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Running a Non-Partisan Political Forum?
cptnHaddock asks: "The internet was supposed to give a new breath to democracy. While there has been some interesting initiatives, I feel a lot more could be done. Do you have any experience, tips to share, about running a non-partisan political forum? How to encourage well-thought postings and filter out the cynical ramblings, and how to moderate without censoring? Is there any good software that you would recommend for that task? Are there other solutions even better suited to running a policy-oriented discussion board?"
Why isn't this under the Humor section?
Just ban all posts and all stories. Well, you can allow porn.
Monstar L
...and that you know will reply in the fashion you desire.
That pretty much limits it to just yourself. But it's a start!
Politics and religion are two of the hottest flame-war topics EVER. You either choose to moderate EVERY comment (you are "censoring" your own board) or you accept the fact that there will be heated disagreements and non-polite exchances.
I started a religion forum about six months ago, and I too was worried about flamewars and intolerance. Suprisingly, we have had very little name calling at all on our forum. Most of our members have came from slashdot through my sig link, so I guess that helped us get members that were above average in terms of writing and discussion skills.
We use phpbb with a few mods, like quick reply and a captcha system that doesn't really work. Most of our top posters have mod abilities, so that really helps us control the spam posts. Amazingly, for a religious forum, we haven't censored any posts in six months. Basically, just encourage rational debate and I don't think you will have any need to censor.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
It certainly is a curious question. How do you have a political debate without people debating with their individual political ideologies. Impossible? Probably. Difficult? Certainly.
My recommendation would be to limit debates to only between two people or two groups which have an equal amount of people. Otherwise the common forum habit of teaming up against an opponent occurs.
Additionally, I would only allow information in a debate that qualifies as a highly verifiable source. Noone should be able to say "Fact" unless they have solid information to back it up with. Once the conspiracy theory debates start then the entire forum is trash.
Finally, I would only moderate comments based on spam, harassment, or an opponent in a debate conceding. Additionally, debates should be of finite length. This will prevent topic drift.
I'm actually doing this, and I can give you advice about some sections of it.
/. but it is a much bigger target - and even here it's not too big of a problem.
Firstly about ACs and flaming, we run it through a university society so most people who come on are from a university (and as such there is little flaming and trolling). We are open though for anyone to post on it, but I think most people wouldn't hunt out a small system on the net to try and troll. I know you get it on
I think If you want it to be non-partisan then you need to put up non-partisan stories and just let everyone have their own views and post them. You can even put up partisan stories but just try to make sure that they are fairly ballanced in number. For us me and a firend put up the stories, he's a Labour supporter (and a Blairite) whereas I'm a member of a conservative party. It's not normally that hard to see your own bias.
If you live in the UK getting access to non-partisan representations of the news is easy (because all our TV media has to be non-partisan). It might be harder if you want to do US news but you could always put up a right and a left wing interpretation of the story and then let people talk about where they feel that they are on it...
If you want to try and encourage well thought out discusion you should consider getting some friends and along with yourself post your own opinions on the stories in a well thought out way (especially at the start) so that people can see top quality examples of discusion and reason
As for moderation on the whole I'd say don't. I've had people say that they think that 9/11 and 7/7 were justified etc. and I've just left it, people can see bullshit and often don't even flame back (but can tear their poor arguements appart). I would delete something which used overly offensive language, or an obvious flaming comment (like "Bush is crap and likes to have sex with dogs and children!" - you know it's a lie and it has no point).
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
If it's an obvious troll, delete it.
Speaking as someone over the years who has been derided on political forums as both a far right rightwing extremist and a left wing nut job, when it comes to politics, trolling is often in the eyes of the beholder. What would be considered trolling in a left wing forum would be seen as a valid opinion in a right wing forum and vice versa. This is due to the different "hot buttons" partisans of different parties are programmed to have.
I'm currently struggling with just this thing myself. I'm in the process of setting up a blogsite/message board for people who refuse to dirty themselves through alignment with a political party. You are right that freedom of speech must be maximal for proper discourse in one sense, but in another, unrestricted political discourse goes like this once partisans of any major group join in:
partisan: "This issue that my political party told me is important is important so I'm arguing it."
partisanx: "Really, well why do you personally care about it?"
partisan: "for the reasons outlined by my political party."
partisanx: "yeah, I've heard of all that before, do you have any opinions of your own?
partisan: "these are my opinions, I just happen to agree 100 percent with my political party.
partisanx: "yeah, sure you do. When I want to hear your political opinion, I'll go read your parties talking points. Thanks for playing."
partisan: "This issue that my political..."
ad nauseum.
