I can't resist going back to old Bureaucrazies. It's cracktastic.

Cash, that is SO TRUE (Also, I have the book boxed and it's in my car.... I SWEAR we are going to the post office this weekend!)

Proud Member of the Go14.

I wish I remember the research article about internet communities that talked about a lot of the stuff we dealt with. The thing that sticks in my mind is that at a certain point you had to codify some kind of disciplinary process or inevitably a troll type person would take down/divide the whole board.

And I remember how difficult it was for us to move from bullshit consensus to voting but that it was ultimately worth it.

It's funny how we worried so much about voting and we hardly vote about anything anymore.

But there was a deep concern that thread proliferation would split the community. And I well remember the days on WX when I read every thread without skipping.

And now there's so much discussion on the various show threads that I never engage with.

Do you mean the Clay Shirky article, Hec?

Yay Gracie! That video totally made my night.

She's friggin' amazing, I tell you.

I am so broken tonight. Tomorrow I'll be broken even worse, but at least the week will be over and I will be able to rest. yay.

It turns out I repressed the memory of Rafmun. Who was he?

Was I top poster back in the day? I can't remember, and I'm not going into a Bureaucracy of threads past to find out. I have a meeting that I can't be late for tomorrow morning, and I'd rather read Southland fic than stay up all night in a fit of self-consciousness.

I'm not sure if this is laziness or personal growth.

That's it, ita. Man, that article had a huge effect on my thinking about our community.

So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.

And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.

He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.

Was I top poster back in the day?

You were too busy setting up Farscape fic archives, and running the quotes generator.

I repressed the memory of Rafmun. Who was he?

Megan E's husband. He showed up and told us that a noisy few (unnamed) were poisoning the waters and driving people away by bending the board to our whims. And then, as Bureaucracy churned like sharks after chum (as everyone took it personally, pretty much) he accused us of ignoring his point.

Except meaner. And WAY longer. All sorts of dirty laundry got hauled out, and people left over it.

Hec, it was very calming to see that people already did what we did, and that we pretty much had to do it to keep going.

And, painful as it was, it worked! Or we survived despite it. Either way. I like to think we're bigger people because of it.

This is the one that made me personally stick everything out in Bureau:

And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.