E-mail Full of Questions I wrote to MEG.

[Tom Wall]

Hey all,

Here's the MEG response. It's very informative and helpful. Hope it 
answers some of the questions you (like me) may have had about HPfGU 
list operation.

-Tom

--------

Hi, Tom,

I have just seen your post on the FAQ list.  My sincere apologies on 
behalf of MEG for not getting back to you sooner.

The leter below was in fact drafted by Judy and Amy back in early 
July, 
but we then managed never to send it.  Here it is, I hope better late 
than never.

I think in the circumstances you should feel free to share it with 
the 
other members of the FAQ list, if you so wish.

David

Thanks for your post!  An Active Citizen!  I've been a
part of list admin for two years and no one's asked
most of these questions.  In fact, since we've been
talking about how to make list administration more
transparent, we'd really love to post your questions
and our answers as a file to the main list, if that's
okay with you.  Let us know.

The answers were written by a few of us and come from
HPfGU admin as a whole.  I am but a conduit.

Many of the questions you raise are on our minds as
well.  We beg your patience as we struggle to find the
best answers.  We have discussed many changes of late,
and each of them takes a lot of time, because the
administrative team *is* democratically run and we
have a lot of discussion and then a vote on each of
these matters.  We're getting there, slowly.



*********

>>>>>>>>>First, what do you do as Moderators?
Without knowing
anything specific in terms of `what Mods are
*required* to do,' yet having an idea how the list is
run in terms of what appears to go on here, I'd say
that you guys do the following stuff: you send out the
digests and special notice e-mails; you field
questions from HPfGU patrons like myself; you keep the
various webpages up-to-date; you monitor all messages
from members who are still on 'Moderated' status; you
monitor all other messages and delete them if they're
in violation of any Yahoo! term of service or legal
situation; you select the poll topics and run the
contests; you (meaning Pip, at the moment) are busy
with the new FAQ; you repost spoiler warnings and
legal policies to the group; you have the power to
shut down and reactivate the list; <<<<<<<<<<<

Most of the things you listed above are things that we
do, with a few
exceptions. The digests are automatically compiled by
Yahoo, and I
think anyone can set up a poll. There are a number of
additional tasks
that you missed, like deciding who gets to come off of
moderated
status. (Getting off moderated status is mostly a
straightforward
matter of having had several days of posts that met
all of the rules,
but we have a lot of members to keep track of.) Once
someone is ready
to come off of moderated status, their status has to
be changed in
Yahoo and they get an email from us telling them they
are now
unmoderated. Also, some of the List Admin has been
spending time
lately removing "spoilers" from the list, such as
posts that say right
in their title the name of the character who dies! We
also spend a lot
of time sending each new member a PWE ("personal
welcoming email"),
although we have had to skip a few days of this
lately, since things
have been so overwhelming. Approving the pending
messages is the
biggest task right now.  

We have a Help Desk for
people with disabilities or who speak English as a
second language; this can be quite labor-intensive, as
a few people request to have all of their posts
screened and proofread.  We also get requests to unsub
someone, delete a post they wish they hadn't sent, or
change their message delivery system--all things
people can do themselves, but if they are new to
YahooGroups they often don't know this and write to
-owner asking us to please help them with the deluge
of e-mails overflowing their inbox.

Other picky administrative tasks that take up a lot
of time:  we have an address that gets sent every
digest so that if a list member misses a digest, we
can forward it; this address needs to be cleaned out
periodically.  A couple of tech-savvy people take care
of the Archives and various and sundry technical
issues that arise.  A couple of law-savvy people
answer copyright-violation questions (these arise
quite often, though we all know the basics such as "no
quoting articles in full").  Every approved post is
entered in a database.  Each change in member status,
e.g. moving off moderated status, requires a bit of
"paperwork" as we update our database.  We also change
everyone who opts for webview to "Special Notices,"
which involves trawling through the new members
changing each one individually.

There are frequent matters that need discussion and
dealing-with, e.g. "incipient flame war on -Movie
between pro- and anti-Oldman forces!"  Many we address
individually, but in other cases we want to get each
other's input on how best to respond, so a flurry of
e-mails follows.  Sometimes we rewrite the
Used-to-Be-the-Humungous-Bigfile (just done) or the
home page (in progress), and those changes involve a
lot of discussion, as you can imagine if you picture
30 language-loving nitpickers sitting around a table.
And interesting policy questions pop up all the time
so that we're often discussing some new question or
other.

As you've noticed, most of the sister lists are also
run by various
HpfGU List Admin people. The regional lists are mostly
run by other
people. Anyone can start a regional list, if one is
not already
available for their area.

Another big task lately, in which some (but not all)
of the HPfGU List
Admin has been involved, is planning the Harry Potter
convention,
Nimbus 2003. We have also been spending a lot of time
lately trying
to think about the best way to run HPfGU and how to
seek member input.
More about that below.


