Where do we go from here?

[komos.livejournal.com]

A couple of days ago, plumtreeblossom and I began a conversation about the davis_square community and some of the changes that have been happening as the list has grown and various folks have been figuring out ways to make use of the space in new ways. As you may recall, I opened a breakaway community (davissquare) a little over a year ago. Though that space has remained largely dormant, it's never actually been deleted. This would be only tangentially relevant except that over the past few weeks, I've received several requests to reopen davissquare and retool it to be a moderated posting community.

There's a certain irony in this since davissquare was originally founded in response to moderated posting being briefly enforced here, but I can understand and have shared some of the frustrations that have been highlighted. Before considering a radical move, I brought concerns to plumtreeblossom so the mods would at least be in on the loop that there was some behind-the-scenes grumbling. She suggested that I share with the community as a whole so everyone can speak out and offer some input as to the direction we should be headed.

The complaints that I've received have been about a handful of things:

1) Rants that are at best tangentially related to Davis Square and really would be better placed in private journals;

2) Minutiae about restaurant & business openings and closings;

3) Repeated requests for the same services; and

4) Members who take it upon themselves to police the list or who otherwise use the space as a personal sounding board.

Weirdly enough, we've not really had issues with marketing.

From here, it'd be good if we could begin a conversation about how we'd like to use the space and how we'd like to see the space used. I'm hoping that there might be some simple solutions that we can come up with that will help this space remain useful and usable.

Comments

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Was this supposed to be in response to me or the previous comment? I wasn't complaining.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Neither exactly. I meant, when I read the original post, I was wondering what was meant by complaint #4 -- what constituted an example of "members taking it upon themselves to police the community." (And why it was a problem.)

I could think of things someone might call "members policing the community," but I could only think of people who were doing it in a helpful way, not a problematic way.

[ron_newman]

I certainly don't think "please add a Subject" constitutes policing the community, especially since the original poster had left it out by mistake and not on purpose.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree completely.

But what can you expect when a person who complains that a post about Diesel opening a location in Union Square isn't Davis Square specific, but posts a question about a parking ticket, also not Davis Square specific, which largely could have been answered if they'd bothered to go read the instructions on the citation, but they just didn't feel like getting up.