Some years ago Eudora (a very nice email client) began including a tool that would put a little thermometer on an email that attempted to indicate how passionate (or flame ridden) the email was. Fun idea.

There is a lot of excellent liturature about how to make negotiations more effective, ethical, etc. This is extremely valuable when your trying to coordinate groups of people in the absense of strong heirarchy or other powerful players. The marvalous book on that topic is
“Getting to Yes“.

Every online community I’ve ever resided in works to find a social contract about how to manage the passions, remain respectful of the people, and stay focused on the task. There seem to be a few standard schemes for addressing this problem. The social contract of good manners for example.

One technique is to have a few respected community members who provide an example of ‘good behavior’, new-commers then mostly model that behavior and occationally the respected members use thier authority to provide a little negitive feedback. This works ok, but it tends to be easy for it to get dragged down into a situation where these folks become powerful and then you get hierarchy and then that’s cheating.

My favorite story of this kind is about elephants. Apparently if your running the zoo and you put some young male elephants into a pen chaos results, but if you ad one elderly elephant then things work out just fine. Thought provoking.

One way people try to avoid that is they create a role: moderator. This guy then does only the process maintainance. In the negotiation liturature this is sometimes refered to as a “neutral third party” – a classic example was having the Swiss and the Nigerians (both land locked countries) play this role when negotiating the treaty about how to govern the sea bed. This works well, in the hands of a reasonbly skilled moderator, who is willing to take his reward in pride of a well functioning/coordinated group.

Another scam people use is rules. This is quite effective in if all players are reasonably constructive. It’s a big help for the moderator – I tend to think at this point of square dancing. It has a tendency to implode because there almost always seems to be one or two bad apples that decide that arguing about or playing with the rules is fun. Arguing with the umpire, so to speak. A second problem with this scenario is trust. People have to trust both the rules and the moderator. Maintaining that trust when powerful players are in the game is double hard.

Well, coordinated effort is a tough problem.

This blathering is all the triggered by Sam Ruby’s littleexperiment. He, I assume, was looking for a way to keep the conversation threads on his blog [by the way comments don’t work on my blog because I’m incompetent] from becoming a hearth for other people’s flames. You can see him trying it out in this thread.

His idea is that somebody, him in this case, would have the karma to mark portions of comments as inapproprate. That “somebody” would be manually doing what Eudora’s little automation was trying to do, or what a good moderator tries to do. It’s also what a good parent tries to do when they pore oil on the water and tells the kids in the back seat “No touching.”

My critique of the scheme, as implemented, is it involves public shaming. A serious flaw because it models for everybody else that the moderator has license to engage in just the type of behavior ones trying to avoid. It’s a bit worse then that because while the moderator does have that authority he should, in the best of all possible worlds, us a huge number of more subtle tools before he gets around to pulling this trick out of his bag.

It’s a tough one. Moderating is extremely expensive work. For example you can avoid the public shaming problem by having a moderator do a lot more work; just have him approve individual postings. The problem with that is it expensive, slow, and it increases people’s fear that the moderator might abuse his power over the forum.

Interesting problems. If I’ve teased you into thinking that an automated tool might help this, well maybe, but I recomend reading the list of dirty negotiating tricks enumerated in this outline see section IV, part c.. Collect the whole set!

Someone once wrote “Apache doesn’t need money. Apache needs high unemployment rates, then everyone will have lots of time to sit around and work on Apache.” I don’t think we can blame this on him.

He’s one of my heros and I’m happy to see he’s got a blog.

Malcom Gladwell is a very clever journalist and essayist who in primarilly interested in groups, communities, movements and how people are related to each other. His most recent book is “The Tipping Point.” He writes in the New Yorker. His articles, which appear in the New Yorker, are all available on his web site as PDF files.

His most recent essay “Group Think” pretends to be a book review, but really it’s a discussion of how little very intense creative communities tend to be where great things happen. It’s a nice way to look at the role of the issolated niche as the place where fresh stuff emerges.

The book as about Saturday Night Live, which is a sweet oportunity for Gladwell since it gives him a series of jokes he can use as exemplars of how an artistic movement (or any movement for that matter) creates a fresh way of looking at the world. The movement’s “in joke” so to speak.

In the Open Source Movement one of our traditional stories contrasts the open market with the hierarchtically control. It’s an old story – the open source community version was told by Eric S. Raymond in an essay called “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. Eric tells it in a the libertarian version.

Gladwell’s essay includes this version of the story from a 1960s British satirical piece. The setup: The speaker is playing Sir Basil Spence, the architect of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. The Cathedral was distroyed during the second world war.

“First of all, of course we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the German people for making this whole project possible in that first place. Second, we owe a debt of gratitude to the people of Coventry itself, who when asked to choose between having a cathedral and having hospitals, schools and houses, plumped immediately (I’m glad to say) for the cathedral, recognizing, I think, the need of any community to have a place where the whole community can gather together and pray for such things as hospitals, schools and houses.”

I’ve been trying to read some of the social science about communities. Some of it is awful, some of it is interesting. It tends to be the kind of science that when you look carefully it’s interesting, but then when you look very very closely it seems to evaporate in your hands.

I liked this list of the three things a community needs to have:

• Ascription: members ascribe community membership to themselves and they know when to ascribe it to others. You might call this idenitity. You might call this “consciousness of kind”.
• Rituals and traditions: The community has ritual behaviors, the members know what these are. Sometimes they call these traditions or sometimes they have stories they tell about how these behaviors arose or what purpose and value they generate. This is something the comunity shares, they are it’s public goods.
• Duty or Loyality: Members of the community feel a sense of moral responsiblity to the their community. They will help each other, they will band together against a common threat.

One very casual example: an open source community might have the ritual of proof reading others source code commits. That act has an element of duty associated with it, the proof reading guards the quality of the code. members of the commuity know that those who do this deserve to have community membership ascribed to them.

This three element model goes a good distance toward explaining why people in a community can become quite committed to defending the rituals of the community. Those rituals may be the key defining element of the community for them. When you displace the rituals, or practice them in a new manner, you are toying with the commuities definition of it’s self.

In one open source project I’m involved we organize the work around a dialog in a on a mailing list. Members of the community ritually read and refined this dialog to polish the work of the commuity. As the community grew other ways of discussing the work emerged: instant messaging, sub-committee mailing lists, even actual conversations at conferences, bars, even phones. All these other channels confounded the community concensus about what our rituals are for organizing the work. Where is the heart of the dialog? Some members, highly loyal to the traditional community rituals, campaigned against these “innovations” while others found these new techniques a fun innovation.

That dispute is not just about what is effective. It is about the definition of our community. Our sense of what the community we subscribe is. For example if a new forum for discussing the project emerges when must a loyal community member climb on board? If he doesn’t is he failing his own personal sense of moral duty to the community?

Steven Noels says something key in the midst of many other interesting things on his blog.

“My recurring argument is that Free Software should be more than just using LAMP, it should be based on the willingness to invest more into employees instead of external suppliers.”

Open source is about shifting ownership around in the supply chain. It is about putting some of the ownership into the hands of the people that do the work. This is analagous to the way that professional societies sometimes write standards. It’s analagous to the craft knowledge of a guild. It is hard for firms to grapple with since they find it much easier to think of the world thru the simple dialectic of buyers and sellers. Adding a third element into the mix – the craftsmen – makes things a lot more complex to think about.