For those of you who don't know, Markos recently published his draft of the new Community Guidelines for Daily Kos. There are two sections that have particular impact on the Caucus Project. Here's the most important of the two:
I'M SYMPATHETIC, BUT WILL STILL NOT ALLOW
1. Debate-free zones.
Some users have asked about the ability to declare their diary off-limits to their detractors, so that they can discuss a topic without having opponents intrude. This would apply to internally contentious issues like Israel-Palestine, Snowden-NSA, and guns. Or primaries where the community is divided among the contenders.
While I find some validity in the request, and considered it deeply, fact is it conflicts with the debate-centric focus of the site. We're not an echo chamber, nor do I want it to become one. So if you want to be spared dissent, Daily Kos just won't be the place for you. If you can't handle dissent, then maybe political activism is not the thing for you.
There is one exception to this rule (the I Got The News Today diary highlighting those who lost their lives in our wars). There might be cause for additional exceptions in the future, but permission to do so can only come from site administration.
Markos rules diary
When I conceived the Caucus Project, my idea was to create a space on Daily Kos that was not a mosh pit, not because I don't like mosh pits--as most of you can attest, I wade into most flamewars around here--but because I don't want to be in a mosh pit all the time, not even in my capacity as activist. Why? Because it's very hard to get anything done in a mosh pit. And you sure as hell can't make plans in there.
Here's my original diary on the subject of Caucus.
While Daily Kos does plenty of work around campaigns, especially in the generals, and also does some very praiseworthy charity and solidarity work, I felt there was a lot of energy around here that could be put toward asking "What can we do about x?" instead of just hurling flaming pies at each other nonstop.
Some others agreed, and the Caucus Project came to be. The idea was essentially that the diarist would establish the baseline premise of the diary-- for instance, I want to repeal the Patriot Act--and people would not be able to fight against repealing the Patriot Act in that particular diary, because the diary would not be for the purpose of debate, but for the purpose of like-minded people coming together and figuring out what to do. Instead of the diary's basic question being "Should the Patriot Act be repealed?" the basic question was "How should we, who want to repeal the Patriot Act, best act to get that done?" My argument was that people can, of course, oppose the premise of any Caucus diary in their own diary and have a rousing debate. There was plenty of room on the site to debate, in my view--it's not like the old days when you got only one diary per day. And as I said repeatedly, any diary critiquing a Caucus diary would get far more eyes than the Caucus diary itself, because vigorous debates and flamewars get far more eyes than dry diaries about strategy and tactics and action planning.
Well, Markos has said no to that, as you see above. We can't prevent people from coming into Caucus diaries and doing everything from debating to trolling. People have remarked that we can use the rules against threadjacking to keep trolling to a minimum in Caucus diaries, but here are the threadjacking rules:
7. Threadjacking.
This is a fun one, because it truly is subjective on a variety of levels. Threadjacking is diverting a comment thread from its original focus. Based on this definition, it's actually hard to find any comment thread with more than 10 comments that doesn't have some threadjacking involved. Our diaries are less of a dictate on what to discuss, and more of a starting point for a free-wheeling discussion. So 99 percent of threadjacking is fine, and actually is what makes our comment threads so much fun.
The actual problem is with malicious threadjacking — the kind of threadjacking designed to derail a productive conversation, whether because the 'jacker hates the diarist, or because s/he is unhappy with the topic of discussion. This is obviously a problem in areas in which the community is internally divided. And it's one of those things that can't be easily defined.
The best way to call out an explicit threadjack is when it occurs together with a violation of one of the other rules — usually the one against personal insults.
Language like "can't be easily defined" "easiest to call it out when it occurs together with violation of other rules" and "subjective on a variety of levels," does not lead me to place much reliance on this rule as a way of keeping the discussion troll-free, even while I acknowledge that Markos' points in this regard are well-taken. I see the problems in site administration making a definitive judgement for all time about threadjacks, but the fact remains that this rule is unlikely to help us much in practice.
I have two ideas as to how we can proceed. Follow me below the Escher orange squiggle of meta for a caucus on how we might successfully have caucuses. :-)
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