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Moderation

As ifiwatch.tv and ifiwatchnet move towards functioning like 'nodes' in emerging networks of information exchange using feeds, new issues of governance and moderation arise. Zoe feels that it should not be down to only one person always to decide what items do, and do not, enter the database. So Instead of 'trying to get people to post', the issue becomes 'who adds feeds, who moderates feed, and how'.

This is of increased importance with the new model because when a database is updated by individuals adding items one by one, it is easier *not* to publish than to publish; however, when a database is updated by feeds, (once the feeds have been selected and added,) it is easier *to* publish than not to publish particular items. In addition, it is in the interest of particular individuals/organisations to add feeds of importance to themselves - once the initial (and very small) work of adding the feed is done, ifiwatch can then become a permanent, automatic outlet for their publications.

Adding Feeds

IFIWatch.tv allows you to add individual video items, also feeds of videos, documents, events etc. I suggest that all ifiwatchnet members should be enabled to add both items and feeds, but that the latter should be checked before being approved before publication.

Q: who (besides/instead of Zoe) will approve submission of new feeds?

There are two ways of treating the feeds that enter ifiwatch.tv: trusted, and moderated.

Feeds can be identified as 'trusted' if they come from an allied ifiwatcher and so we can be sure, a priori, that every item in the feed will be relevant and appropriate to the site(eg from BIC).

However feeds should be 'moderated' if they (even just potentially) contain

a. spam (eg youtube feed)

b. material unrelated to IFIs (eg banglapraxis feed)

Q: who, besides, and eventually instead of Zoe, should be responsible for moderating feed items?

When it comes to dealing with a., it is possible to select and delete items in bulk from the moderation queue. It is however desirable to define the search/keyword terms generating the original feed so as to exclude any items tagged with (eg) 'sex', 'runecraft' and a range of other terms that seem often to be attached to spam items also tagged 'world bank', 'IMF' etc.

Also relevant to b.: not all sites generating potentially interesting RSS feeds do so from keywords or search, and their administrators may not all easily be convinced to implement this extra functionality... It is therefore desirable to find some other way of reducing the number of items entering the ifiwatch databases to the strictly IFI-relevant. Ekes suggests using yahoo! pipes until we can create our own system to sort feeds before they come into the moderation queue.

When it comes to displaying video on the home page of ifiwatchnet.org, different people may want to be involved in moderation than are involved in moderating ifiwatch.tv. OR, if ifiwatch.tv moderation is agreed to be working effectively, ifiwatchnet.org may choose to treat the ifiwatch.tv video feed as 'trusted'.

Language

As we start to collect more information from feeds, we are being lucky enough to get more information in more diverse languages, scripts etc (eg cyrillic, japanese etc.) Zoe is lacks the language skills to moderate all this material, perhaps it will be helpful if member groups from the regions can become involved in some of this process? we can defer decisions on publication or deletion of the items until this question is dealt with...

What to Do

I am summarising these issues to help the animators and steering group of ifiwatchnet get to grips with the issues and the new decisions that will need tio be taken. Please contact Zoe with any questions or clarifications of the above, or Ekes if it's a technical question about what Drupal can actually enable.

Meanwhile, we can all act as ifiwatch animators to encourage member groups, especially their media people, to look out for videos on IFIs and also identify sites producing valuable feeds, and then upload the details to ifiwatchnet and/or ifiwatch.tv where needed.

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