Warning: It does have language that’s NSFW at the end. Still, it’s 2 minutes well-spent on how to have a productive online discussion:

Matthew Murray was angry.  Matthew Murray had been angry for a long time.  On Sunday, Matthew Murray was so angry and so unbendably focused on exacting revenge that he packed up his guns and his ammo and let his anger fly in the direction of 2 Youth with a Mission staffers and two sisters, age 16 and 18, who were unfortunate enough to be in his sights at New Life Church.

His anger didn’t come on suddenly.  It smoldered over a very long time, and began to erupt into flame when he began participating in online forums at the Ex-Pentecostals.org message boards.  Some general observations about these boards:  The regular members seem to be pretty even-keeled, but definitely healing from a childhood of toxic religion in tightly-controlled family environments.  They are not shy about criticizing the groups they escaped from, but in general, they seem to be dealing with their individual pasts in a forgiving and mature way.  Matthew Murray, posting as “nghtmrchld26″, burst onto the boards on Christmas Eve, 2006, posting on a thread about “child abuse in Pentecostal families“.  According to CNN, his family is involved in ministry and has ties to New Life Church.

Murray was absolutely depressed and disturbed.  He wrote about it sporadically on the ex-Pentecostal “Azusa Street Survivors” forum, intensifying the frequency and voraciousness of his posts beginning in August and leading up to Sunday’s tragedies.  His spiralling mental health is well-documented in his posts and despite the best efforts of members to guide him to qualified therapists (with one even making a personal appeal to him), the spiral continued.  Today, those members are heartbroken that despite their best efforts, they could not reach him.  Here was a typical response from him:

I’ve already been working with counselors. I have a point to make with all this talk about psychologists and counselors “helping people with their pain”…….

it’s so funny how many people want to help you and love you and counsel you and “work with you through your pain” when there’s money involved……

One of the limitations and dangers of communities like this is that there will be that one person who is determined not to get help and is actually triggered by participation in discussions about their past experiences, bitterness, and even abuse.  Matthew was one of these.  Although he was angry at “the church”, he was most angry at YWAM for rejecting him in 2002.  Here are some of his remarks:

Well, ok, I haven’t met every single last christian on earth, but during my whole time with my parents church, YWAM Denver, Kings Kids, and the Mike Bickle/Peter Wagner/Charismatic type conferences, YES, those behaviors and attitudes were always observed and I was treated that way. I honestly cannot remember when I was not treated in those groups as one of the “horrible people”(as opposed to one of the “Beautiful People.”)

After I left/was kicked out(depending on the group,) I was somewhat openly considered an “official outcast,” someone not worth their time and “not of God” and “certainly not truly spiritual.” (Link)

Sounds like the same kind of crap that goes on in YWAM and went on in The Family…..
Unthinking youth and young adults who go in without asking questions and without bothering to question all the “feel good spiritual elitism” experiences. (Link)

The fact is, in YWAM, and christianity, it’s all about the Beautiful People. No, it’s not just “one group of bad christians” but rather….almost every group of christians except for a few open minded non-evangelical churches. (Link)

Jesus also never said that I had to follow and believe in people like Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, Rod Parsely, Mike Bickle, Joyce Meyers, Ted Haggard, YWAM or any other so-called “annointed teacher” or “prophet” or self-proclaimed “holy spirit filled” group. (Link)

There are many more posts documenting his deteriorating mental state. I considered quoting them, but I’m going to just link to the search results and his final postings on December 9th if you want to read them. I’m concerned that reposting them, even small excerpts, might be triggers for others who land here as a result of a search.  By mid-summer, he was admitting to cutting himself and his poetry was growing darker, with one particularly dark post quoting Marilyn Manson lyrics on Halloween.

Without question, his posts were painting a picture of someone contemplating a dark and violent end, and I’m certain that the leadership of this forum had done everything they knew how to do to help him.  Still, even as he felt free to express himself in the safety of online interaction, the members were limited by the barriers erected by that same free space.  Some members, trying to be kind and engage him, complimented him on his poetry, which encouraged him to write much more, and the more he wrote, the darker it became.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen situations like this online, but it is the first time that I’ve seen it come to this kind of an end.  I hope it’s the last, but I am getting concerned about the possibility that participating (and venting) in a venue like the one Matthew used actually inadvertently contributed and gave him the outlet he needed to NOT seek help.  There is a chilling thread on 12/1/07 entitled “Considering Suicide?” where he writes about the six steps one should take if they actually call a suicide helpline to avoid being personally contacted by a Suicide Hotline worker.  It’s unclear to me whether the thread starter is addressing those hotlines manned by church workers, but here is Murray’s advice:

A word of advice if you do call and want to talk to someone……remember some things:

1. You do not have a plan. You do not actually intend to kill yourself. Admit to no more than suicidal thoughts.
2. You do not have the means to kill yourself available
3. You have never attempted suicide before. Nobody in your family has either.
4. You don’t have any recent life stressors
5. You don’t use alcohol/drugs
6. You are under the treatment of a mental health professional who you are seeing weekly.

