Recently saw a delightful post by Derek Sivers – A Real Person, A Lot Like You (http://sivers.org/real) – in which he reminds us that the people on the other end of the email are very often pretty much the same as us . . . that is, he reminds us that those are thinking, FEELING, people at the other end of the flame or bombastic email or whatever.
So often with email or internet forums, we see anonymous monikers and often cartoony avatars or profile images that so easily allow us to forget that there is a person behind the screen name.
This is something I see in a number of the resources I run as well as the ones I participate in, some more aggressively than others.
As many of you know, I've been hard at work recently on a "super secret project" involving the tweaks and revisions of our Hypnosis Community Platform for the Society of Experiential Trance (http://www.trancesociety.org) which will be open to the public, albeit with certain resources open only to members of the SET (yes, we will be making public annoucements sooooon).
Since the Community will not only be open to SET members, many of the resources will also be open to the public, so we've been thinking of ways to make sure we engender a friendly personal style of communication that helps foster the sort of community outreach we've tried to engender in many of our other projects such as the Hypnosis Technique Exchange and the convention.
Being aware of the effect that near-anonymous communication has on many folks and wishing to foster a sense of personal communication, we have a policy of real photos only for profile pictures and Avatars for the Community. So, when a person creates their profile, it doesn't go active until they've made sure that their Avatar image is a real photo of themselves. There are no anonymous profiles allowed and IDs have to be associated with the actual person creating the account.
Sure, this will alienate some folks who prefer their net identities be anonymous or roleplayed persona but for the most part we have seen that in most forums that have similar policies folks flame less, troll less, and tend to be more friendly, open, and polite in their correspondence and public communication – sure, there are disagreements but they tend to be the polite disagreements of the academic meeting rather than the anonymous flamefests of the anonymous thrash pit.
We'll see how it works in practice . . . honestly, for the most part, the folks who tend to participate in my forums tend to be polite and respectful, even when disagreeing with someone else so we don't anticipate too many issues anyway and it's nice to belong to a community where you can put a face to an ID.
Oh, just in case some folks are getting the wrong idea, the Community is a community outreach program and it is NOT intended to erase, supplant, or replace any of the fine existing platforms for hypnotists to interact. This is an open community program that has some things other programs don't have and they have fine things the Community does not have. For instance, the Community has audio-video chat built into the platform so folks can enter the group rooms or have individual sessions with others. The discussion groups also have their own chat rooms so folks who are members of my private group will have access to resources not available elsewhere. I made sure to have a whiteboard and some other neat things too.
In any case, I saw the Sivers post and it dovetailed very nicely with some of what we're trying to accomplish.
Soon.
All the best,
Brian
(If you are reading this blog post via a stream, go to https://briandavidphillips.net/ to access the full post with any videos or photos included.)
http://www.briandavidphillips.net/store
See http://www.BrianDavidPhillips.com for details
Brian David Phillips, PhD, CH [brian@briandavidphillips.com]
Hypnotist, Hypnotherapist, Intuitionist, Trance Wizard
President, Society of Experiential Trance
Associate Professor, NCCU, Taipei, Taiwan
