Daily Kos: New community guidelines, final draft

Daily Kos: New community guidelines, final draft

Those of us who've been involved and even led communities, online or not, end up devising simple guidelines to guide behaviour. Most of us try to keep it simple and trust that if the community "needs" a bureaucratic codification that goes on and on then it probably needs a reassessment. What we have in mind by having any guideline is to ensure that the environment of communication stays friendly and, ideally, productive; that it is not a space where hostility is at all countenanced or tolerated and that people contribute because they like the whole process and also trust it as an institution. Certainly that idea, of insisting that discourse be friendly and open to all, and inclusive and stay civil and not veer into misogyny or racism or other forms of obnoxious rudeness determined the guidelines and policies I had a part in writing for OpenOffice.org.

These guidelines I link to by Daily Kos are of interest if only because Daily Kos is such a public site and not an open source site. But as with open source environments, where harshness and (misinterpreted or not) irony is always a possibility, maintaining productive civility is hard. Hence these guidelines.

Speculatively, it would be interesting to look at the other big, public sites, like Reddit, or even Twitter, to track the elements that are permitted or not and how they may differ around the world.