Remember that they are able to get pass Caller ID blocking and WILL call local mental health authorities.

The responses are what concerned me.  While one person steps up and disagrees with him, other members are handing out applause. 

What a formula.  Rejected by YWAM and still bitter five years later, and as that bitterness is expressed in a ’safe’, anonymous online environment, acceptance comes.  Compliments come.  He is one of the ‘beautiful people’ at last. 

He seems horribly damaged by the religious zealotry of his youth, and his rejection by YWAM also seems devastating.  There’s value in escaping that and finding a safe place to start a healing process.  But what happens when the ‘healing’ becomes a trigger?  And what, if anything, could the moderators or managers at the ex-Pentecostal forums do?  Upon hearing the news of the shootings, they knew almost immediately that one of their own had likely been responsible.  Could they have done anything else, preventatively?  I don’t know.

They were in a no-win situation.  He wasn’t breaking the rules, and despite the encouragement, he was also receiving gentle suggestions to seek help, which he was rejecting.  One possibility is to change the forum rules just a bit so that in situations where a member is clearly posting ongoing negative triggers, they are forced into a time-out.  The problem with that, though, is that in Murray’s case, it would have felt like another rejection, similar to the one he received so painfully in the past. 

My heart goes out to the parents of the sisters who died at the church and the families of the two staff members at YWAM.  I know a little bit about the unspeakable pain that comes with such a random and inexplicable tragedy.  I hope that we, as online denizens, can find a way to prevent another one from happening by learning ways to intervene before the end of the spiral.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: MatthewMurray, YWAM, ex-Pentecostal, Azusa Street Survivors, forums, community, online, depression, rejection

Kathy Sierra, meet Kevin Leitch. I think the two of you have much in common.

I especially hate trolls that threaten children. There’s a special place reserved in hell for those morons.

Kevin Leitch is shutting down his wonderful autism blog (Left Brain/Right Brain) after troll John Best did a number on his little seven year old daughter, including assuming her identity and encouraging others to do the same.

John Best is a rabid anti-vaxxer. And when I say rabid, I mean foaming-at-the-mouth-in-your-face-what-an-asshole kind of rabid. For some samples of his spew, click here.

Kevin writes:

Let me be clear. I do not care one iota what this cowardly idiot thinks of me. He can write whatever he wants. But he has involved my daughter. Not to reference her progression. Not to quote me. But to laugh at her and to put words in her seven year old mouth.

I genuinely fear for her safety at the hands of this person (I will refrain from calling someone who picks on children ‘a man’). Three days running he has posted blog entries about her, two of which assume her identity and one of which is attempting to gain money in her name. I do not know where he would stop. Therefore the only way to make her safe is to remove us from his presence.

I cannot tell you how angry this makes me. This goes so far beyond disagreement over issues and into the realm of mental illness that it’s impossible to understand. You differ with someone, then exchange opinions. But involving their kids is a tactic which leaves them with absolutely no choice but to be silent, because no one with half a brain is willing to exchange the right to speak on the Internet with their child’s safety.

At the same time…

I’m not sure how Kevin shutting down his blog will silence Mr. Loony-Tunes-Anti-Vaxxer Best, since he was conducting much of his mischief on his own blog and can continue to do so. The only one silenced here has been Kevin Leitch.

When I wrote about anonymity here and here, this was precisely the problem I was referring to. The law-abiders — even anonymous ones — give a route to a contact point. But the ones who really just want to destroy ideas, people and reputations online can find any number of shitholes to hide in, just like Mr. John Best is doing.

What Kevin Leitch ought to do is track down Mr. Best and his provider, get a good lawyer and sue the hell out of them. I don’t know what UK laws allow and don’t allow, but I’m sure there is some provision in there for harassing children (like child abuse laws, maybe????), harassing adults, identity theft, and the other juicy and expensive violations of the law that Mr. Best is engaging in.

