There are wide-open semi-public communities ("semi" because, as long as someone owns the space (and the space is always owned by someone) it is only public in so far that the owner/moderator is willing to pretend that it's public, sort of like shopping malls), and there are smaller communities where one must apply for membership. There are communities where everything happens or is supposed to happen in view of the community, and communities where various forms of opting-out or protecting certain interactions is allowed. There are communities without written or expressed rules of behaviour; communities that run on assumed or implicit rules of behaviour codified into a community-specific form of netiquette; and communities with explicit written codes of conduct such as Charters or User Agreements. There are communities with and without moderation or top-down control. But in the end they all fail.

One community I participated in had a membership of thousands, and viewing was not restricted to members so the number of lurkers can't even be estimated. There were no established rules of conduct, but a strong code of netiquette that was assumed to be common sense but in reality was learned through trial and error. There was no function enabling people to communicate privately, except if emails were exchanged, and this would necessitate posting it publicly on the board. No one ever had their membership revoked; it was intended to be entirely free speech, and the explicit assumption was that free speech would foster democracy, individual rights, accountability and resilience in its members. There were no moderators. It was a free-for-all. You signed up, you jumped in, and if you were smart you brought a weapon (virtually speaking, of course).

Friendships are formed on this site, but the formation of community is problematic, though many participants feel a sense of community on the site. For one thing, trolling is constant and fairly vicious. For another, it is all too easy for a handful of posters with time to completely dominate the board, comprising their own-tightnit community that appears to exclude outsiders, newbies or people with less time. Some posters openly and viciously attacked each other, and there was no mechanism to deal with this as a community.

But the main problem, for me, was the contradiction between the stated community values of equality and progressive politics and the way the ultra-free-speech nature of the site played out in practice. That is, that people with an identity that allowed them the privilege of assuming that people will listen and value their speech in real life tend to be the same people who dominate online communities because they assume that the experience will the same. And ditto for people who for whatever reason (disability, sex, language skills, class, race, etc.) in real life are not used to having their speech validated and valued continue to participate less and be validated and valued less online. In a community without explicit rules, in which no thought is given to the way that rules of expression can mirror or combat rules or experiences of privilege and power hierarchies, the rules of the outside world will be implicitly mirrored. On this explicitly feminist and progressive site, there was a tremendous dominance of middle- and upper-middle-class, white, straight, able-bodied women with good educations, and a surprising element of pissed off guys who hated not having their masculine privilege confirmed and valued. (One would think they would simply move on, but apparently, giving voice to women is an insult to men and an example of 'reverse sexism.)

On another site I participated in, the owners and moderators attempted to combat these problems by instituting rules. There was a user agreement that made posting racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive or anti-progressive materials an offence that led to being banned from the site (nothing to stop them from signing up again, but nothing's perfect). Moderators were available to view and remove offensive materials if they were posted. Otherwise it was remarkably similar to the above community; wide-open to public view with a members list of thousands and a lurkers list many times greater and the regular intrusion of right-wing trolls. However, there was a private message function which enabled one to reply to another member's post privately.

Here, too, there were problems. Many people who signed on to the user agreement didn't support it and openly and regularly questioned its existence and necessity. They viewed it as an infringement of their right to free speech. And in spite of the publicly-stated valuing of progressive and anti-oppressive politics, the patterns of dominance and hierarchy still favoured those with privilege in the outside world: men over women, straight over gay, white over everyone else, and so on. And while offensive material was banned, flaming was not; posting required an extroardinarily thick skin and imperviousness to insults. This probably reflects at least in part the passions and values that led people to that site to begin with. However it started, though, it has the effect of limiting discussion to those people most passionate, most willing to tolerate personal attack, sometimes those most judgemental. Many of the discussions are far from healthy. Certainly it would be foolish to reveal something personal that one was not willing to have roundly criticized, mocked or flamed.

A third community I have been participating in is yet further along the continuum of limiting speech. One cannot even view the community without first signing up. There is a charter of behaviour that one must agree to that does not only forbid offensive materials but mandates that all posts must be courteous, supportive and free of "bad words". One can report posts that do not adhere to this standard. Not only are private messages enabled, but one can choose to ignore certain posters so you don't even have to know when they post, let alone see what they wrote. And again, traditional patterns of power and privilege are replicated. Of course this isn't a political board, so I am probably in a very small minority in seeing that as a problem.

The effect of all of this is to mandate a stereotypical form of typically adolescent feminine behaviour. It's infantalizing and sexist. It's infuriating when there is something that needs to be discussed but you don't dare bring it up because someone might not think you're being nice enough and so report you. Honestly it reminds me of nothing so much as a bunch of teenaged girls operating on that bizarre byzantinian code of conduct where you can do or say anything as long as it's not to someone's face, and it's perfectly acceptable to ruin someone's life or reputation as long as no one can pin it to you.

