Governance Frictions

This post is also available on my free blog (Marcia's Post Its)

The other day I was invited to participate in a workshop with other people in the Fediverse. I was invited by Sohyean H to participate, to which I am grateful to her. I won't name the other participants but I will say they were all kind and open and came with good ideas.

The discussion has several parts (I'm paraphrasing their titles):

• community decision
• self governance
• concrete specific decisions about governing community
• envisioning responses to frictions
• tools that support workflow

I like all of the discussions we had during each section. In the 'concrete specific decisions" section, however, I offered "duty of care" as an idea. I'll try to expand.

After many years on fedi, and having contributed to several instances in terms of moderation, 'duty of care' has been something that as a concept as been in my opinion, an oversight. There have been some moments in the last few years where people have been in vulnerable positions or in need of community, but due to their actions, they have been removed or asked to leave their instances. There have been moments where the mental health responsibility of a user has been placed onto the shoulders of moderators. I think that a responsibility has serious as someone's mental well being, should not be the responsibility of instance moderators, as they are often not medical professionals and thus can not ethically shoulder that kind of responsibility. In my opinion, 'duty of care' as a concept should be part of the pillars or core of communities; people should state that when they create servers, so that other users can also know what to explect from their moderators. I think that we need to be a bit more realistic about what we can do for others, and where our own limitations are.

Both moderators and instance members need to have a clear understanding of where everyone stands.

I'm sure there are plenty of instances that have taken this to heart and it is a part of what they do. This workshop just really prompted to consider this anew seeing as some of the heaviest and most important moderation choices I've had to make over the years were more in this vein of care and responsibility to myself and other users. I just wanted to point to a new way of considering these kinds of choices and I guess how we categorize them.

I want to thank Sohyeun once again for inviting me, and perhaps more will develop from the conversation in my own mind.