When a parent fears for his daughter’s safety AND identity (Mr. Best was evidently soliciting donations in Mr. Leitch’s daughter’s name…), AND that daughter is a young girl who doesn’t even use the Internet, it’s time to take action. I’m just not sure pulling excellent and credible information off the Internet to give someone with a shrill, ugly dangerous voice his way is the right way to do it.

So I went over to see what Mr. Best (aka Fore Sam) was doing on his blog. Oh, here are some gems, which I will copy but absolutely won’t link to.

Posted 9/16/07:

I have people question me once in a while about why I’m so rude to the neurodiverse. Some don’t think it’s fair that I bash these bastards constantly. Maybe those people should reread the posts here concerning the fraud by Baggs, Williams and Andrews. Them they should consider liars like Chew and Gorski. And, if that doesn’t help convince them that neurodiversity is just a sham to support drug company poisoning of babies, they should talk to some people whose kids have improved after being treated by Dr Geier who is bashed non-stop by neuroinsanity’s K Seidel. Seidel has dug up all sorts of junk that she portrays as “dirty laundry” but conveniently forgets to mention the improvement in Dr Geier’s patients. That sounds like a lie to me.

Posted 9/12/07:

Here’s another crock of shit from some conman claiming to have Asperger’s named William Stillman. This son of a bitch is using God to lie to parents, touting autism as a gift from God. He uses the spooky music in his video while he tells people there is no cure for autism.

Autism was caused by Eli Lilly not bothering to test thimerosal properly in 1929. Put that in your books, your videos and your speaking engagements you scumbag!!!

Posted today, in comments to his post celebrating the closure of RB/LB:

Justa Mom to 3,
I wouldn’t be surprised if Leitch didn’t even have a kid and used a tape of somebody else’s kid to further his deranged agenda. All these ND’s have to be mentally ill.

Should this kind of crap be allowed without any accountability? I say no. Google ought to shut down his blog, cache the whole thing so he can’t destroy evidence and Kevin Leitch should then subpoena them for records so that he can hold this thug accountable for the crap he spews not only about Leitch’s daughter, but respected doctors who don’t agree with him about his rabid anti-vax stance, therapists who are critical (and rightly so) of his whack-brained theories, as well as every professional he has slandered, libeled and otherwise smeared in the name of so-called free speech.

Incredible.

Technorati Tags: kevin leitch, john best, autism, antivax, cyberbullying, cyberbullies, internet,

Anyone who has been active in online communities will immediately recognize the type: Friendly, good (sometimes great!) writing skills, and they always have an amazing story. If you had an appendectomy, they’ve had a double appendectomy while being brainwashed by an evil shrink. If you have an interesting story, they have one even more interesting, usually full of drama and derring-do. Yet they are humble, supportive, friendly. They never want the drama they live — it just seems to travel with them. And they are tossed around by it constantly, eventually seducing their online audience into becoming part of it, too.

Usually you can spot them easily and learn to discount the stories. But some are really excellent writers who weave just enough reality into their story to make you doubt. And even if you question the story, they overcome you with their gentle, friendly, often self-effacing demeanor.

If you work in online communities they’re even easier to spot. Sometimes they even create two personas to chat with one another as a device to work the drama more effectively. If their IPs don’t give them away they usually do it themselves when they forget who they were talking to or what they said and post a reply as the other person. When it happens, the community at large is generally angry, sometimes devastated, but always wiser.

When I saw this BoingBoing post about The Life and Death of Jesse James I knew in my gut it would be the same kind of story. To tell you the truth, I almost didn’t read it because I’ve seen so many of these things gone wrong over the years online and off that I can hardly stand to see another poor trusting soul enlightened. But this one was different. And not so different.

At first I thought it was probably a made-up morality tale, but then I read the comments, which link off to this video and the victim’s own blog where she talks about how she was drawn into the drama to the point of leaving her husband (just in time for her online lover to kill himself) and taking in the author of the scam to live with her. She’d talked to “Jesse” on the phone, but says of those conversations:

I spoke to “Jesse” on the phone often, but he was always whispery and hoarse, because he was shy and didn’t talk much in his 3D life, so his vocal cords were weak, but jesus, could he write. Now, I’m sure we all know people like that, folks who come alive in type but are pretty inept in person. “Jesse” and his family had been exposed to an internet freak who’d been stalking Janna trying to get close to Dan Fogelberg, and had gone as far as to impersonate her on the Dan Fogelberg boards and to telephone her home to freak out her daughter. “Jesse’s” sister made him promise never to expose them to people like that again, so he (and Janna) were very leery of giving out any personal details to people they didn’t really know.

She goes on to describe how her involvement in a life-consuming project and his amazing ability to cancel face-to-face meetings at the last minute came together in a magnificent exercise in denial and intellectual dishonesty that she didn’t really sort out until she actually sat down…and sorted it out, after her friends orchestrated an intervention. Read the story and then visit the blog…this will make more sense.

Where it gets truly bizarre is when “Jesse” dies. The victim writes:

And then, well, “Jesse” died. And Janna was utterly lovely to me. Of course, most of “Jesse’s” other friends were quite horrible to me, because they never understood why he was interested in me in the first place, and constantly criticized me for not making more of an effort to be with him. But Janna was always a comfort, telling me stories, and encouraging me to set up the tribute blog. I was emailing with “Jesse’s” son, who was going to spend time in Spain. I had an address. I was emailing with “Jesse’s” ex-wife and his best friend Cakey. And Annie Martel, “Jesse’s” therapist. I met Janna, and she was real, we spent a few days together driving around Colorado and New Mexico, while she showed me some of “Jesse’s” favorite places. She cried real tears when talking with me about “Jesse” on his birthday. I saw them.

She closes the post with this:

And so I ask myself again, How could I be so stupid? So gullible? So easily deceived?

It wasn’t that easy. But I have no answers for the rest of it.

I hope she figures it out, because she’s not the first and not the last to be on the receiving end of stories like this. I suppose she should be grateful that she wasn’t solicited for money, or that she never really picked up and moved to Colorado to be with “him”.

If you read “Jesse’s” blog, it’s not hard to see where a busy woman locked into a voluntarily loveless marriage could be gullible. Jesse is a man who has drama in his life. High-stakes situations follow him (he’s supposedly a volunteer fireman) yet he’s unafraid to open up the ’secret parts’ and talk about how he ‘feels’ about things. He was in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina; had friends who died in New York on 9/11; he’s a man who fought the good fight for right while doing battle with his own demons — sexual abuse, bipolar disorder, anxiety, PTSD.

But hey, he would talk about it. and write about it. Transparently, and honestly. He confessed on a regular basis, not only in church but to his Internet followers. A man unafraid to have a breakdown in public, out where everyone can see the slow deterioriation of his self-esteem. Someone needy. A rescuer in need of a rescue.

Jesse was tailor-made for Audrey. I mean that. Janna, Jesse’s creator and engineer, figured Audrey out and then created Jesse out of whole cloth just for her. If you can stomach it, knowing what you’ll know after reading Josh’s LA Weekly article and Audrey’s blog, you can read archived posts from “Jesse’s” blog here.

It would be easy enough to shrug and dismiss this story as another idiot being taken for a ride by another internet scammer, except that there’s so much humanity in this one, all the way around. The video shot of Janna after her banishing is pathetic. She’s a broken, pathetic creature who I couldn’t bring myself to hate, no matter how hard I tried. I thought she was…well, ordinary. An ordinary person with a gift for writing in voices. Why couldn’t she have put that talent to useful use? Why prey on the hearts of people she’s never met, who have never done anything to her? I’m sure there’s a zillion psychological reasons, all quite rational, but when you look at that grey, flat, pathetic woman and then try to reconcile her with her inventions, it just doesn’t compute well. Josh Olson describes her this way:

Not just a liar, but bugfuck crazy. Because this has been going on for close to two years, and it’s clearly not about money. This sounds like some sort of weird variant on Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the mental illness in which a parent induces an illness in a child so he or she can be the beneficiary of sympathy.

And Audrey. Someone who was perfectly willing to be needed, to rise to the needs of the needy, seduced by the slow unveiling over nearly two years of a man she found herself needing in spite of her own admission that she didn’t need anyone. Again, I’m sure there are zillions of rational psychiatric explanations. Still, couldn’t it just be a desire to be needed? To have contact with someone who was brave enough to spill their own vulnerability and secure enough to let a relationship grow around it?

This is where online interaction fails. There’s irony in the ending, where Audrey’s “real-life” friends put an end to her pseudo-friendship with Janna and give her the real story. For all of the great stories about friendships made and built online, there’s one of these, and sadly, most times the “real-life” friends are too distant or too busy to pay attention to what an online friend has done to their own.

Update: Liz Ditz (I Speak of Dreams) posted hers at about the same time I posted mine — go read and read her links. She’s got a whole collection of stories like this…I’d completely forgotten about the one earlier this year in the medblogs.

Technorati Tags: LA Weekly, Josh Olson, Janna St James, internet fakes, scams, trickery, community, blogs, blogging

Saturday was One Web Day, and I wanted to get this posted on the actual day, but time got away from me. Even though designating a day is great, it occurred to me that what it begins shouldn’t end the day after, deferred for another year until the next one.

The purpose of One Web Day is:

The idea behind OneWebDay is to encourage people to think of themselves as responsible for the internet, and to take good and visible actions on Sept. 22 that celebrate the positive impact of the internet on the world.

Toward that end, the organizers encourage bloggers to post about the top 10 amazing ways the web has changed the world, the ways the web has changed my individual world, or ways I’d like to see the web change the world. The organizers also encourage one web-related action that helps someone else.

There are so many different ways the web has changed me and the world I live in. I originally went online in 1992 via Compuserve to research the 1971 murder of my grandfather. In the process, I met people along the way who I would not have had the opportunity to meet, much less have a conversation. Judge Ray Cunningham helped me navigate the legal system; others helped me to really form goals and objectives for my research, and ultimately, that small group helped me accept the fact that for some things, there just aren’t going to be answers. Not one to give up easily, I hit the Internet in 1994 on a very slow dialup connection through a local university in the hopes that I would discover answers. I didn’t, but I discovered a world I never imagined.

I discovered a world where people openly shared their lives in the hopes of helping others. Blogs about raising bipolar children, about racism in today’s times, about injustice and justice, about art and photography, about how other families manage ADHD, about friends who I’ve never met but consider a friend, and about friends I have met and learn something new from every day. I discovered writers who challenge my thinking and writers who teach me.

If I were to name one way that I’ve been changed by the web, it would be this: It has given me the freedom and permission to discover my creative self without fear of rejection. It silenced my internal editor because it is so easy to share my photos, my writing, and my thoughts. Not only is it easy, but it invites me to step into the world of global sharing, to open myself not only to sharing my own photography but also to enjoy others’ work from home and around the world. My Flickr contacts are global — there are no barriers, not even language. Zooomr is similar, especially as it grows and welcomes the global communities. Once those artificial self-created barriers were torn away, I was freed to indulge the creative me screaming to get out. And I’ve only touched the tip of that long-frozen iceberg. Along those lines, it also brings golden nuggets like Thomas Hawk’s Principles and Guides for Photowalking, one of the most inspiring and encouraging posts about the art of photography that I’ve seen.

The web changes all of us, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Julie Amero’s life was changed for the worst through no fault of her own by the Internet, and yet, it was also the Internet that came to her rescue. Even though she remains in a suspended limbo until the prosecutor makes a decision as to the disposition of her overturned verdict and refreshed charges pending, at least she is free and not sitting in prison for a crime she never committed. Out of that rescue effort, The Julie Group was born to help others who are the victims of the darker side of the Internet. I’m glad that I have a small voice as a blogger there, and gladder still that there was such an overwhelming response to what I and others wrote about her case. In my time blogging, I would say that Julie Amero’s plight and the small contribution I made alongside the much larger contribution that a small group of computer forensic experts and others made is one of the Internet’s finest hours, and a shining example of how we can all make a difference for the good.

I’m looking forward to more of that in the coming year and years following. As wonderful an idea as One Web Day is, the lasting value comes from the actions of ordinary people, connected by fiber, phone and cable, speaking their minds, offering their expertise, calling for injustices to be made right, and teaching us all something simply by taking the time to be a small part of this whole organism called “the Web”.

Technorati Tags: OneWebDay

Similar to society as a whole, online communities are not immune to the machinations of those who wish to use them for their own agendas, gain, or other individual benefits. The story of a recent meltdown of the MacSerial Junkie community is one with lessons for those of us working to build online communities, participating in them, or building tools to facilitate them.

The MacSerial Community meltdown has some big lessons, particularly in the context of these days of “Web 2.0″ and “user-generated content”. It also speaks loudly to the questions raised, debated and debated again in the wake of the events leading to Kathy Sierra’s decision to stop blogging. It involves cyberbullying and power plays, and in the best human tradition, reads like a soap opera. But this meltdown is distinctive — it was over two years in the making and involved trusted volunteers. The genesis of the conflict appears to begin two years ago, when two moderators came into conflict with each other. One was ready to strip the other of their mod powers when they withdrew to their own server, voluntarily resigning mod powers. However, the underlying conflict was not resolved and was driven farther underground.

(It’s probably worth noting as an aside that the purpose of the community is to share hacks and serial numbers for Mac applications and games. It follows, then, that the members of the community probably share a somewhat anarchical and anti-authority philosophy which might be manifested in different ways and which could naturally lend itself to rising conflict)

The conflict

From the notice on their site:

Right now we are facing problems from another direction: they’re coming from a side where you’d least expect it. The “elite” Mac UnderGround scene, our own side. Or so we thought.

They go on to define their vision of the community:

MSJ is a community built upon openess and loyalty. People dedicating their time to help MSJ grow, dedicated members get to be moderators and dedicated moderators get to moderator moderators and so on. Until you reach the top mod levels and that’s where the real decision-making goes on.

Then there is a lengthy discussion of the details. Disclosure: I do not fully understand the machinations of underground hacker groups, the hierarchy or even the structure, so I won’t try to analyze it in that context. What is more interesting to me is how a well-structured and strongly-knit community was almost undone because the volunteer moderators were given the power and permission to moderate the community, but did not have absolute power, nor ownership of the domain, something they felt should have belonged to the community at large rather than a single owner or group of owners. They felt that they were sharecroppers tilling the virtual ground for an absentee landlord.

From their post:

His strongest complaints were that we, as founders, were still in charge while being absent most of the time; even though he himself had been hardly active at MSJ lately and we head admins rarely intervened with day to day business.

Contrary to his assumption, we head admins visit MSJ frequently though, yet we do not actively participate and decision-making, let alone take part in any topics. We only show up when there are crises at hand and real threats to MSJ’s existence. The reason we do this is because we still strongly believe in MSJ and the envisioned path. Other than that everyone was free to sculpt MSJ’s future the way they seemed fit. But to some moderators this freedom was not sufficient and, even though everyone had the access that was needed, more access was wanted… even owning the domain name was being discussed.

As time went on, the primary antagonist tried to co-opt other moderators who did not share his views by naming them in a claim to the ‘top mods’ that they were about to break off and form their own community. There was email flying, lots of lying, lots of names and lots of hostility, leading to this:

Between the two of them, they were really directing and manipulating a lot of moderators at MSJ into a certain direction…away from the sense of community which MSJ is about.

It’s difficult to discern what really happened with their site, but I did find a Digg.com post from about a month ago asking if the site had been shut down, indicating to me that there were some serious efforts not only to compromise the community, but also the host and the forum software — this is a community of hackers, after all. Shortly after that Digg post, there was a notice on the front of the site letting users know that they were down for maintenance, which was subsequently replaced by the notice on the front page. At this time, no other pages are accessible, at least not to folks like me who aren’t inside that community.

The Public Reaction

Over on Slashdot, the reactions are more or less a “shrug and so what”. One reader, who goes by the name “Anonymous Coward” has it right when he/she states that this is important from a sociological perspective and within the context of social networks. Over on Digg, it’s a non-event. There’s 4 diggs on the current story and over 40 on the month-old story. Barely a blip.

But within the community itself, the impact is as big as a 9.0 earthquake along the San Andreas fault. RavingLunatic.outblogger.com, a one-year member of MSJ, writes this:

But one thing this childish elitist group will never get is the fact they failed miserably in the end. MSJ members have dispersed all over the globe and will continue to Share The Wealth (STW).

Some will create their own forums, some will join others and some like me will continue to STW openly.

(snip)

No matter how hard this elitist group tries to control the Mac underground they will never succeed. Any of the underground Mac elitists are nothing more than hypocritical fools. They forget the whole point of being in the underground is to be an Anarchist and share the wealth , NOT to keep it hidden from the rest. Suppressing the truth only makes the elitist’s look like idiots pretending to be Big Brother (like the governments & police).

There isn’t a lot of public reaction out there. I’m guessing that the nature of the forums kept the majority of the reaction under the radar since the members are engaging in activities that involve the use of pirated software. Still, a couple of points do jump out. First, this community is one of the oldest and most well-respected of its kind. Not the only one, but definitely one of the highest-profile. Second, the group that comprises the community tends to be a group that prizes the concept of “share and share alike”, rejecting the notion that anyone should have unique claims to knowledge without sharing it with the community at large. Even pirates have their own code of ethics, and this community was no exception.

