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I understand completely. Find me an alternative!
At the moment the choices we have are 1) don't let anyone in at all, 2) control the entry in some way. Neither is ideal, but both seem to me to me to be fundamental. If there was a way to legitimately identify individual people then we could decide to just exclude the Knowledge and open the doors wide to everyone else. But I don't know one way of doing that. Not a single one.
There are other possibilities, but they aren't exactly easy to implement. I mean - for example we could open up one suit to a random punter for every new sponsored member on the board. But the question of how we keep that functioning, and don't make it open to abuse, is far from easy...
And finally, while I completely relate to the desire to make this place as open as possible - there really is the legitimate concern that conversation and debate would suffer. The temptation to make another barbelith - a barbelith OVERGROUND if you will - is increasingly appealling. Something with little in the way of moderation and with few if any boundaries to entry. And then current users could decide which one they'd rather occupy.
I've been seriously thinking about podding the board, actually. Treating it as something that operates concurrently and invisibly - ten or twenty different boards, all almost exactly the same in structure, all with roughly the same mechanisms - each growing organically in their own way. Or perhaps running two filtered views of the board concurrently - one in which anyone could join and post (but whie everyone who wasn't a core member could read AND post, core members could only read), and one filtered one (with only the initial mentored and self-governming group) where only the core members could post, but where you couldnt' see the whole conversation as posted from outside...
It would be a complex balance... Might work...
Come on - surprise me. Think up great paradigms for community and Cal and I will implement them... |
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