Room for More · moderation and safety
Moderation and safety
Mostly this is not dramatic. It is noticing the person standing on their own who has decided to leave in ten minutes. Read the incident guide before your first night. How things reach me is in handing things over.
1 What the job is
Being a second pair of eyes. Almost everything that goes wrong at a social event is quiet: somebody cornered in a conversation they cannot get out of, somebody who came alone and has not spoken in forty minutes, somebody drinking faster than they meant to.
Reports and complaints are the smaller half of it. The room is the bigger half.
2 Where you start
One event, as the named second person, having read the incident guide and the community code first. Watch the edges of the room. Afterwards send me two lines: anything that needed handling, and anyone who looked stranded and what you did about it.
Twice, and then you get admin on a group or a channel you are in.
3 In the room, you never need permission
You can do all of this immediately, without asking anybody, including me:
- Ask somebody to stop
- Put yourself between two people, or move a conversation somewhere else
- Move the whole group on
- Stay with somebody who is uncomfortable until they are alright
- Message or call me, any hour: +47 984 41 663, a Slack direct message, or martin@roomformore.no
If it turns out to have been nothing, that is fine and will be treated as fine. The usual first move is small. Standing next to somebody changes a situation more often than saying anything does.
4 On a group or channel you run
Remove a message, remove somebody, mute somebody, or take down a photo somebody objected to. No approval step. Send me a message the same day saying what you did, so I am not surprised by it later.
Beyond your own group or event, check with me first.
5 When somebody tells you something
Listen properly, do not promise a specific outcome, and do not investigate. Deal with the immediate thing if there is one, then get it to me.
- Anything about somebody's safety: to me the same evening, at any hour
- Anything else: within a couple of days
- No names in the channels. Send it to me directly
- If you are personally involved, or close to somebody in it, hand it over. That is what keeps the outcome trusted by everybody, including you
You are not on call. If something lands with you at midnight and you cannot deal with it, forwarding it to me is the whole of what you owe.
6 What happens after
I decide, and I tell both people plainly what was decided. Before anything permanent, the person it lands on gets to say their piece, unless somebody's safety means acting first and talking after.
Somebody who reports harassment is never asked to confront the person, sit in a room with them, or be mediated with. If anybody suggests that, it is wrong, and you can say so.
7 Where this is up to
This is people rather than software right now. Removing a message from the website chat needs a tool only I have, so some things you spot will come to me to deal with. That changes once somebody is doing this regularly enough for it to be worth building.