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
1. allow only discussion on events that happened atleast 120 years ago in rural Sweden
2. no Swedes
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Hm...
I have seen forums come and go while certain ones stay. They have several factors, but in terms of administration:
1. I would think the first step would be to go out and attract/recruit the core group of people who share your vision and are enthusiastic about it. The core group is very important, as they set the energy and the mood for everyone else. They are also the ones you will eventually trust to place moderators when the forum outgrows your oversight.
2. Set clear and simple policies and rules that encourage the atmosphere/cooperation you want in place and enforce them consistently. Be fair and explain the actions you take and have the moderators explain themselves to the group when they make a decision, don't make decisions that are arbitrary. People can see when you are being fair or when you are taking sides due to varying factors such as cronyism, partisanship, etcetera.
3. No censorship of purely political speech. It may see like "no duh!" but enough political forums decide to censor views that are not compatible with the moderators/leader of the board. Even over objectionable views, there are ways to win over them without resorting to this.
Okay, that aside, let's discuss what you want. You want a non-partisan board. The origin of partisan is of course party, like political party. The role of the political party was always to band individuals together into a force that has power. The downside of a political party is that over time a member had to trade in his individual thinking and go with the groupthink of the group, sometimes with issues that had little to do with the original goal of the group.
Political parties/movements have done or promoted some good, such as the abolitionist movement, women's suffrage, and of course our own revolution.
Political Parties have also done a lot of bad: the Communist Party in Russia and elsewhere where they have actually taken power, the National Socialist party, etcetera. In America, Political Parties have not been this evil, but have set the current political system (which I think should be unconstitutional) and climate to their advantage and have wrought the current situation.
In this sense, the way to minimize partisanship is to get in your core group of people who are for independent politicians (no party affiliation mandatory) and where political parties have little meaning to them. Meaning that your core group should be people that don't follow a party line, but decide issue by issues. People who staunchly stick with their parties will always have a conflicting interest to be partisan as a show of loyalty/teamplaying for their party.
You will likely also want people who are not afraid to blast both sides equally.
Like many social human endeavors, since politics is the assertion of one's own ego, don't expect a lack of shrill bickering though.
We have had an excellent forum that has a reasonable sized user base, an extremely diverse set of viewpoints (Your standard variety of mild to hard core democrats, republicans, libertarians, but also views from communists, fascists, etc.), and consitently high quality posts.
There are rules that people are expected to follow regarding respecting those you are discussing with. While there are occasional flame wars (and people are suspended from posting for a brief period of time when it gets out of hand), it doesn't require anything particular draconian. Requiring respect in a public discussion is not censorship.
ornery.org for those interested.
LetterRip
You have to find a way to prevent high-traffic, partisan political sites from sending large numbers of their members to your forum. Maybe have a quota for the maximum number of new members who can register in a day?
Also consider having three forums: one for liberals, moderated by volunteers within the forum; one for conservatives, moderated by volunteers within the forum, and one non-partisan. That way, the people who really just want to be partisan can talk amongst themselves, and they can censor the other side as much as they want within their own forum. Make it so new threads on the non-partisan forum can't just be created by anyone, but on specific debate topics pre-arranged by "community leaders" from the partisan forums. This will hopefully cut down on the amount of moderation work that needs to be done by you.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Instead of focusing on parties or current (cliched) discussions, start with first principals and try to steer discussion toward principals upon which people agree on, THEN apply the reasoning to current events.
For example:
Abortion - pro or anti? -- Wrong!
To what degree should the law force dependency on a person? Can the law require a person to allow the use of their body to host another, even if it means the other may perish? Could we force a person to donate blood or an organ? -- Discuss the principal, then work up to 'abortion' - the specific application of the principal.
This will probably still backfire, so you will have to moderate - there are a lot of asshats out there with axes to grind.
Good luck and post a link - I'd welcome a positive political discussion.
Unfortunately, politics in the United States have become so very partisan that most open discussion of this sort will devolve quickly into shouting matches between kneejerk liberals and dittoheads.
