Membership / Openness discussion

[didlix]

What should the requirements for membership be?

This is a co-operative, so we want all members to participate in some way.

[didlix]

List of things people could contribute:

• moderation
• casting
• web dev (help with reviewing pull requests?)
• admin
• running servers

[mfcrocker]

Is there a particular reason to restrict membership to those who contribute? I can't really see the harm in letting dormant people just sit there.

[didlix]

The way I see it is that we want a culture of social responsibility. Everyone doing their best to keep the streets clean. We also want to provide safe spaces for people to game and I think restricting to those who want to participate will help achieve this.

I do however fully expect us to have public areas where anyone can mooch, though the same code of conduct will apply. I also think we should have forums locked to members, but are publicly viewable so that our discussions on the gaming industry can be public.

[mfcrocker]

My fear is that a closed or semi-closed setup could end up being too insular.

[didlix]

We want to be just insular enough that we keep the harassment out but not so insular that we are a closed community and unable to educate the world.

[mfcrocker]

Well, at the moment you are proposing a closed community. That's fine for purely organisational discussions but no-one is going to engage with it for education. I personally would suggest an open community with strong moderation - it's not a perfect paradigm but I think it's the best one for the goals of the group.

There is no sweet spot between keeping harassment out and having an impact; the latter will drive the former.

On 19 August 2014 17:29, Rachel Graves notifications@github.com wrote:

We want to be just insular enough that we keep the harassment out but not so insular that we are a closed community and unable to educate the world.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/gameranonymous/frontend/issues/8#issuecomment-52660676 .

[didlix]

I suggested some closed areas (free from harassment), some semi-closed (good for discussions that are useful to be public, without risk of harassment) and some entirely public (like IRC, and public forums).

[typed-hole]

I think it comes down to how many moderators we would be able to find. I really think keeping things as open as possible is the way to go since it's a lot harder to grow if the community is too insular. It all requires that an increase in members/activity doesn't come at the cost of maintaining the safe-space status of the forum or other areas.

Basically I think that we should be as open and restriction free as we possibly can while still guaranteeing that our spaces are safe (well, guarantee is probably a bad choice of word, more like guarantee that rule violations will be acted upon, and fast).

[didlix]

:+1:

By asking members to participate, I am hoping we end up with a larger number of committed moderators. The more of that we have, the more open spaces we can afford to have.

We could look at moderating new registered users' posts by default, and let members remove them from the moderation list after they have met some criteria (10 inoffensive posts, length of membership, etc).

Though again, we want lots of people who can do this, so posts are let through quickly.

[typed-hole]

By the way, what, more precisely, will a membership contain? Access to closed forums/voip rooms? More stuff? I'm guessing a lot of people would be interested in hanging out in our spaces while not actually signing up for anything.

[didlix]

No one is proposing to have only closed spaces. I am still convinced that a coop approach is the best (where members are committed to making it a good place to be) while providing public spaces for everyone as well.

But everything can be fluid.

[didlix]

Okay, since everyone is discussing how open we should be here, I've opened #17 to discuss the application process and specifics of becoming members.

[didlix]

To roundup what has been said so far:

• We want open spaces
• Some people want a more open than closed environment
• This depends on how quickly we can moderate out behaviour, and reactions to harrasment.

^ If people can harass then get banned, we're not really meeting the goal which is to provide a space free from harrasment.

[sw17ch]

Just a few thoughts based on the first question (what should be requirements of membership?):

1. Continued respect for the Code of Conduct and being willing to be guided under it.

2. Participation in the support of the community including some of...

   a. Review and implementation of digital infrastructure (code reviews, server maintenance, etc) b. Community moderation (see Code of Conduct) c. Outreach - this is broad, catch all, and something that I don't feel I have the life-experience to properly define. It may include the following: offering support to marginalized persons, explicitly inviting those who may have had bad experiences in other communities, educating our own members in ways to be better humans who game.

Thoughts? I may have phrased some of that poorly. I humbly ask you to read it in the best light you can view me in. :)