Paolo Bacigalupi’s description of “news that you can trust” in a dictatorship parallels what’s happening with news in social media: who do you trust?

With a new mix of Kulaap’s music from DJ Dao streaming over my stereo, I sit down at my little kitchen table, pour my coffee from its press pot, and open my tablet.

The tablet is wondrous creation. In Laos, the paper was still a paper, physical, static, and empty of anything except the official news. Real news in our New Divine Kingdom did not come from newspapers,or from television, or from handsets or ear buds. It did not come from the net or feeds unless you trusted your neighbor or look over your shoulder at an Internet cafe and if you knew that there were no secret police sitting beside you, or an owner who would be able to identify you when they came around asking about the person who used that workstation over to communicate with the outside world.

Real news came from whispered rumor, rated according to the trust you accorded the whisperer. Were they family? Did they have long history with you?

The Gambler
© Paolo Bacigalupi 2008
In Fast Forward 2 / edited by Lou Anders.

This flurry of activity seems to show that traditional news media begin to feel that the anonymous comments that most of them allow on their Web site are not enough for readers involvement, a sentiment well summed up by Jay Rosen:

@mathewi I agree about persistent identity. I agree that hosts getting involved is key. And I think that anonymity has become a big problem.

This is good news.

The discussion is so wide that I think it can be helpful to frame the topic a little more. Online communities have debated and experienced anonymity long before news media landed on the Web, so we have a vast pool of knowledge to tap from.

As Steve Buttry points out, anonymity and identity are not an either/or question. At Worth1000, for example, the range of ages among members goes from 12 to 80, so anonymity is mandatory, but with an unique and persistent identity. A second identity is a banning offense.

Whereas at MetaFilter, only registered members can post but the basic rule is simply “stable identity”: the degree of openness is chosen by each member. As examples from the front page, we can see that stringbean is anonymous; KokuRyu is half-anonymous (he doesn’t reveal his real name but links to his website); and brundlefly, without giving his name, offers links to his other pages on delicious, flickr, facebook, myspace, twitter, etc. (aggregated identity is the best kind). Furthermore, it is allowed to have two identities on condition that they never interact. Also anonymity can be granted on request to ask a question, but only on a case by case basis.

The most significant lessons from MetaFilter and other communities are that

• there can be several degrees of identity, either decided by the site or by the member,
• and these different degrees can vary from one context to another, on the same site.

What is clear here, and what must be stated from the start, is that this discussion is about reader participation in online news media. The rules could be (and are) different in other kinds of communities.

So the first helpful question is “What?” What do we want from our readers?
Jeff Jarvis has swiftly pointed a major hurdle:

we *allow* people to comment on *our* work when it is *done.* insulting

People familiar with his blog and his book What Would Google Do? know exactly what he means: that readers should be involved in the whole news process, from choosing the topic to participating in research to commenting, to adding information and following up.

We are here and now in the river of news, not in a “journalists-write/readers-comment” universe anymore.

So, I think that “What we want from readers” has a huge role in helping us decide what we do with anonymity and identity. And from Mathew’s and Steve’s posts, we can see that we might want different things from different people in different contexts: sources, topics, news, questions, answers, opinions, votes, pictures, etc.

Which leads us the second question: Why? Why would we want readers to be anonymous?

If this is about “protecting absolutely the anonymity of a source”, I am not sure that we are able to guarantee it. But every news media should provide a tutorial on how to use anonymizers.

There is also the question of access: anonymity allows readers to post without having to go through the hassle of registration. I think that this is what Mathew Ingram means when he writes in his post:

I believe that one of the principles of running a media site is that you should open up interaction to as many people as possible.

I see two points here. The first is that I agree with Mathew that involvement should be progressive. If the objective is participation, we have to offer a scale of participation from the most simple involvement (anonymous voting as in The Huffington Post, for example), to full identity with access to all past contributions (as for Mathew Haughey in MetaFilter, for example).

The second point is that I think that “opening up” is not the same as “publishing”. There is already a lot of noise in communities with registered members and we all know that anonymity breeds noise. Sure, there is the slashdot system, which is certainly one of the marvels of the Web: long time members rate comments from 1 to 5 and readers can choose what level they want to read from 1 (all) to 5 (top of the crop).

But as much as I love the slashdot system for rating comments, I believe that a news media on the Web is not in the same business as slashdot. Here, we are entering the economic territory that is the topic of my work in mediamachina but, briefly: before asking “Why should we have anonymous contributors?”, we have to answer “Why do we want contributors at all?”. There are probably a lot of answers to that one. Clay Shirky would probably say: “Because they are there“. In The People Formerly Know as the Audience, Jay Rosen quotes Jeff Jarvis:

“Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose.”

If you read Steve Buttry and Jeff Jarvis, you know that the only way for news media to survive and prosper on the Web is through the participation of our communities.

