A month ago on Daily Kos I posted this diary proposing that interested parties work together to build a positive, intentional community online. If you check out the comments below the diary, you can see that the idea was well received by a number of people. But the project kind of stalled, partly because I just didn’t know where to go from there, and partly because I simply didn’t have the time to devote to it.
Now a couple things have changed. First, I have slightly more time at the moment. Second, The Village Gate, a group blog to which I used to contribute, has gone offline. My blog there was called “Sacred Space”, and the “about me” page, which explained how I chose that name for my blog, can be found here. I had never actually saved that entry to my own computer, but fortunately it was still online in cache, so I was able to rescue it and post it here. Third, I figured out how to create “here”, after finding out that our web space came with blog capability. (Who knew?)
Anyway, here’s the crux of what I wrote in that diary last month…
By “intentional community”, I am suggesting a number of things. When people spend time there (wherever this ends up being), they are choosing to be there, and agreeing to interact respectfully with one another. Just the basic “treat people the way you want to be treated” stuff. None of us are good at that all the time, but sometimes we really lower our standards when we are discussing things online rather than face-to-face.
What would the community members have in common? Not religion, not necessarily political ideology–something broader than either of those.
Off the top of my head, here are a few statements that are at the core of this new effort for me. If you agree with them, maybe you’d like to help with this. Or maybe you’d like to hear more about it once some of the details are sorted out.
I believe that…
How we treat people always matters.
Everything we do or say can have a ripple effect–for good or for bad. I want to maximize the good whenever possible, and minimize the bad.
We, as humans, really can do better, but we need an approach that is different from “business as usual”.
Name-calling and mind-reading people who disagree with us is not helpful. Not just “not nice”, but it only adds to the problem. We (I) need to spend more time trying to genuinely understand people, rather than labeling them or settling for interpretations of their worldviews that make us (me) feel superior but it harder to communicate productively with people who are (at the moment) “on the other side”.
Punishment and violence are overused. They treat (temporarily) symptoms but never the underlying illness. They often create new problems, and ulitmately do more harm than good.
There are many great blog communities, and this is not meant to replace any of them. But for me, what’s missing is a gathering place where everyone who joins is doing so because they agree with some basic values with respect to how we as humans should treat each other. And they are also agreeing to treat each other with respect when they disagree. We would need to come up with some guidelines to help spell that out.
This isn’t about being nicey-nice all the time, because none of us can be that. We all get angry and frustrated sometimes. In face-to-face interactions, though, if I “go off on” someone, I know I need to smooth things over. “Hey, I was having a bad day…I’m really sorry I yelled at you.” I’d like there to be a place online where we agree to show each other that kind of “real life” courtesy
These are difficult times for many of us. We have jobs, children, homes–plenty of situations that demand our attention and energy–and on top of all that we see bad stuff happening in the world and we feel compelled to do something to try to make it better. I believe that, as we do so, we should try to be gentle with one another.
As this develops, I’d like to look into adding a forum. For now, I would like to invite interested parties to submit their own entries for this blog. The entries should be in keeping with the basic guidelines I laid out above, but I hope that we can have a variety of voices from different faiths as well as nonbelievers dedicated to the betterment of humanity, different races, ethnicities, and so forth.
Interested? You can contact me at renee_in_ohio at wowway.com
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