A fourth community I was involved with was an email list for women who are pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant and have type 1 diabetes. Membership had to be approved, and the list of members was quite small. There was no explicit code of conduct, but there didn't have to be because the topic of conversation was naturally limited to type 1 diabetic pregnancies and diabetes control. So while it was of all the communities perhaps the easiest and most natural to belong to, in my experience it did not foster friendships or any sense of community, and once women had given birth they tended to drop off the list.

So you'd think by now I'd have some idea of how to make an online community work, eh?

But I don't, not really.

I know what doesn't work.

--not making progressive politics or anti-oppressive values part of the site guarantees that those without a voice in the real world won't have a voice there either.
--making only lip-service to such values has the same effect
--thus there needs to be explicit consideration of the needs of groups who are traditionally disenfranchised in order to counter this tendency. But how does one do this?

--having no rules of conduct gives free reign to people who are willing to be vicious and cruel, and guarantees the presence or development of a community that is at least in some elements so lacking in orderly or respectful conduct that it would never exist outside of the internet. Self-policing by community members has minimal effect if there is no system or authority to back up community rules.
--Having rules that are condescending or infantalizing makes a community look good but robs it of any valuable or adult interaction, thus guaranteeing that all members will at least occasionally behave like kindergarten students. ("Teacher! She called me a poo-poo head!")
--So a community needs to find and walk a fine line between over- and under-policing and regulating. There need to be rules and penalties for breaking them, but it can't be so strict or absolute that it stifles genuine conversation or healthy conflict.

--Wide-open semi-public access and membership fosters the existence and proliferation of trolls and lurkers, which can and usually does inhibit the formation of community.
--But a membership that is too private or closed will also inhibit the formation of community because the level of interaction (in terms of quantity) required to move beyond formalities and limited shared interests will never be crossed.
--But what is the magic number? And how do you find members if you aren't semi-public and wide-open?

What on earth am I talking about? Why do I think this is interesting? How much free time do I have anyway? All valid questions.

The thing is, real communities are not all public or all private, they are both. There's the public square, the shopping mall, the grocery store, the laundromat, the telephone, and individual homes. All sorts of spaces along a continuum from very public to very private. And I think that one of the things causing online communities to function in the often dysfunctional way that they do is that they don't approximate this. Or it's very crude. There are very public spaces galore, a few very private spaces, adn that's it. But if you wanted to, say, draw aside five or so of your closest friends and have a chat with them about something, you couldn't. I'm not sure how to create that experience online, but I think it's important. It's important to have spaces for everyone all together, for each person by themself, and for various combinations of people who have voluntarily chosen to be together.

As it is, it is very difficult to find safe spaces online. If you wanted to discuss something important to you without judgement or censure, good luck. If you are very brave, you can open such a discussion in a semi-public space and hope the hordes of trolls and lurkers keep their mouths shut. In my experience that doesn't last forever. Or you can try to find or start a private community built around a particular issue or problem, but they tend to remain shallow.

There also need to be rules of conduct and methods for enforcing them. AFter all, we don't permit criminals and dangerous lunatics to roam city streets freely. But on the other hand, you don't want to lock someone up because they told someone their perfume stinks. You might not require them to talk to each other, but you probably wouldn't give them a cloaking device to they can both pretend that everyone in the world is good and kind and agrees with them about everything.

Not that real communities are a paragon of excellence or healthy functioning in every instance, but there are some kinds of dysfunction that they are better at avoiding, and I think it is partly due to the physical structures of the spaces they inhabit. And I wonder if it is possible to replicate those structures online.

And this is interesting to me because (I know, I'm a geek) I think that kind of community is important to real, solid advocacy for mothers as a group. It doesn't necessarily have to be online, but I think it is probably easier to foster and establish a diverse group of people online that in the real world, where people strive to divide themselves along so many demographic lines. We live in neighbourhoods divided along class, economic and racial lines. And if we are going to advocate for mothers as a group, we can't permit it to be so divided. It has to reflect ALL mothers, or it's worthless.

So to begin, we have to have some understanding of what mothers as a group might want or need.

And I can't see any way of knowing that doesn't involve a community of mothers from diverse backgrounds and with diverse values and experiences.

This is probably true for most issues, but I'm talking about moms here. Insert the group or issue of your choice, if you prefer.

Is this making sense to anyone but me?

So anyway. For a host of reasons, some very selfish, and others relating to advocacy for mothers as a group, I am thinking more and more of how to go about establishing a healthy and functioning community for mothers. One that allows for safe spaces, for real discussions, for healthy conflict, for the formation of strong friendships, for a strong formal and informal code of behaviour, for good times, and might even foster the potential for change. If anyone has any brilliant suggestions, observations on what does or doesn't work, or feedback of any kind, I would love to see it.

Yeah, I know, it's a bit of a tall order. But it would be nice.