So we have a huge incentive to involve people in our processes: survival. We want to welcome our readers, we want to encourage participation, we want to reward contributions, we want to build trust. In a nutshell: because trust is the royal road to commerce.

It means that we are in it for the long haul. I am not so sure that we should be interested in drive-by anonymous shooting. Sure, we need to help our readers and our journalists to learn how to collaborate. So anonymity can be granted at an entry level. But the long term objective of a vibrant community is to have trusted members with a persistent identity. This is probably not for all our present readers. We know the standard numbers in community participation: only 10% of our readers will participate and only 1% will become regular collaborators. Anonymous people are not part of these 10%.

So, finally, comes “Who?” Who can be anonymous?

- Sources who need to be protected: this is a tough one.
- Visitors at an entry level: in that case, anonymity must be seen as a first step and further steps should be provided, with incentives.
- People who prefer to have a persistent identity with an alias. The progressive solution of MetaFilter is a good blueprint.
- Anonymity can be granted in special cases one post at a time.

BUT, but, but, before I (at last) end this post, I have absolutely, imperatively to say that moderators should not be anonymous. Hm. Maybe I didn’t express myself clearly enough: some readers can be anonymous sometimes but

MODERATORS SHOULD NEVER BE ANONYMOUS!

I am surprised when I visit the greatest news media in the world (at least in New-York, Montreal, London, Paris) and not only moderators are anonymous but some of these media outsource moderation! I know: it goes hand in hand with the idea that moderation is akin to police duty.

It isn’t. Moderators and admins are the most important members of a community. But they are “Members”. Moderators are people. Community is about people. Moderation is about being part of a community, about exchanging with other members, about helping, about explaining, about conversation. And, yes, occasionally about banning. Anonymous police forces have no place in a community. Please listen to cortex.

Steve Buttry has just be named last month Editor of the year by Editor and Publisher.

The simple text of the first 4 job descriptions illustrates perfectly the skills needed in a new newsmedia:

Senior Community Host:

Duties will include:

leading community engagement in coverage of breaking news;

recruiting and managing relations with community bloggers;

moderating community conversation in live chats, discussion forums and site comments;

handling community-submitted content;

managing special community-engagement projects, such as events and contests;

coaching and mentoring other community managers.

We’re looking for an experienced digital journalist with involvement in community engagement avenues such as blogging, crowdsourcing and social media.

[[I applaud here the use of  "community host", instead of "manager" or even "editor".  Buttry's choice of words shows his understanding of the issues and his innovative strategy. "Host" sends the clear message that community is first about welcoming and hospitality.]]

Community host:

You will be a part of a team of community managers who will undertake a variety of duties, including:

recruiting and managing relations with community bloggers;

moderating community conversation in live chats, discussion forum and site comments;

handling community-submitted content;

managing special community-engagement projects, such as events and contests.

Journalism experience helpful but not required. Applicant must be involved in digital engagement avenues such as blogging and social media. Work may include evening, weekend and holiday duties.

Social media producer:

We want someone to lead our efforts to engage with the community through social media. While you will take the initiative in developing the duties of this position, some of them will be:

managing social media outlets, such as Twitter feed(s), Facebook fan page(s), YouTube and Flickr channels;

monitoring and responding to social media references to our work;

aggregating social media content for linking to or posting on our site;

promoting our content and community-engagement opportunities using social media; using Twitter and other social media to crowdsource breaking news stories, supplementing staff coverage;

planning tweetups and other social-media-oriented community events.

We’re looking for an experienced digital journalist who uses social media extensively for personal and professional purposes.

Mobile producer:

We want someone to lead our efforts to engage with our community through mobile devices. While you will take the initiative in developing the duties of this position, some of them will be:

planning and executing mobile engagement projects;

managing and producing mobile-focused content;

working with tech staff to ensure quality of mobile site;

working with social media producer to plan and execute strategy for mobile-focused social media;

working with tech staff on mobile apps.

We’re looking for an experienced digital journalist who’s an avid user of mobile devices and has ideas for engaging the mobile audience.

This is very exciting. I’ll bet he has already received 1000 applications.

Paul Ford, Web Editor of Harper’s Magazine, tells first in a conversation with journalist Choire published in Awl:

What I wish I could do is take our tens of thousands of nice registered subscribers and offer them a Metafilter-style community – something where they could create the content and talk and interact (with editors) and then we could promote the most interesting stuff to the home page.

Of course this quote is found by a member of MetaFilter and kittyprecious posts it on the site. There, moderator Jessamyn West remarks:

It’s just a pipe dream at some level. But people who run magazines would kill for the sort of community we have here. And most people that run community blogs would kill for the sort of income that magazines [still] make, relative to what most blogs make. So we sort of meet in the middle and talk about it. And it’s an interesting conversation.

Happily, it doesn’t stop there because Paul Ford is also ftrain, a member of MetaFilter, and he adds these precisions:

My point was that MetaFilter is one of the best communities on the web and that if comments are about community, and not just about traffic, then as a nat’l magazine Harper’s would be well-served to emulate the blue [MetaFilter], and maybe the green [Ask MetaFilter] and the gray too [MetaTalk].

