====== Mediation, not moderation ======

[[2025-04]]-11

So here's an idea that came to me when engaged with difficulties in a web-based conversational forum. Traditionally (if I may use that word for a relatively short tradition) forums have had codes of conduct and/or codes of practice, and then appointed moderators to deal with people not complying with those codes or rules. The traditional practice has usually involved warnings, suspensions, and eventually banning people from the forum.

What came to me? Instead of "moderation", how about we ask for volunteers to be "relational mediators" for the space? What I imagine is this: when a relational rupture appears in the conversation space, we ask the people implicated in the rupture to have a live conversation with a mediator. To start with, I see it as most promising to do this one at a time. The red line for me would be if someone refuses the offer of conversation — they would then be clearly refusing the offer to rebuild or restore relationship, and therefore are putting themselves outside the relational pale, and can be excluded from the forum with a clear conscience. 

Sometimes it's clear who is provoking the rupture, sometimes not; and if not, then both parties need to engage in a similar way. After that, if it seems right, we could move on to a mediated conversation between the two sides, exploring the potential for restoring relationship.

I can feel this drawing on the principles of [[https://www.restorativecircles.org/|Restorative Circles]], but I'm proposing a much simplified version. The Restorative Circles approach, in full, is in my experience very effective when several people in a community are affected by a conflict. What I am proposing is intended for quicker response, before there is a community-wide conflict brewing.

What's emerging for me as important is a difference in the underlying basic principles. Instead of seeing ourselves as defending a conversational field from people attacking or degrading it, which seems to me to share an underlying ontology and belief system with enemy agents in a war, we see ourselves as diligently serving the cause of regenerating relationship, wherever it is possible. To me it is much clearer when someone is refusing to acknowledge relationality and its importance, and much less clear when someone is in the "right" or "wrong". 

I don't think this is GameB, but it sure is a different game. It's changing the game in the same kind of spirit — and this, to me, is the kind of cultural paradigm shift that we need to get out of what many people call "modernity" into a better culture, through what some people have come to call a [[https://secondrenaissance.net/|Second Renaissance]].

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=== topics ===
  * [[t:regenerating relationship]]

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