I think you misunderstand what the submitter was talking about. It looks to me like he's trying to set up a forum that takes no political stand of its own and lets people of all parties and convictions discuss politics. It's not the discussions that are non partisan it's that the site's owner doesn't use it to push his own agenda.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I could see that it might not be too bad if there were no anonymous posting.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
First off, I think you're bound for failure. However, if you really want to do this, there's a feature you should absolutly not impliment. Friends. Nothing like a /. zoo. Friends will be people that agreee with you. Foes will be people that disagree with you. Soon it degenerates into killfile.
Some say don't censor, but that's wrong. You should. Too often the shrillest voices take over the discussion. Be fair though. Five years ago Jonah Goldberg fired Ann Coulter from the National Review Online, for her notriously shrill and childish name calling. He said that there was no place for that in a serious political discussion, and he was absolutely right. (Five years later, he's realized that playing Coulter's childish game is what makes money, so he's done a 180 and wrote the self-paroding and hypocritical "Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton," but that's for another discusssion.)
A few reasons :
If it's a US-centric forum, you can't avoid partisanship. One of the very cornerstones of US political practice is partisanship - the system has largely been warped from a rational discussion of issues and direction into an "us vs them" argument ("this isn't an argument, it's just contradiction!" "No it's not..."). Of course, there'll always be a few truely non-partisan people around - the people you want to attract - but they always seem to end up being attacked by both sides.
And that's another point: you will be attacked. Trolls, swarming, astroturf, DoS, legal threats - anything and everything, every dirty trick, will be used by one or the other to destroy you. Because you threaten their beliefs, because you threaten their cosy bipolar system, and sometimes just because they need to rile up their army of like-mided followers to attack something.
(A little aside: every organisation of any power or size has some sort of hidden master/slave structure. In left-wing organisations, the two parts are sometimes called "members & militants". The militants are, well, militant; they make policy, choose targets, etc. Members exist so that (a) the militants can point and say "look, we have 30,000 supporters, so we must be right!", and (b) because 30,000 members turning up at a rally is much more impressive than 10 militants...)
Finally, it's impossible to keep it non-partisan. Gradually, in 100 different little ways, the group will show a consensus biased towards one side or the other. Even these little biases will attract one or two like-thinking members, and discourage one or two others. Eventually the tipping point is reached - and in these things, that point is almost invisible - and the bias becomes unrecoverable.
So, nice idea - and one I applaud tremendously; I can see my own country's political system becoming more and more party partisan every day because that's what the parties desire. But, ultimately, doomed to failure. It'd be a nice windmill to tilt at for a while, though...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Oh, and by the way, if you want to join the Ornery forums, you should know what you're getting into. The standard greeting there is "Welcome to Ornery. You're wrong."
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Assuming you're American, you need to remember that a NON-partisian organization needs to include ALL political parties and ALL voters. This includes independents, Libertarians, Greens, Socialists, Communists, and all the other 'minor' ideas. Non-partisian doesn't mean just democrats and republicans, do you hear me League of Women Voters?
As for the moderation issue, make it clear and make your users agree to a 'debate not argue' concept. By example, I was at a political rally for PeirceForOhio.com last week. A Green supporter, a Blackwell supporter, and I were having a discussion about poltics. We disagreed, but we were amiable and making points all around. Another rally-er came over and started ranting while we were having a nice conversation, irritated all of us.
Your users need to be reminded that a discussion forum is for DISCUSSION and is not a pulpit.
See also issues arising from Godwins Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
A strategy that I use on a non-political board is NEVER to delete posts. I move, split, and edit and every time I have to moderate I make it clear why the thread was moderated. I and the other admins also listen to and respond to issues with moderation, but not in the moderated thread.
Also consider having three forums: one for liberals, moderated by volunteers within the forum; one for conservatives, moderated by volunteers within the forum, and one non-partisan. That way, the people who really just want to be partisan can talk amongst themselves, and they can censor the other side as much as they want within their own forum.
That's a bad idea because it provides two nurturing pools for partisan extremism to let people gear up for battle before going all out in the "non-partisan" forum. People can argue with a "public" face and then bad mouth in the "private" partisan forum. Unless you restrict access to the partisan forums, then they'll just become battlefields as well. If you let moderation filter out people in the "wrong" area, then they'll quickly become two camps that accuse the otherside of close-minded censorship.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").