[liberationtech] Does this "freedom of assembly" online idea have legs?

[Miles Fidelman]

Steven Clift wrote:
>
> Good. Bad. Ugly?
>
> Does my Open Groups proposal to the Knight News Challenge resonate 
> with you?
>
> https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/2014/submissions/open-groups
>

Steve,

In theory yes.  In practice, not so much.  At it goes right to the 
opening statement "Open Groups will help people find and join online 
groups. People connecting in groups powers innovation and the 
*effective* freedom of expression online."

In my own experience - in participating in, organizing, and hosting 
various online groups, back to the days of computer bboards, early 
ARPANET, and USENET - I've accumulated a few lessons that might apply:

1. People don't really have that much of a problem finding or joining 
online groups - when they want to.  If they're looking for an 
established community/organization, there's a web site and/or facebook 
page and/or twitter feed that's pretty easy to find.  If they're looking 
for a group on a specific topic, Google works.  For more substantive 
engagement, groups usually go to the participant, not the other way 
around - e.g., lists associated with one's employer, professional 
association, university, church, etc.  And for more targeted 
communities, word of mouth (and email) does wonders.

2. The issue, on the participant's side, is really a combination of 
lazyness and overload - a lot of people aren't motivated to engage, 
and/or they're already inundated with so much spam, list traffic, and so 
forth that they simply delete everything as it comes in, and don't join 
new groups.

3. There's a lifecycle for online groups.  They tend to start small, and 
have trouble reaching a critical mass.  Those that survive their growth 
pangs, tend to do well - until too many people join the 
list/board/whatever - at which point noise grows to dominate substance 
and people zone out.  Also spammers tend to start polluting lists at 
that point.  I.e., it's not all that clear that increasing the number of 
participants, without end, is a good idea - it tends to work against 
effective engagement.

4. Some groups can be self-organizing - e.g., the xxxx-users and 
xxxx-developers groups for a piece of open source software (though 
open-source communities have their own organizational issues). Other 
groups really require an initial organizer to recruit participants, 
establish and maintain codes of conduct (netiquette), through moderation 
if necessary, catalyze interactions, quash flame wars, and so forth.  
Once a group is ongoing, though, "social pressure" from long-time 
participants is often enough to keep things on an even keel -- someone 
to do administrivia (add/delete users to closed groups, kill compromised 
accounts that have started generating spam, manage the list/forum 
software -- that sort of thing (I seem to have fallen into that role for 
quite a few lists that I host).

5.  The right tools make a big difference.  Personally, I've observed 
that classic email lists seem to "work" the best - in terms of 
longevity, participation, and so forth.  Archives are an FAQ help for 
engaging newcomers (or simply those who want to catch up on a 
discussion).  There will always be the occasional clamor for "why don't 
we do this on Facebook instead," or why don't we replace this with a web 
forum - but inevitably those seem to work a lot worse (Facebook's 
arbitrary way of deciding what information to feed to each user, web 
forums that nobody ever remembers to go look at). The old USENET 
approach also worked pretty well - but USENET seems to have been invaded 
by spam these days.  I'd suggest a good email list, with a 
web-accessible archive (Google Groups is pretty good, so is Yahoo Groups 
- if you don't care about eventually moving your archives and list 
elsewhere.  Personally, I'm a big fan of Sympa - a list manager provided 
by a consortium of French universities. Groupserver is pretty good in 
this regard, as well.)

I guess, my suggestion is that a tool to "help people find and join 
online groups" will have very little beneficial effect, on anybody. On 
the other hand, perhaps a guide to "help people organize and moderate 
groups" and to "select and manage technology" might be very useful.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra