Subject: [GRC] Free speech, destructive talk, unsubscriptions, and a democratic solution?

(This followed a few high-profile unsubscriptions over posts the unsubscribers deemed sexist. Complete with unfinished sentence typo!)

Dear all,

(The philosophical issue, below the technical, does relate to radio.)

This note suggests a potential, partial answer to inclusiveness without censorship: web software that would let people subscribe to unmoderated and
(pseudo-)democratically moderated lists. The main incentive is so direct communication can scale into the millions, but I think it could also help situations like this. Anyone can post to the unmoderated list (which should also be posted to a web site), and that person or anyone else could petition for a post to go to the whole list-- and a random drawing of people on the list would take on the short task of deciding if that particular message is important for the whole list. In this way there can be a list and public archive, quite uncensored, which anyone can go into as interested. At the same time the largest list (certainly larger than unmoderated lists can be) would be limited to the posts considered more important to the community.

The issue, as some have made clear, isn't free speech. It's the use of a valuable shared resource - this list - for messages that harm GRCs mission.

Even a listserve of an organization dedicated to the advancement of free speech, solely, is not the place for actually exercising free speech for the sake of free speech, when it is off-topic and arguably reinforces a sub-group's privileged position.

But how do we decide what goes on the list? How do we decide what goes on the air?

In the present arrangement, asking any one person to censor won't work. The decisions are bound to violate some sense of fairness and equality at some point, which is even more destructive to community communication than offensive posts.

People Who Give a Damn is working on the above-proposed technical solution to allow democratically moderated lists (encouragement, cash, programmers welcome) but no technological fix will do away with the need to talk about

What messages are carried by community resources, who decides, and how? And how could we make choices better (and would it result in better choices)?

Thoughts on this broader topic, as well as opinions on the desirability/undesirability, pitfalls, or promise of democratically moderated lists (which will be tested out for the joint Grassroots Use of Technology and Grassroots Radio Coalition conference in June) would be greatly appreciated.

- ben

Agaric Design Collective
Open Source Web Development
http://AgaricDesign.com/ [1]

People Who Give a Damn
building the infrastructure of a network for everyone
http://pwgd.org/ [2]