The Lessons I See

These are the lessons I see with regard to this incident. I’m not going to say that this could have or should have been prevented, but it is sad to see a strong community fractured, and I think there are ways that the damage could be (and is being) minimized with preventive measures for the future.

1. Visibly manage volunteers

Or said another way, make sure volunteers understand the scope of their duties and powers and are accountable to others. Put it in writing. Have them agree to it. And then watch to make sure they adhere to it. I am not a fan of volunteer-moderated communities, but in this day of user-generated content and self-regulated communities, it’s inevitable. If the community creators are relying upon the volunteers to tend and care for the community, they need guidelines, constraints and accountability.

2. Stay active and visible in the community.

Having volunteer moderators should not be a reason to stay away from the community you created. Despite the claims of the MSJ ‘owners’ that they were present, they were not visible by their own admission. That left their volunteers with the mistaken impression that they were running the place, which led some to be resentful that they had the authority but not absolute authority. That’s not entirely unreasonable. When landlords are absent and folks are doing a decent job running and growing the community, how could they not be resentful? This is one of the reasons I’m not a huge fan of the volunteer moderator model or the user-regulated model without constraints and supervision. People are people and it only takes one antagonist to completely undo and fracture a group.

3. Don’t let resentments fester

The resentments at MSJ simmered over a two-year period. I don’t know if there was resentment or division among the moderators who were a part of or along the sidelines of the original conflict 2 years ago that went unresolved, or it bubbled up from the membership. To the credit of the ‘upper management’ of the MSJ forum owners, they did open threads to allow people to air their personal grievances, but it was 2 years after the fact, and those threads were then used as a weapon to attempt to garner support behind the dissenters’ cause. The time to deal with it was quietly and with authority 2 years ago.

4. Define community boundaries, communicate them, and enforce the rules

Even pirate communities need structure and boundaries. The structure might be to agree on having no structure, or the structure might be similar to what MSJ had — tiered groups of moderators and managers. Whatever the agreed-upon structure is, it should be reinforced by consistent administration according to a published set of guidelines. The moderators should be accountable via reporting methods and/or administrative cross-checking, and if they cross lines, the forum manager will have recourse to take steps to correct it quickly and with as little public flap over it as possible.

Technorati Tags: mac serial junkie, community, online interaction, user-generated content, Web 2.0

A quartet of four high-profile bloggers and shakers in the social media sphere have come up with a Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. It looks like they’re trying to put a decent start toward acknowledging that users should be the ones who control their personal information, rather than the network.

The foundation of this manifesto is a three-pronged stool around personal information: Ownership, Control, and Freedom to grant access. It goes on to define certain elements that any supporting network will include; namely, the ability to syndicate data and friends lists outside the site, to link from profiles to external indentifiers, and to discover other contacts via those external identifiers.

It sounds great in theory, but how will it work in practice? For example, who will determine the standard for open data formats? What is the benefit to site operators in adopting this? What about laws like HIPAA, which would bar health-related social networks from adopting these standards because of the requirement to protect the identity and personal information of their users. Unfortunately, the government has placed the responsibility for protection of information in the hands of the site operator rather than the user. Would those networks then be penalized or considered to be walled gardens by virtue of their forced compliance with the law?

How would this square with current social networks who have the policy of identifying and reporting sexual predators? (I’m thinking specifically of the first and second prongs here: control and ownership. Under this document, how do site operators address the question of content created which is either illegal or outside of their allowable content boundaries if a user has control over the activity stream of their content? Or on the other side, if users have control over that activity stream, what tools will they have, if any, to prevent theft of that content or limit how it is used?

Still, a great start. I’d like to see more focus on the idea of identity and how that fits into this document and I’d also like to see a reciprocal document which holds users to a minimum standard of conduct and behavior as well that’s actually enforceable.
Technorati Tags: social networks, users bill of rights, social web, profile data, identity

I think this video is an awesome example of a collaborative community effort, with a maps mashup just for good measure.

One PDF of the GMail envelope, zillions of people sending in 10-second submissions of the envelope moving from left to right on the screen, an editor and a map. What a terrific idea. I’ll bet there are other cool ways something like this could be done…got ideas?

Technorati Tags: GMail, video, Google, mashup, collaboration, community