I read a wonderful post by danah boyd discussing how inexpensive actions in social networks add little or no value (think of all the Zombie invites you got on Facebook until you deactivated your account in dismay [*].) And that reminded me of a rule adopted by the members of a mailing list I started some years ago.
If you want to add someone to the list, you post to the list with your intention to do so. Then you wait a week for objections. After the week passes, you can nominate them.
Why the wait? Back in the late 1990’s, email was still new to many of the members of the community for which the list was created. They didn’t check email hourly, or even daily. So if requests to add someone to the list were processed immediately, we ran the risk that we could add someone who another member of the list may have had an issue with, and they would not know until well after the person was added.
In practice, I think there has been only one objection to adding someone to the list since the rule was implemented. But it’s kept because we decided that we want to respect each other and not spring disruptive surprises on one another.
The list thrives, the members discuss and debate, but we haven’t suffered mass defections and flame wars.
[*] Boy, I’m glad I gave up Facebook before all the beacon craziness.
