Community Direction, Rules & Privacy

[flourish]

First off: since I'm bumping it off the top of the page, everyone take a second and go share some links at the Resource Roundup post that elf kindly made for us! We're hoping to develop those resources into linkspams about various topics, so that in future, we can point to other people's words and not just rely on our own.

As we've had the first couple posts in the community, laughingmedusa and I have been talking a lot (and talking with some of you) about what direction the community ought to go. As some of you may know, the community was started based on several incidents in the feminist blogosphere, wherein it seemed like all possibility of constructive discussion was destroyed because of the huge numbers of people getting involved - people who didn't know each other at all, and therefore didn't share anything or feel any accountability to each other about their actions.

That was the rationale behind creating a small community, really more of a discussion group: the idea that, if everybody has a chance to get to know each other, civil discourse will be easier, even when we are angry and frustrated and ready to snap. But almost immediately, the comm got much bigger than we had expected. We should have known better - in retrospect, we should have realized how many people from our flists and drolls would be interested, how few friends we actually shared in common, and how quickly things were going to snowball. Most of all, we should have workshopped the rules and profile info more carefully. But at the beginning, it looked like it was going to be me, laughingmedusa, verity, jlh, and maybe five or six other people - so it seemed like we'd have plenty of time to discuss the rules later, and it seemed like surely we would share so much knowledge and awareness of each other that we wouldn't need to explain ourselves too thoroughly.

Obviously, our assumptions were wrong. Now we need to actually, you know, define what the hell we're doing, since it obviously isn't what we initially set out to do.

As a result, we've decided that, as of noon EST tomorrow (13 October), we are going to close membership to this community. The goal will be to allow people who are currently members to get to know each other without adding new folks - limiting our growth so that we can begin to understand each other and build up trust. It would be foolish to try and kick anybody off, and we don't want to, anyway: everyone who is here, we think can and should be an excellent member of the group.

This is not a step we take lightly. Obviously, there are costs to it: the primary one is that the group will remain more or less at its current demographics, which are fairly white and cis and USian. But, laughingmedusa and I have agreed that it's the only way to get some amount of stability while we determine what the hell is going on. We will probably allow people to join again at some point in the fairly near future; we just need to give everyone a chance to take a breath, learn some names, learn some usericons, and figure out who's interested in and able to speak to what.

We also would like current members' opinions on what our rules, now that we're formally writing them, should be. Fuzzy statements like "give people the benefit of the doubt" need to be clarified, because the audience is no longer the ten people who have been following the situation all the way. We also need to decide on some pretty important things. For instance: Are we interested in using private posts sometimes, that only community members can see? (Benefit: people who are in the closet or uncomfortable talking about personal matters can discuss these issues with the community without fear. Cost: Further locking down, people who are not members of the now-not-open community cannot possibly get access to the posts to give their perspective, which might be sorely needed.) Or, are we interested in engaging in discussions about what some people might call '101-level' anti-racism etc? (Benefit: People who are tired of having those discussions don't have to have them; people who have too few spoons to deal with it don't have to deal with it. Cost: Some people can no longer take an active part in the group, even though they may be awesome people who just have not ever encountered this stuff before.) I'll put my own perspectives in a comment to this post, and so will laughingmedusa, but we want to know what you think, too. If this comm is going to work, all members need to buy into the premises.

So: What are your thoughts? What should our rules be, and where do we go from here? (And our private inboxes are also open, if you would prefer to talk that way.)

[Co-signed, flourish and laughingmedusa.]

Comments

[jlh]

One way might be to stop referring to this as a white comm and talking about how white it is. Maybe, there are some white people here! Also some people who are not white! I hadn't really thought about this before, so if I'm phrasing this in a hurtful way I really don't mean to, as my feelings are not hurt, but it's weird to have people refer to a comm as being X, when you're in the comm and you are Y, and X and Y are not the focus of the comm. Like, it's fine to call this a female comm, because feminism is the focus. That it's mostly-white and mostly-cis is frankly, what people would expect from a comm that isn't specifically trying to be about race or about trans issues. My default for comms that aren't specifically black is, mostly-white-but-not-entirely.

I think the angry tag will be great! That may well help me a lot, as I can take it in when I feel stronger and not take it in when I don't. Thanks!

[imaginarycircus]

Not hurtful at all. It's an excellent point. I never meant to imply we were all anything. Several members were concerned about it being a mostly white comm and some of them were PoCs. Flourish and I were worried about a disproportionate number of people being cis white academics. It does seem to be the default for many online comms, but I still think it's worth thinking and talking about. But we should watch how we define the comm, you're right.

I want this to be a good place to discsuss feminist issues, but because of places where feminism intersects with race or class or trans issues I do want to be aware of those issues too and sensitive to the differences as well as the sameness between us all. Like I want to make sure I am calling a transman by his preferred pronoun because calling him, "her" could be very hurtful. I didn't know that until last year. I'm very glad I know it now.

[quantumdani]

I'd love to be part of a discussion where we challenge the normalcy of this: My default for comms that aren't specifically black is, mostly-white-but-not-entirely.

I understand why it's your default, but I am really trying to work on a world where it's not and where the people around me are discomforted by the idea that it is. I have to, otherwise I am stuck in my neverending sea of being the only one in the room. In particular, my experiences of sexism are primarily where they intersect with my experiences with race: being left out of discussions about women OR being left out of discussions about people of color. Anyway, I realize that not all women of color experience or relate to feminism in this way, but I wanted to throw that out there. I know that [Unknown site tag] and [Unknown site tag] have in part been responding to prompts from people like me. I would really hate to be part of a community where I showed up and it was supposed to be a foregone, normal conclusion that it would be largely white.

That said, I like the idea of not seeing this as a white comm but as a comm where whites are overrepresented. Maybe just semantics, but I think it sets the tone differently.

[quantumdani]

I seem to be unable to edit my comment (I can't find the icon??) so I just meant imaginarycircus and flourish.

[flourish]

I think that the change in semantics definitely sets the tone differently in my mind. It even sets it differently from "This comm is mostly white people."

Saying "overrepresented" (1) suggests that the ideal composition of the comm would be less white (true, IMHO) and (2) suggests that the composition of the comm may change (and hopefully will).

[laughingmedusa]

YES!

[jlh]

Maybe this is something that we need to make a separate post about--not that I don't want to continue THIS conversation, but this thread has collapsed so a lot of people aren't seeing it. Also I'd be really interested to hear you expand on the idea of challenging that default!

For me, having grown up in Maine and adopted by a white family, almost all the spaces I'm in all the time are default majority white unless they purposely are not, so much so that I don't really think about it. But when I say default majority white, I don't mean that in an "I assume that everyone I'm talking to is white" but more, "majority white is not particularly remarkable." And while I understand the concern from both Katie and Flourish and the other PoC who've joined to have the comm be less white, I so far in other spaces have found the conversations around that to be, as trinker said above, somewhat othering.

I don't know if you'd like to start that post, or I can with what I was saying and how you and trinker brought different ideas to it, and open it up. But I'd really just be repeating this convo, so if you have other things (particularly, challenging the default) it would be awesome if you started the post.

[laughingmedusa]

And part of the work I want to do with the comm is to grow it into a place where there is far more diversity.