A question about OS listserv

[Artur Silva]

Very interesting questions, Peggy (and Juanita).

I have been thinking about questions similar to those ones after some time. Being part or having been part of many mailing lists, Web forums and other e-tools (not to speak about the old BBS's); being the moderator of some, very active in one or two, and very little to nothing in some others, but also as I have prepared and currently teach a course on "Moderating virtual forums", I began to try to understand, some years ago, why some of them (and not only this one - even if this one is special) flourish, but others die or have something like one post per month...

Two years ago, when I made the initial preparation of the referred course, I made a large comparison of many mailing lists (and other forums), one of them being the OSLIST, and arrived to some conclusions. I agree with most of what has already been answered, but I will add my answers to some of the questions, as those answers have been originated with a different purpose and may eventually be useful  to the owners of the World Cafe list.  Here we go:

Peggy Holman <peggy at opencirclecompany.com> wrote:
What has enabled the Open Space listserv to flourish?

1.  Technical Questions

1.1. The OSLIST is a mailing list. This may seem obvious, but I have come to the conclusion that, to create a community, a mailing list is better than other tools, like Web forums, wikis, blogs, etc, as the messages come to one's mailbox, one per one or in groups, and can then be read or not, but one is not obliged to access some site to read and contribute.

1.2 The OSLIST is based on the Listserv (and not on some others products that support mailing lists, like Majordomo, Mailman, etc). There are some useful facilities that LISTSERV and Majordomo have that are missing in Mailman and others.

1.3. The specific configuration used allows for:

- immediate access after subscription;
- non moderated immediate distribution of messages from members;
- option between receiving messages one per one or in a daily Digest (essential feature when one is full of work or "testing" a list; not so useful - as Lisa mentioned - when people repeat in full the message they are answering to...);
- access to the Archives of all previous messages;
- system that works almost all the time (availability higher that 99% of the time, I would say)

2. Moderation Style

The self-organization way of working in the OSLIST that has been mentioned, with no evident moderator/facilitator is the contrary to some other lists where there is an evident moderator and/or facilitators that are intervening all the time and "facilitate too much", often "closing" the dialogs, or directing them, having a consequence that all diversity is suppressed. Another consequence is that in the OSLIST I never  noticed any attempt to force people that don't intervene to participate. What in other lists are called "lurkers" here are "respected non active participants".

The presence of Harrison is also very important, as many have mentioned - but even more important is the help he provides to all (specially to newcomers) and the caution he uses in  never speaking as the "owner" of the truth or the one that must have the "last word".

The presence of many "old timers" that allow for what can be called  "distributed facilitation" (self-organized, of course) is also a must. There is not "facilitation" - but there is informal "guidance".

Presencial meetings

I think the quality of the dialogs in the OSLIST are only possible because there are annual OSonOS. It is not important that every person goes often, but this assures that the majority of participants are personally known by at least some others, which almost suppresses flames (as Chris referred).

Community of Practitioners (CoP's)

Participants of the OSLIST are real practitioners of OST - many regularly facilitate OST meetings, others have facilitated some. This allows the conversations to be "focused" mainly in "practical subjects", even in the theory, and the concept of OS in general (not only OST) are also welcomed. This is different from a "communities of interest" (for instance, people interested in cinema but that don't work in the cinema business) that are much less focused and quickly lose impetus. And it is also different from a group that" would like to be", but is not currently (yet) a CoP - an frequently will never be, just because they call themselves something they are not.

The fact that people that only attended a training or only red the book, or even didn't read it but heard about OST, are very well accepted must be understood as "legitimate peripheral participation", allowing for "situated learning" of the apprentices - a normal feature of CoP's.

OST Fundamentals

There are lists on subjects different from OST that work very well (and in some aspects even better - see last question), but the fact that in this list the majority of participants have OST experience helps to follow the "OST fundamentals", including the law (not only by deleting messages, but by not reading at all some threads  - hence joining some breakout sessions, but not others), easy acceptance of butterflies and bees, etc. On the contrary, I don't think that I formerly need the "OST principles" to explain anything in the OSLIST that doesn´t happen in other lists.

Interestingly I think that this is not so much an "aplication" to this list of those OS fundamentals, but the fact that mailing list (and generally the internet) happen to share some of those fundamentals..


Other points

There were other points in my comparison but I think that the majority of them have already been referred by others.


What wishes do you have for the list's future?

More of the same, of course. But not only. I think the list has some small problems where I would like to see improvements.

a) The vast majority of the participants still come from the USA, which implies the dominance of a culture that is alien to others, including the European. Matters and opinions that are "obvious" to an American, are used directly or indirectly, even if they are strange to some others. The frequent use of religious remarks is an example, but there are others.

b) this list has a limitation that I think also happens in many other CoP's - dialog is great, "normal science" (OST "science") is improved, but I wouldn't expect "profound changes" or "paradigm revolutions" to happen easily, nor remotely related subjects to be addressed often. And discussion  (even if respectful) is often suppressed, for what, in my Latin European way of thinking, seems an excessive (and Aemrican) preoccupation of being "polite". [This means that, with almost no other Latin Europeans in the list, I often have the sensation that I am the only impolite member of the list - sorry for that].

This two points are related. In (a): even if we have many nationalities present, the fact that it is difficult for foreigners to write in English and costs more time, and the fact that they are few implies that the list is "American oriented" (that is not a fault of the American members of the list that always make a noticeable effort to accept other cultures, but almost a demographic matter). In (b), there is the possibility that we became isolated from other tendencies (either theoretical or practical) that could be interesting to the evolvement of OST. I am afraid that the Open Cafe community may suffer from the same problem - if not why not create only one list for both, clearly similar, approaches?

My two Euro-cents, from the far West of Europe

Artur

PS: and this one is NOT the other mail I have pre-annouced...











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