Civility and Moderation

The design included several means of maintaining civility and the quality of interactions. Users were prodded to self-reflection and some restraint on impulsive commenting by having to identify comment type and summarize the content in the a subject line. A user was also unable to disguise her identity, because had to submit the comment on a form that was mailed to her email address In addition, moderators were used to minimize the posting of low quality, redundant and inappropriate comments.

The moderators' tools included virtual queues to allocate work, review forms, form letters to users, and a constraint-based view system. These were used to overview all submissions to the meeting, access unreviewed and pending submissions on a topic, rate a submission's quality and decide its status. Options for the last function included accepting the submission for exposure to users, rejecting it or returning it for revision with a form letter explaining the reason, and deferring a decision to another moderator. The moderators in the on-line meeting, volunteers recruited by NPR and assigned to specific nodes, were trained to reject submissions that were low quality, redundant, obscene, personal attacks, whistleblowing or commercial solicitations. By checking on the review form the reason for a rejection, a moderator automatically returned the submission to the user with the appropriate letter of explanation. Much of this labor can be further reduced by the development of rule and neural network based programs that can automatically detect some prohibited content types.

Moderation exploits the database support of views, since accepting a comment merely included it in the public view. As implemented, moderators could see all submitted documents with their review status and quality ratings, while the general user saw or received only those that had been accepted for public display. More generally, views are displays generated by constraints that determine what gets shown to whom, display of the textbase and can be apportioned by arbitrary criteria, e.g., security classifications, organizational roles. A role, like moderator, then can be defined as a capacity to make certain moves towards others, based on the information the role holder gets or sees. Information is thus the context for interactions and power relations in the group.

The discourse grammar and the moderator reviews were constraints on what was said during the meeting, but there were factors that diminished their potential for arbitrary suppression of voices by the moderators. First the grammar itself was fairly transparent and was consistent with the announced purpose of the meeting as a discussion. Second, the moderators for the meeting were peers of the users, shared an interest in a meaningful discussion of the recommendations, and had to give reasons for rejecting a submission. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile comparing the risks that having rules of order and moderator authority poses for democratic practice with other means of control in on-line forums.

• Unmoderated forums, bulletin boards, mailing lists, etc., depend on the civility and common sense of their users. They are plagued by digressions and flame wars which drive away users, effectively suppressing diverse opinions. Efforts by some users as self-appointed "thread police" may be counter-productive. An option to improve control is collective moderation in which all participants rate the value, relevance and civility of the posted comments, with users receiving low scores being automatically barred. Certified registration could foil attempts by exiles to post under assumed names and also determine who is a participant.

• Moderated forums involve posted guidelines and moderators who usually preview (sometimes review) submissions to block (remove) from posting those violating the guidelines. The costs are a) possible abridgment of free speech rights[14], b) moderators seeing themselves as proprietors of the forum, c) moderators' interpretations of the guidelines are opaque regarding how and what they judge are violations. Users, after all, do not see what is not posted. The use of content analytic as filters on submissions would reduce the need for moderators and enable collective reviews of rules or examples of violations more fine-grained than the initial guidelines. This leaves open the questions of who writes the rules or chooses the egregious examples and how intelligent do the filters need be.

• Adding Roles to Discourse Grammars is a means to reduce the potential for aberrant, disruptive interpretations of the situation, that can be enacted within the constraints of the grammar. A cheap implementation of this idea is providing more directions to users in the introduction to the meeting, including the roles they might imagine themselves playing and there motivations in these roles. A more complete fix would be the support, similar to that given moderators, of roles that are either help the group pursue the discussion or manage itself. For example, a resident expert with access to specialized sources may be able to settle questions of facts that arise in the discussions. In contrast, a mediator could handle the problem of two participants using the forum as a private battleground by opening a back channel to them with suggestions to resolve their differences, or just remove their exchanges from the view of other participants. Increasing the organization of the meeting also increases disparities in power and social relations, since these are based on the information and moves available to the respective users.