>>>>>So, when someone says that you're all 'swamped'
with
work right now, does that mean that you're all extra
busy reading through the Moderated messages because
there has been such an influx due to OoP, and/or that
there are other pressing things that are keeping you
very occupied at the moment? <<<<<

Mostly the influx from OoP -- moderated messages,
sending PWEs,
demodding new members and answering questions,
although a few of us
are busy gettingr eady for Nimbus. Also, we've been
doing a lot of
discussion about the best way to run the list,
although this has
mostly been put on hold since OoP came out.

>>>>Now, secondly, I'm also wondering how it is that
you
all came to be Moderators, Elves, and Geists....<<<<

Originally, HPfGU was small, and the moderators were
either the people
who started the list, or other people they asked to
join them. Then,
the Mods asked for helpers -- the "List Elves" --
because the pending
messages and PWEs were a lot of work, and several
list members volunteered and were accepted.
Essentially, the people who
were in List Admin choose the new List Admin people.

In the early days, this seemed reasonable because it
was easy, and
anyone who didn't like the rules we used, or who
wanted to moderate a Harry Potter group and wasn't invited to help 
moderate ours, could just start their own Yahoo group. This is still 
true,
of course, but especially now that HPfGU has grown so
big, we're aware that we should switch to something more
democratic. We are seriously thinking of instituting some sort of
terms limits --
possibly quite short, like 6 months or less -- when
the OoP rush slows down. We are also thinking of dividing up the 
workload
more, with different committees for different tasks, to give more
people a chance to be involved.

>>>>Is the Mod team run like the Ministry of Magic, at the
decree of an official or group that isn't ostensibly
elected? Do you elect officials *within* the group,
i.e. is there anything comparable to a Moderator
`president' or `chair,' as in, who has access to the
owner-account `albusthewise?' Does seniority count?
Does activity on the list have anything to do with
becoming a Mod? For instance, there are several of you
from whom I am hard-pressed to remember having seen a
post on-list... others post regularly. So I am tempted
to ask how fair it is that some of the Moderators for
the list are less-involved than some regular
members?....
Surely the level of activity rates somehow in
determining eligibility for `Moderator' rank? Or does
it? <<<<

Up until a few months ago, there were eight or so
"full" Moderators
who had more power than the Geists and List Elves. We
changed that,
and now all the List Admins have equal power. We have
had a person
(or small group of people) serve as facillitator for
List Admin
discussions during the past couple of months; that
position was
elected, and rotated between people after a brief term
of office.

As for how people got chosen in the first place,
basically, people who
posted well, posted a lot, didn't get into
arguments or write
flames, and demonstrated diplomacy got invitations
to join the List Admin, typically as Elves. A
few people were asked to join List Admin because they
were heavily
involved in related parts of Harry Potter fandom, such
as the Harry
Potter Lexicon. Often, though, people's posting rate
would drop off
as soon as they joined List Admin, because List Admin
took up all of
their online time! However, virtually everyone on List
Admin was a
heavy poster at one time.  One reason we are
reorganizing how we do list admin is that the task has
been so time-consuming that it has reduced heavy
posters to non-posters.

It's been a long time since we asked anyone to join
List Admin, which
is why some of the currently active posters haven't
been asked to
join. We want to get a better system in place before
we recruit new
List Administrators, but we will probably do that
pretty soon, after
the current rush has slowed. (Maybe in a month or
two.)  So another topic of recent discussion is the
fairest and best way for new people to come
aboard--self-nomination and then open elections by
poll on the main list?  self-nomination and then
selection by the current admin?  etc.

>>>>What kind of influence do HPfGU Mods exert over
the
sister Yahoo! groups? Is there some kind of core,
ubiquitous group of Mods throughout, or is authority
restricted to the main, book-related list? I've
noticed that the Mods for OT Chatter and Movie lists
aren't identical to the Mod-group for the main list,
and yet there is a noticeable overlap between them
all. <<<<<

For the most part, people in HPfGU List Admin have
volunteered to run
the sister lists. The regional lists are somewhat
separate, and are
run by whomever volunteered first. There are a lot of
former HPfGU
list adminstrators who are still listed as mods on the
sister lists,
although they generally aren't actually running those
lists.

Everyone in List Administration for HPfGU has equal
authority on -OTC, -Announcements, and -Movie as well.
The reason we don't all appear on the Moderators
lists for all of them is that we informally divide up
duties ; e.g. some of us never pop into -Movie unless
alerted of a problem, so we never bothered to get
ourselves Moderator powers there.)


