Thank you so much Brad, can't tell you how helpful this is :)

@amandasm Siren is just my Playa name, so regardless of whether i sign Siren or Lou-Lou it's still 'me' if that makes sense... i was Siren long before i became part of Nest org.

If you want to split identities, I don't think you can do it with real names - you have to use labels. So you post as yourself using Siren or Lou-Lou but you post ex-cathedra as Comms Lead or better still, Comms Team.

And of course if you do that, then everyone can and should assume that what you post is what everyone in Comms Team can also put their name too - which may or may not also apply to the whole of the org (perhaps that uses a different label, if it's necessary to differentiate).

But from what I've read, that's exactly what you do much of the time.

yep that's fair. We wanted comms team to be about sharing rather than 'management of comms' if that makes sense... so anyone can post anything on facebook or contribute to website in an effort to decentralise - Char and i actually write very little of the copy that's shared, we tailor to ToV or to make messages fit together, but that's it... that's why there are v few 'official' BN posts on the facebook group or actually from Nest news - it's personal so people know who they can contact and are talking to.

So i guess this is another question we can ask for part of the proposal:

What would the community rather:
- Transparent, decentralised comms from everyone/people?
or;
- Formal impersonalised comms from a faceless Comms Team?

I'm personally in favour of option A, because then it means that Comms isn't 'controlled' as such; the comms team are facilitators instead of being managers of information flow. At the moment, anyone can email me or Char and have anything put into the comms schedule, (the only dependency is release dates, according to what else is going out so to avoid saturation of message and conflicts).

In the spirit of making changes straight away and listening to the group here, i've started topping and tailing my posts and comments that share formal information as follows:

Official response/position:

/NestCore

Not sure if it will help/work, but as an experiment to trial i thought that could be a good start point? If it doesn't have that parsing, then it's not me speaking officially.

As a potential step to avoiding some of these unproductive, emotionally-charged Facebook threads in future, perhaps we could establish together and make clear to everyone what the purpose of the Burning Nest Facebook group is.

At a basic level, it's for sharing official information about Nest the event and Nest the community. Personally, I think that "official" doesn't have to mean only information from Nest Org or core volunteers, but information that people believe would be of value to the community and event participants, like other events, projects, fundraisers, community decisions, and so on.

I think that Loomio is better suited as a platform to host discussions, disagreements, proposals and so on, and to decide on them as a community. It's better suited to use on a computer rather than a phone, which I believe means people post less hastily and reactively, and are not so likely to post while doing other things. The pace is slower than FB, making it more conducive to thoughtful, considerate discussion.

Lastly, I think it's useful to note that while we all like to cite the principles to back up our points of view, they are not inseparable and balancing them is very, very difficult, particularly as they are phrased in quite absolutist terms. I've worked in human rights campaigning for 15 years and the same is true of those principles too. I imagine Christians and others faiths have similar challenges with their principles of behaviour. Balancing consent, inclusion and self-expression will always be a challenge and, inevitably, a compromise for the vast majority of us. And there won't ever be any clear, objectively "right" ways to do it. Solutions will just have to be broadly acceptable to the majority and internally consistent, as well as largely understood by everyone. The hopeful bit is that as time goes on and we become used to any changes in our community, we'll come to accept them more and see them as normal.

oh even more drastic fuck facebook, just keep loomio for Nest discussion and everything sideline like camp and rideshare if they decide it, can continue using fb if they want but no more burning nest group, I will be sad true but if it solve all THIS, i wont mind .... actually is there a way to have a group working only June to March and deactivae everything else in it during the rest of the year (Mute everyone on the group maybe)

Agreed that everyone views the principles differently and loves to trot them out. There is no objective right. The good thing is they are just PRINCIPLES, not rules or commandments. Unlike many other groups burners are more diverse because of this, which brings it's own challenges. Maybe it's also worth everyone taking them with a pinch of salt and remembering that we're all just here to build an awesome playground.

I've started a new thread about interpreting the principles.

+100 for fucking facebook. If you don't understand how it's directly opposed to the principles of Nest, ask me. I'll try not to rant.

Completely agree.

Lots of interesting points here for sure and certainly far more eloquently put with much more respect and care than much of the discussion happening on FB.

A few of my thoughts.
- I love the variety and multiplicity of views that happen in a burn. The mixture of inclusion and expression means you get people who come from very differnt world views - from people who believe they are fluffy chakra unicorns, to hard line scientists who think that's a whole lot of rubbish (and much else besides). These beautiful differences allow us to grow as individuals and a community and should be celebrated.