Is this true? I don’t know. I doubt I have time to build it this year.

The thing that always strikes me about MetaFilter is that it’s a real editorial success. I’ve now spent nearly a decade (judging from the sign-up date of my first sock puppet, in the 300s) watching editorial norms emerge here. It’s not the same kind of editing that is done at a magazine — sometimes, sure, posts are killed or edited or helped along, but the goal is not necessarily to make every post better but rather to make the community better. It’s sort of like editing a river. Have you ever tried to edit a river? It’s hard, and the moderators here are genius. They have an art and a craft and a discipline. They keep the community working, and that attracts the right kind of people. It’s an amazing loop. It has much to teach me.

In the future I wonder if there isn’t a way for the different kinds of editing to combine. Could that be good for the web AND for magazines/radio/etc.? Interesting, useful communities where many people share a common sensibility, connected to — but not utterly dependent upon — more traditional media (like articles, or stories, and so forth).

Now, if you are in charge of a magazine and you are thinking that this is a good idea, you may wonder how something as MetaFilter has been built.

This is your lucky day because Matthew Haughey, MetaFilter founder, has just been interviewed on this topic by journalist Suemedha Sood.

I can’t recommand enough this interview to anybody interested in creating a community. A few quotes:

What about readership?
Matt: It’s continued to grow and grow — about 10 percent every few months, doubling every year. My Google analytics say there are about 17 or 18 million pages viewed by 7 million people around the world each month.

(Besides its founder, MetaFilter employs one full time programmer, two full time moderators and a part time moderator.)

What makes Metafilter a success?
Matt: I’d like to think it’s intense moderation and customer service.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Video: Ouvert 5 Catherine Genest 2009

used with permission of the artist

I was planning to create a new site for a work in progress called “media machina” and I used this opportunity to move all my blogs under one domain, boutotcom.com, and one platform WordPress MU, and here we are at last.

It’s time to thank Robin Millette from Waglo Labs who has originally created this blog on Drupal and has taken care of it for years, and then did the hard work to move the content to WordPress; unfortunately, the comments have not followed, but I keep the original archives and we plan to find a way to bring them back;

also Patrick Tanguay from taste of blue who installed the new WordPress MU at iWeb, wisely helped me to chose  the theme Shantia by Nofie Iman and created the original design before leaving for Berlin;

and finally Francis Laplante from iXmédia who did the integration of the boutot.com domain, showed me the ropes and did the final set-up.

Thank you all for your patience that used up all my attempts at procrastination.

warrenellis I appear to gain more followers when I don’t actually post anything. I consider this to be a valuable lesson about the internet, and life. 7 minutes ago from web

hrheingold 74% of the earth’s population are social media strategists 17 minutes ago from web

mpesce Having massive brainwave. Had no idea it was coming on, then WHAM, there it is. Beautiful, terrifying, and will not be ignored. 7 minutes ago from web

How we have become filters:

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move. Filter-then-publish, whatever its advantages, rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter.

Communities are good and feel good:

Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate, or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another.

Journalism crisis:

Philosophers sometimes make a distinction between a difference in degree (more of the same) and a difference in kind (something new). What we are witnessing today is a difference in sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind.

People are important to people:

We gather together because we like to, and because it is useful. (…) cities don’t exist just because people have had to be nearby to communicate; cities exist because people like to be near other people, and it is this fact, rather than the mere trading of information, that creates social capital.

Giving a platform and doing nothing:

Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another.

Acting on a troll in Wikipedia (same process as with graffiti) :

… he or she had spent the better part of an hour lovingly crafting those three fake entries. I deleted all three in about a minute and a half; the prankster never returned, presumably disappointed by the speed with which fake entries could be undone.

Moderating communities 101:

… a basic truth of social systems: no effort at creating group value can be successful without some form of governance.

The individual is mightier than the marketing plan:

The transistor and the birth control pill (…) were pulled into society one person at a time, and they mattered more than giant inventions pushed along by massive and sustained effort. They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom. This is what is happening again today.

The first problem in intelligence augmentation: how do you make a human being smarter? The answer: pair humans up with other humans.

Given that we try to make decisions about our lives based on the best available information, the better that information is, the better our decisions will be. (…) every time we use (—-*) to make a decision, we are improving our decision making ability. We are improving our own lives.

Douglas Engelbart’s original vision of intelligence augmentation holds true: it is possible for us to pool our intellectual resources, and increase our problem-solving capacity.

—-* mark Pesce had written “Wikipedia” here but, as he acknowledges a few lines further: … Wikipedia is really only one example of the many tools we have available for knowledge augmentation. Every sharing tool – Digg, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter, and so on – provides an equal opportunity to share and to learn from what others have shared. We can pool our resources more effectively than at any other time in history.