>>>>>What infraction could result in an ouster from
the
HPfGU group? What kind of infraction could result in
an ouster from the Moderator group? Who makes those
kinds of decisions? Can they be appealed? If so, to
whom can one appeal?<<<<

If someone is really not following the rules, they get
put on
moderated status permanently, rather than ousted.
Posts
they make that conform to the rules still go on the
list, and we revisit them once in a while "poster Q
has really not caused any trouble since that flareup
in late '02--shall we deMod?"). We do ban people who
send us spam ("Enlarge your penis today!!"), but I
assume that isn't what you meant.

We have not had written policies about what the rules
are for staying in the administration, and we are in
the process of doing so, in the larger context of
articulating how we'll deal with conflict within the
administrative group.  We're taking up the question of
whether to have some kind of Wizengamot, and lookee
here, JKR has given us a word for it.

>>>>>>>For instance . . . where is the distinction
between [a Moderator who is a member] posting her
personal opinion, and that Moderator
posting on behalf of the team?<<<<<<

In regards to posting opinions about HP, we want
Moderators to feel free to participate in the HP
discussion that brought us all here and not be treated
any differently than other list members in those
discussions.  I.e., "Lupin is Ever So Evil" does not
have extra weight because it is advocated by a
Moderator, Pippin; that's just her own view of canon.
We keep administrative messages separate from our
personal messages to the list in order to keep that
distinction clear, and everyone seems fine with it.

In regards to disciplinary matters, a moderator may
occasionally write offlist to someone in his capacity
as list member and say "I'm not speaking as a member
of list admin here--I thought that was rude" and sign
it "David" rather than "Elf David, for List Admin."
However, we try to be aware that no matter how many
qualifiers may hedge such a comment, and however
unofficial the capacity in which the author is
writing, it is nevertheless coming from a member of
list admin and reeks of a big stick.

>>>>> What about when
Elkins-the-member steps out of line, or gets overly
rude, or violates some HPfGU policy? Are Mods held to
a higher standard than regular members, or can Mods
basically do whatever they want? In my example, would
Elkins be sent a Howler?<<<<<<<<

Ah, tricky, that.  Mods *should* be held to a higher
standard if anything.  One advantage of hand-picking
the administrative team is that they seldom break the
rules.  It does happen, though, and we tend to take
each other quietly aside and point this out.  We try
to do the same with all list members, for that matter,
reserving Howlers for egregious offenses--we're trying
to bring about a culture change in this regard,
believing we were too free with Howlers in the past.
We're aware that *any* admonishment from list admin,
however gently worded, can be painful and
embarrassing, and we want to make them as helpful and
nurturing as possible.

>>>>>Finally, as a 'normal' member of HPfGU, what
options
do I have to enact change if I desired? I ask this
because the no-longer-so-hb-file says: "Do not flame,
send obscenities or spam, engage in other
discourteous, disrespectful or illegal behavior or
**argue about list policy onlist** (send suggestions
to HPforGrownups-owner at yahoogroups.com instead)."

In other words, there seems to be *no* public forum
for a discussion of list policy.<<<<<

Yeah.  The reason for having no on-list list policy
arguments is that we've all seen lists where the same
old policy questions get rehashed over and over
(sometimes irresolvably; e.g., there are always a few
people who think anti-flaming rules are a violation of
their civil liberties and want to revisit the question
of whether we should have any rules at all) and good
people leave because they were there to discuss HP or
Buffy or Medieval Agrarian History, not
administration.  We'd like to continue to keep policy
discussions separate.

We are very open to suggestions and have had many
interesting conversations with listies who write to
-owner with this or that idea, and have frequently
changed policies due to popular demand.  All of that
said, we aren't content with the way it's been, and in
fact have discussed setting up an open-membership list
just for policy discussion.  It seems likely that
there will always be a need for a small group that has
private discussions, unless list members are willing
to submit to having all disciplinary matters be
public.  We try to balance transparency with a respect
for people's privacy and dignity; most members who are
criticized for rudeness don't want it discussed on an
open list and are grateful that we deal with it
quietly.

> In *other* other words, you guys exclusively control
list policy, and
> when you discuss both it and suggested changes
(unless
> you feel inclined to ask for anyone's opinion via
> poll) your discussions are private and you are
> unaccountable to the rest of us

Yep, basically.  The list is *not* run democratically;
it's run by an oligarchy that makes its policy
decisions by vote.  It is, after all, a private
association, not a town; no one has to be here, no one
has a constitutional right to belong here (as long as
our rules aren't based on arbitrary dividers like "no
Italians allowed"), and ultimately, if one doesn't
like the rules in a private association, the solution
is to create a different private association with more
agreeable rules.  The fact is that most people don't
want to be involved in making policy at all; they join
the list because they like the way it's run, and are
more than happy to let someone else run it.

HOWEVER, we're moving the list toward a more
democratic model.  And we do want to be
accountable--that's why we give reasons for our
decisions, invite discussion and suggestions, and are
exploring ways to make policy discussions broader and
more transparent.

Best wishes

Amy and Judy