2,000 Greater & Lesser Mysteries/2,000 Greater and Lesser Mysteries.iso/bahi/mys00182.txt

Text File | 1994-06-10 | 13.5 KB | 273 lines

ATTACHMENT  4


Electronic Netiquette in the Baha'i World



1. Introduction.

Computer Mediated Communications (CMC) is not like other media.  As more
Baha'is participate in CMC forums around the world, the need for Baha'i
standards of netiquette become necessary.  What follows is a summary
which characterizes a set of suggestions that can help the Baha'is
maintain a harmonious relationships on computer mediated communications
(CMC) forums.  These suggestions are based both on principles of Baha'i
Administration, a research report prepared by the Rand Corporation as
part of a National Science Foundation grant study, John Quarterman's
book The MATRIX, and lessons learned through experience on CMC forums.
These suggestions will be revised over time as more people learn to
apply Baha'i  principles to correspondence in CMC forums.


2. What is Netiquette?

"The heaven of Divine Wisdom is illumined with the two luminaries of
consultation and compassion..."

                Baha'u'llah,  Tables of Baha'u'llah, p126


Netiquette is a term used in CMC forums to describe the etiquette and
ethics followed by the citizens who use the forums.  Learning to use a
CMC system without offending other users and to maximize the benefit
involves etiquette.  Learning to use a system without causing harm to
others involves ethics.


3. In Sending Messages:

o   Be loving to each other.

" It behooveth the loved ones of God to be enamored of one another and
to sacrifice them selves for their fellow-workers in the Cause.  They
should yearn towards one another even as the sore athirst yearneth for
the Water of Life, and the lover burneth to meet his heart's desire."
(Abdu'l-Baha, Baha'i Administration, p 35)

"...If between the friends true love - based on the love of God - Could
become manifest, the Cause would spread very rapidly.  Love is the
standard which must govern the conduct of one believer towards another.
The administrative order does not change this, but unfortunately
sometimes the friends confuse the two, and try to be a whole spiritual
assembly,  - with the discipline and justice and impartiality that body
must show, - to each other, instead of being forgiving, loving and
patient to each other as individuals."  (Shoghi Effendi, Lights of
Guidance, p 403)

o  Create single-subject messages whenever possible.  Choose a title
that fits the subject and stick to it.  If you need to bring in another
subject, consider posting an additional message.

o  Be Brief.  Using many words is more likely to cause misunderstandings
than using a few well-chosen words.  People are also less likely to read
long messages.  More than a page or two is probably too much.

o  Assume permanence and ubiquity.  Anything you post to any CMC medium
or release through any resource sharing service may be saved
permanently, with or without your knowledge, and may be read by anyone,
at any time, anywhere.

o  Have in mind a model of your intended audience.  When sending a
message, remember who will be reading it a tailor it to them.  Use
language, references, and subjects that will be comprehensible.  Do not
use buzzwords or other terms the audience will not know unless you
define them in your text.  Be aware that consultation on many Bah may be
read by Baha'i Institutions not explicitly on the mailing list.

o  Separate opinion from non-opinion, and clearly label each.  Your
recipient, and especially unintended recipients further down the
forwarding path, might not know you as well as your friend, and may not
know about the subject matter of the message well enough to distinguish
opinion from fact.

o  If you must express emotion in a message, clearly label it.  Sarcasm,
humor, and irony often do not work in a message.  Someone who knows your
acerbic wit less well might not "get it."  The tradition of labeling
emotions has developed for two good reasons:  (1) People feel strongly
about many subjects, and want to express the strength of their feelings,
and (2) there have been many examples of misinterpreted messages, in
which emotions were misinterpreted or confused with the other content of
the message.  Labeling attempts at humor, anger, or sarcasm as such
allows those feelings to be transmitted, but with less
misinterpretation.  Again, it helps to remember that there could well be
readers of your message at a different place and time for whom even your
labeled emotions might be inappropriate.

o  Identify yourself and your affiliations clearly.  Include a signature
with your mail.  This would ideally have your name, e-mail address, and
company or school (if relevant) in it; it may also have a physical
address or a quote or graphics.  The reason that this is important is
because some mailers don't print the e-mail address of the sender in the
header of a letter.  So if you get a letter that you want to respond
personally to, and there's no signature, you may have no idea where to
send the reply!

o  Avoid formatting problems.  Adjusted right margins are hard to read
without proportional fonts.  Lots of vertical white space takes up
space.  Paragraph breaks are very useful.

o  Post new ideas.  If you have something to say and no one else has
said it, do so.  But try not to repeat what has already been said,
except in brief confirmation.

