| Felipe Fonseca (MetaReciclagem). Mercado de Intercambio de Conocimientos, organizado por Platoniq. Barcelona, 2008. |
Collective Moderation
Published on 01/08/2009 - Games and methodologies
Self-management, Communities / Networks, ICTs, Analogies of digital, Collective decision-making, Collective moderation, Networking, Web 2.0, Communication tools
Contributors: MetaReciclagem, Felipe Fonseca
Related with: MetaReciclagem
The world wide web has been proposed in the early nineties as a free space, through which anyone could have access to a wide diversity of human knowledge. Later on, the web has also been identified as a brave new world in which every person would have the opportunity to interact with virtually any other and share his/her own knowledge, adding to the creation of a "collective intelligence", which would contain all sorts of useful (and also useless) information. If in one hand that has led to real disruptive technologies allowing new voices to be expressed throughout the world, on the other hand the huge amount of information available in any single moment exceeded what a person could be able to understand in a lifetime.
There are different ways to avoid being lost in such an ocean of information. Up until a couple of decades ago, there were central information authorities -big press, for instance- that would publish "the truth that matters" - supposedly. Time has proven that assumption to be either misleading or totally false. Relying on a centralized infrastructure to choose what should or should not be published is allowing power to interfere in the flow of information. But the opposite is not viable either: if anyone can express any idea, how can one tell what's right or wrong, what's interesting or not?
The solution for that situation seems to be understanding that any information can only be evaluated as worthy or not in a given context. In that sense, distributing the power of decision to the members of a group of interest can be the way to make moderation balanced. A technology news website called Slashdot has created an innovative approach, by giving frequent users the temporary power to edit and moderate contributions to the website. The website has a moderation queue: new articles submitted to it are held in a space where they can be evaluated by those users. The users earn the ability to moderate the contributions based on a series of measures of what they have contributed in the past to the website: approved articles, appreciated comments, frequency of visits, and so on.
That kind of moderation has been called reputation-based, or "karma" moderation, after the oriental concept of karma ("the effects of all deeds actively create past, present and future experiences, thus making one responsible for one's own life, and the pain and joy it brings to others", according to the Wikipedia entry on "Karma").
In such a moderation system, the choice of what pieces of information are considered valid to a specific community is made by its own users, collectively. That makes it an interesting option when a group of people wants to find out what can be held as important information to itself.
Workshop 1: Collective Moderation (Karma)
Felipe Fonseca and Leo Germani
Goal: Acknowledge the use of a collective moderation layer to facilitate participatory editorial processes, and come up with material for a collective publication that describes the group of attendants.
~10-15 people. About 90 minutes.
Material: post-its (at least 10 per person), big paper for 2 billboards, marker pens, ball pens for attendants.
Process:
1. Introduction - reading of a short text (previous page) about collective moderation. Presentation of the goals and procedures of the workshop.
2. Each person receives 3 post-its and are encouraged to write down in each one a small paragraph about themselves. They don't need to be extensive or objective, but focus is given in diversity – people are supposed to describe unique characteristics. They are required also to sign their post-its with a nickname. All post-its are put in a simple billboard.
3. Pre-selection: everybody has the chance to read all the posts. The billboard has another block of blank post-its, so that anyone wishing to write a comment upon someone else's paragraphs is encouraged to. Those paragraphs who are considered interesting (for whatever personal reason) are then transferred to a second billboard. It is important to stress at this point that all the participants have the chance to choose any post except the ones they have written. There can be debate about the paragraphs, but the goal at this point is only defining a first, raw, cut of the contents.
4. All attendants earn moderation points starting on 3 and growing to the number of their paragraphs that have been pre-selected: someone whose paragraphs were not selected at all has 3 points, those who had one paragraph selected have 4 points, and so on.
5. The second billboard is marked with horizontal lines: 3, 2, 1, 0 (from top down). All posts are put in the second (1) row.
6. Collective moderation: everybody will read again the pre-selected posts on the second billboard. They will use the points they have earned to moderate the content: moving any paragraph one position up or down costs one point. They still can write more comment post-its and debate the posts. The process goes on until all moderation points are spent.
7. To finish, the most ranked paragraphs are chosen, in the same number as people attending the workshop (i.e. 10 people, 10 paragraphs). If there are exceeding paragraphs with similar ranking, those with most comments will be selected.
8. That may be followed by a debate regarding the benefits and eventual issues raised by this kind of moderation.
2. Each person receives 3 post-its and are encouraged to write down in each one a small paragraph about themselves. They don't need to be extensive or objective, but focus is given in diversity – people are supposed to describe unique characteristics. They are required also to sign their post-its with a nickname. All post-its are put in a simple billboard.
3. Pre-selection: everybody has the chance to read all the posts. The billboard has another block of blank post-its, so that anyone wishing to write a comment upon someone else's paragraphs is encouraged to. Those paragraphs who are considered interesting (for whatever personal reason) are then transferred to a second billboard. It is important to stress at this point that all the participants have the chance to choose any post except the ones they have written. There can be debate about the paragraphs, but the goal at this point is only defining a first, raw, cut of the contents.
4. All attendants earn moderation points starting on 3 and growing to the number of their paragraphs that have been pre-selected: someone whose paragraphs were not selected at all has 3 points, those who had one paragraph selected have 4 points, and so on.
5. The second billboard is marked with horizontal lines: 3, 2, 1, 0 (from top down). All posts are put in the second (1) row.
6. Collective moderation: everybody will read again the pre-selected posts on the second billboard. They will use the points they have earned to moderate the content: moving any paragraph one position up or down costs one point. They still can write more comment post-its and debate the posts. The process goes on until all moderation points are spent.
7. To finish, the most ranked paragraphs are chosen, in the same number as people attending the workshop (i.e. 10 people, 10 paragraphs). If there are exceeding paragraphs with similar ranking, those with most comments will be selected.
8. That may be followed by a debate regarding the benefits and eventual issues raised by this kind of moderation.
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IMAGEFelipe Fonseca. BCK 2008
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