I am a member of or participate in a few local groups in Minneapolis, for the most part they are local chapters of national groups (The Nation, Move On, OccupyMN). I have been mostly on the periphery of the OccupyMN movement, helping a bit on the technology side, but not able to be feet on the ground at the protests due to my job. So when I heard of a new group that sounded like it was positioning itself to be a support system for the Occupy movements with a working title of EngageMN, I was almost giddy with excitement. It sounded like a wonderful opportunity for me to participate and provide a service and I was ready to get started. It now looks like I am not welcome and my services are certainly not desired.
How did this happen? How do you get uninvited to volunteer for a group that doesn't even exist yet? It seems that all you need to do is bring a question to the wrong person within the group. I sent an email to three people I thought to be the correct people to communicate with inside the group, and was almost immediately sent an unprofessional and nasty response from a completely different person I'd never met and still do not know. This person berated me for sending an email to the wrong person within the group and let me know that they were the leader of this group and not the other person. They then proceeded to berate me for bringing up the question and accused me of spreading rumors. And since that was not even enough, they then went on to accuse me of purposely sending an incendiary email to their work email, even though they apparently had been using their work email for EngageMN and OccupyMN up to that point. In fact, what account do you think they sent this unprofessional email from? Yep, that same address that they just berated me for sending to. I responded to this person's email (replying to the correct email as they now demanded). I let them know that I was still interested in volunteering and received a snippy reply that let me know exactly where I stand.
Oh well.
This surreal exchange actually made me think about another observation I had about unmoderated mailing lists, especially non-tech mailing lists. I have participated in dozens of technical, social and political mailing lists over the years. Most of these lists were well organized, well moderated and had great conversations with the exchange of valuable information. Then there were the unmoderated, or poorly moderated lists. These lists were little more than troll magnets, attracting the equivalent of belches and fart noises to otherwise intelligent conversations.
What I've found is that many of the politically progressive mail lists are not able (or willing) to effectively moderate their email lists. This ultimately results in those conversations attracting the trolls and miscreants that eat away at the structure of the online group and memberships and drive the thinking participants away. I see this happening with the local Minneapolis Move On mailing list already, even though it is brand new. Without moderators or any kind of structure, there is very little information of any real value, and in order to get to the valuable information you need to wade through juvenille attacks against unpopular opinions and views. While this is the same for non political mailing lists as well, for me it is frustrating to see the efforts of well meaning people being diluted by a tiny subset.
These projects, groups and movements would benefit significantly from the use of online forums and moderators to add value to their discussions and provide a much more efficient way to talk to members and keep the miscreants from derailing conversations.
Given the experiences I've had so far though, I won't hold my breath.
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