• I've had a few thoughts about potential sources of what's been occuring - 1 - People thinking their view is objectively right, not understanding that we can co-exist with differing views as long as we treat each other with respect. It might not always be comfortable, but that's the reality of living in a diverse community.

2 - Not understanding how online forums should be used in community. They are wholly inappropriate for any conversation that has emotional weight. Sure loomio is better for these discussions, but even it doesn't express tone of voice, body language or any of those subtle cues needed for communication around charged subjects. If people have specific feedback they should talk to individuals about their challenges/issues, not air them in public.

3 - The facebook page is a public forum for everyone and is the face of Nest to new people, these types of discussions are a terrible way for people to interact with our community. It is the vocal minority which is seen, not the silent majority who really don't care about what is being discussed. I seems that much of this charge has been building for some people, but most people don't care, they just want to have a fun time with friends in a field. If people want to have these dicussions then maybe they should organise an inperson forum for it - somewhere where people who care about this can talk in person, rather than inflicting this one the community at large.

---

So what to do moving forward for next year.
- If people post about what other individuals have done it should be explained that FB is not the place for such things.
- FB should be used for creating positive buzz
- Loomio to be used for debates and ideas
- In person discussions to be used for anything with emotional charge
- We must ensure that respect and care is the tone that we encourage. With the awareness that this is a diverse community and that disagreement can be great and constructive, as long as it is done with respect and care.

Thank you Yon. So wonderfully articulated. 💖

Well put Yon.

I'm so thrilled with everyone's respectful contributions on here. I'm going to allow more people to come on and discuss and contribute and add suggestions.

And then i'm going to draw up on of those proposal type add on lah-lahs and then people on here can edit and add etc...

Then, what do you think about all of us here as a consultation group taking it to the community meeting at Nest for discussion?

@siren sounds ideal! Thank you. I guess how animated I and others get about this topics of censorship and power informs us how important it is to the whole communities stability. My other suggestions are above in reply to you ( loomio 'controversial topics' section etc)

thank you so much for your contributions and support, it does mean a great deal to me. And i agree, that we are all so passionate and animated is because we all really really care. And that is a wonderful thing

Clearly it appears to some like we're an autocractic group making everyone dance to our tune, but i promise it isn't the case - i really want to find a way to demonstrate that and show everyone that we're actually very hands off! I'll put some suggestions for that in proposal too. I am a massive utopian and i'd love everyone to just get along and for there be no need to have any kind of moderation ... I'l try and add some thoughts into the recommendations piece to ask questions to the community about we need to do that too.

Will definitely capture all your suggestions too @tomallen4 . 🙂

I will have a proper think about this after Nest but here are a couple of quick and easy wins that could reduce tension all round:

1. I 100% want people on the comms team/moderators to be able to voice their opinions. There should also be a clearly identified separation as to when they are speaking as a mod and when they are speaking as an individual.

The majority (all?) of the email comms are signed by Siren, rather than the Comms Team. That can give the impression that Siren is the official voice of Nest. A lot of other burns sign it off as the team rather than an individual. That way, when a comms lead speaks on Facebook, there is a clear separation between the individual, and the voice of the organisation. I suggest we move towards that model and I think it will give the comms lead more freedom to speak freely.

1. If you are involved in a conversation, you cannot moderate it.

This comes from the Borderland social media guidelines. And it makes a lot of sense. It removes the perception of there being bias in the moderation. It is also incredibly difficult (despite our best wishes), to remain completely unbiased in a conversation we are involved in.

Great suggestions!

Agree with Amanda, great suggestions!

@simon216 one thing we would need to accomplish these suggestions is MORE VOLUNTEERS. #BrokenRecord hahahaha! I've been trying to get comms volunteers on the team who have specific experience all year...

To augment these suggestions: I think if we have super clear guidelines for an 'Official' Facebook group that would mean that largely there would be no posts or discussions posted in the first place which might need moderating (and in fact we would encourage all discussion diverted to Loomio for org change; and the Unofficial Nest for bants and arguing).

As a funny/weird point of order: i'd just like to flag to newcomers to this conversation that i actually posted this before anything kicked off on facebook over the weekend. Quite spooky! but i think it's important context - this is something that's been on my mind for a while. <3