The forum moderator group met for its inaugural meeting on Sunday Sept 21 by Skype.
My goal in setting up the group is to develop a method of self-governance for the oD forums. Why?
oD's mission is to become the open source supplier of global news commentary, debate and analysis. I often describe this as ''doing to the analysis pages of the major newspapers what Wikipedia did to Britannica". The forums are a critical part of the mission. They are the natural place for debate; they are the expression of the free-form openDemocracy community. Everyone has a chance at a voice here. Above all, they are a public space, as broad as can be, where all with a desire to understand can come together to discover, confront, perform and try to change minds.
The goal of the forum moderation group is to keep this community together, nurture its conversations and maintain the quality of its debate.
In our first meeting, we agreed that we needed to develop a broad set of goals and principles for the forums in order to guide our decisions. We will be deciding about all sorts of things -- from technical design issues, to whether to elevate anyone for particular praise to whether anyone should be banned or disciplined to questions of how the forums interact with other parts of the openDemocracy network of sites. Those decisions must be grounded in principles and explainable as deriving from the principles. The statement of principles should not be a set of laws, but more like the pre-amble to a constitution. I hope that over time, precedent will accumulate to determine the specific realisation of the intended spirit of the forums.
If you'd like to add you piece to what those general principles and aims of the forums should be, please do so here or in an email to me (tony dot curzonprice at opendemocracy dot net). We are next meeting on Sunday November 2nd, when we will consider whether we have enough to produce a draft of the forum principles.
My starting point is this: the goal of the oD forums is to create a community of debate and discussion that allows as wide a range of views as consistent with the existence of debate.
Please improve, object, propose ... or let the forum mdoerators group just get on with it.
Tony
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