Free Range Librarian

I sit here in my corporate bathrobe catching up after the great California Library Association conference in San Jose last week. Nice location, great tech support, super high attendance, good food… hey, Toto, I know we’re not in Ontario any more (site of last year’s conference, and a dump that was). Kudos to everyone involved in putting on what in my childhood someone called a Really Big Shew.

I did two mini-presentations and one big presentation about MPOW, and sat in on a program about next year’s mahhhhvelous summer reading program, Dragons, Dreams, and Daring Deeds, honchoed in this state by the ever-stoked Stephanie Stokes. (You’re asking what I was doing there? MPOW creates theme collections for this increasingly popular summer reading program collective.)

And frankly, though I believe in Hot Tech and Ubiquitous Computing and all that, the best part of the CLA presentations was that the audience members were listening to what I had to say. Which is where I have a bone to pick with my biblish buddies Michael Stephens and Steven Cohen, who are at Internet Librarian wondering where the bloggers are, because they are one of a handful of people blogging during the presentations.

Yeah, I know it’s called multitasking, and I know the NextGens think it’s hot. But I think it too often can be an excuse for solipsism. Just when you should be all eyes and ears for someone else, what are you doing? Blogging!

As an adjunct library science instructor, far too often I have had to walk around the room and say Shut Down That PC And Listen. I have seen the pouts, the lower lips pushed out, the dagger eyes. I have said Shut It Down Anyway. If nothing else, you are paying good money for me to bore you.

As a presenter, I can’t order anyone to shut their laptops, but I can think it. Take notes? Write a pre-bloggy entry? Make a brief blogtation, “psyched, great show?” O.k., fine, even good. But launch into full-length blog entries during a talk, IM back and forth, practically publish a newspaper filled with YOUR thoughts and YOUR ideas, and then shake fingers at others for not doing the same? People, people!

Where are the laptops, Michael asks? Where they should be, tucked into briefcases while your rapt audience hangs on your words. Well, that’s my fantasy, anyway. I put everything I can into making it worth your while to see my Really Big Shew; I’d be honored if you returned the favor.

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I can’t believe I just wasted time doing this on a busy week before the state conference, but I generated my blogger code:

B5 d+ t+ k+ s u– f i+ o+ x- e l c

Oh, and here’s the decoder (thanks to Eclectic for pointing out this omission). And here’s this blurb from the decoder:

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http://shirky.com/writings/group_user.html

“The assumption that the computer is a box, used by an individual in isolation, is so pervasive that it is adhered to even when it leads to investment of programmer time in improving every aspect of mailing lists except the interaction that makes them worthwhile in the first place.”

As a long-time list co-moderator (for PUBLIB, a 5.000-member list), I lapped up Clay Shirky’s latest think-piece, “Flaming and the Design of Social Software,” which is about the group culture of mailing lists. Everything he says is on the money. Clay points out that mailing list software is not designed around group behavior. But he makes some assumptions that all groups behave similarly with mailing list software.

Drawing from my own experience (as Clay does for his analysis), I suggest only partly tongue-in-cheek that the most useful “flame retardant” for mailing lists would be to ensure that most of the subscribers and all of the list managers are women. Before you bridle, don’t ask yourself whether this is true, but what we can apply from the experience of PUBLIB–regardless of the predominant gender of its membership–to the design of mailing list software, and indeed to support Clay’s argument.

How is PUBLIB “a social structure that encourages or deflects certain behaviors?” First, PUBLIB subscribers overwhelmingly ignore the handful of trolls that pester the list, and collectively advise others to do the same. In this sense they function as a collective, group-oriented “kill file.” Second, they invariably share, off-list, that someone is a troll, and in some cases will research the troll and present their information, not to prevent the troll from posting but to inform users of the troll’s background. In that sense, they are acting as a rating system. Finally, PUBLIB subscribers support a policy in which the list managers can step in, deus ex machina, and terminate a thread. Rarely has the moderators’ ability to do this been challenged (and never by women, except once when a co-moderator killed a thread the other co-moderator was participating in; and at that, the challenge was again off-list). It is also true that moderators (usually with the on or off-list support of the membership) can vote subscribers off the island. In twelve years, this has never happened.

Finally, the very presence of a list policy, and the moderators’ unfettered ability to implement it, are likely both key to PUBLIB’s success as a reasonably well-trafficked but peaceable queendom.

Every once in a while, it is suggested that PUBLIB become an ALA list, which among other problems, would make PUBLIB subject to the medieval and ill-thought-out rules that make trolling and flaming so attractive to ALA list members, and is the reason most ALA lists are either shameful troll-bridges (e.g. ALAOIF) or largely silent (e.g. Council). Quite a bit of PUBLIB’s success comes from the authority of its list managers and the fact that no well-meaning organization “owns” it.

Kudos to Clay for acknowledging that mailing lists are important commons for all of us, and for such brilliant suggestions for improving these commons.

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