Revision of Minutes from "London Commons Meeting - April 9 2008" on Apr 9 2008 - 5:00pm from April 12, 2008 - 3:18pm

Agenda Items:

Physical Space
Working Group Model
Spam
LC Theme
Not For Profit Co-op
Introducing Voting at meetings
Making meetings more inclusive towards women+others
Online feedback/suggestion box
Comment Rating system
Moderators

Physical Space

The center for social innovation is looking at opening a space in london where cooperatives would be able to rent affordable office/work areas. They would be $325 full time/mo $120 part time/mo.
Just putting the idea out there for future consideration.
Thomas will be going to a conference on June 18th/08 and would like to represent the LC there.

Working Group Model

Since there has been no defined policy there have been some confusion/problems with working groups.
*How are working groups held accountable?
*How are they empowered?

Need to solidify policy.
- Rachel will put together a proposal and post it to policies forum asking for review.

Spam

Aaron P. marked a post from a long time user as spam because he believed it to be an advertisment.
Review of policy re: spam and advertisments. Group agrees that post is advertisment.
User will be informed that he is welcome to post to the ethical business directory.

Also- there seems to be an issue with some people repeatedly getting their posts marked as spam by the spam filter.
There has been a new user role created called 'spam bypass', it...bypasses spam filters.
Users with this problem will be given this role.

LC Theme

Thomas is willing to meet with people to consult re:theme.
Thomas will post a date for a public meeting to discuss theme.

Not For Profit Co-op

Matti is volunteering to bottomline incorporating the LC as a not-for-profit Cooperative.
Deb Prothero offered to help.
*Matti will come to the next meeting with info, at that point a working group will be set up to git r' done.

Introducing Voting at meetings

Defered to next meeting since Thomas had to leave and it was his topic.

Making meetings more inclusive towards women+others

Need for structured meetings to promote inclusivity.
Group agrees to always have a facilitator, no matter how small the turn out.

Online feedback/suggestion box

Needs to be a way for users to submit feedback.
- Feedback re: site
LCDEV team will add a feedback link/button to the top of the page that directs to a forum for user feedback.

- Feedback re: meetings
Suggestion to create email address for feedback, concerns re: workload and transparency.
*Make sure that the meeting is posted well in advance, as well as agenda items, to allow maximum amount of user feedback time. Any feedback can be posted under the event, or in the feedback forums.

2 week and one week reminders for meetings will be posted
Whoever is posting the event for the next meeting, will link to the description of consensus in the post.

Comment Rating system

Original rating system problematic due to language (based on character not behaviour).
Also issues re: transparency (i.e. the ability to see who rated you up/down)
pro= accountability, con =people abusing and retaliation

Concerns brought up about some users not wanting the system at all.
-are there any other self moderation models available?
all others include ratings and delete comments that are rated low.

Pro's of rating system discussed:
-Community Oriented - currently power (to delete, moderate comments/content) is only in the hands of a few. Helps to distribute power to the user base.
-Optional - you can choose to rate comments/content or not. You can select the option to hide low rated comments, or not.
-Better alternative to current system where comments get deleted or accounts restricted.

1. Better explaination of rational behind comment rating system is needed
-Aaron P. will post something

2. Current system needs to be tweaked
- See if we can get low rated comments to show as collapsed (as opposed to not show at all in certain instances)
- Try out anonymous ratings as it may increase usage (remove fear of retaliation, hurt feelings?)
- New descriptions needed.
Changed to scale of 0-4 (instead of 0-5), low rating will indicate that it equates to 'hiding' a comment.
0- Hostile response (Hide)
1-
2- Neutral response
3-
4- Polite response

Moderators

Mike McG is now a moderator.
Lizzi T is also approved to be a moderator - busy currently with school but when has the time Rachel will walk her through the system.
Moderator roles and responsabilities were explained.
Currently role mostly involves spam control.
Hopefully eventually the role of the moderator can be focused entirely on:
-Deleting ads
-Spam
-Technical issues/Help

As opposed to:
-Subjective value judgments
-Civility issues.