o  Avoid the use of Baha'i acronyms in CMC messages.  Spell out all
Baha'i Institutional names.  For example, do not use 'UHJ'.  Provide the
Institution dignity by using 'Universal House of Justice.'

o  Remember the difference between the 'list' (like bahai-announce) and
the 'administrative' address ( like bahai-announce-request).  The latter
reaches only E-mail conference coordinator, and does not automatically
go out to the whole list.  Conversely, no one wants to see "Please add
Joe Bob to bahai-announce" on the whole list.  The same goes for the
majority of E-mail conferences.

o  Don't send copyrighted articles to the lists.  This includes articles
and editorials from newspapers and magazines.  Short quotes and excerpts
are fine, as are BINS and press releases, but you really shouldn't send
an entire article without first calling the publisher and getting
permission.  It's illegal in most countries.  And it's sometimes very
easy and quick to get permission, anyway.

o  Cite sources.  When presenting an idea that originated with someone
else, give the proper credit, either by naming the source or by citing a
formal bibliographic reference.

o  Keep the list of recipients and Cc:s to a minimum.  In one sense, it
is too easy to send electronic mail.  Electronic mailboxes fill up with
peripheral material that needs to be scanned and continuously culled.
If one of your recipients decides that someone else needs to see a
message, it can be forwarded at that time.


3. In receiving and responding to messages:

o  Avoid responding while emotional.  Wait a few minutes or hours, or
even until the next day.  Emotion feeds on emotion, especially in CMC
media, where body language and tone of voice are not present.  Read any
later messages. Consider asking for clarification.  If you are still
emotional when responding, say so.  If you have thoughts you need to get
down while emotional, write them in a separate text file and save it.
Later you can review it while you are not so emotional.

o  If a message generates emotions, look again.  One of the most
surprising things about electronic mail is the ease with which
misinterpretations arise.  People are used to reading "body language,"
voice intonation, and numerous other cues when interpreting messages
delivered in conversation, or even on the telephone.  Those cues are
missing in electronic mail, and what was meant as a casual comment, or
an attempt at humor or irony, is misinterpreted.  Even small
misinterpretations have a tendency to mushroom.  Messages between two
correspondents may become more stilted and formal, until what started as
a casual exchange of messages becomes a set of diplomatic communiqu_s.
What at first glance was offensive can often be interpreted, on
rereading, as merely a poor choice of words in a hasty message--words
that might have been casually used, then forgotten, in a face-to-face
conversation, but that linger on the printed page (or phosphor screen).
It might help to consider the message as a written verbal communication,
rather than real writing.

o  Assume the honesty and competence of the sender.  Giving someone the
benefit of the doubt isn't a bad rule of thumb, especially when they're
3000 miles and three time zones away.

o  Consider whom you should respond to.  If the message was sent to a
distribution list, do you really want your answer to go out to that same
list?  Wouldn't it keep the electronic clutter down to respond only to
the sender, even if that means editing out the name of the distribution
list in the "Cc:" field your text editor so helpfully supplied?  There's
a nice compromise:  Send an answer only to the sender, with the P.S.:
"If you think this response merits wider distribution, feel free to do
so."  That way, the original sender can batch together responses
received, and provide a coherent update to the issue (giving you credit,
of course, for your insightful contribution to the debate).

o  Respond to the topic, not the person.  Try to separate opinion from
non-opinion while reading a message, so you can respond appropriately.
Avoid ad hominem attacks and try to understand what the person is
saying.  If you can't tell from what they wrote, ask.  If you must
criticize someone, attempt to give them a chance to respond.  If you
comment on the style of a message, respond to the content as well.

o  Read other messages before responding.  Don't dash off a message
making an obvious response; somebody else has probably already made the
same response.  Read all the relevant messages first to see if you're
the first to make the response.

o  Give the benefit of the doubt.  Mistakes, misunderstandings, and
ignorance are far more common than maliciousness.  Don't take offense
without evidence.

o  Do be encouraging and polite.  New users (and often old ones as well)
tend to be hesitant.  Encourage them when they do well.  The most
effective encouragement is often a simple response acknowledging a
posting.

o  Take personal conversations into private e-mail exchanges, so that
the rest of the CMC conference does not receive irrelevant mail.  Please
note that many mail editors automatically put the CMC conference into
the CC: line when you reply to a letter sent to it.  If you don't want
your personal mail to go to a multitude of people, you must explicitly
remove the mailing list from the CC: line.

o  When responding to a letter, please do not include an entire copy of
the original mail, unless it's very, very short.  Excerpts are fine, as
long as they are clearly set off from your commentary -- with
indentation, for example, or ">" signs:

>  This is an example of text
>  that someone else wrote.

o  Be careful with private correspondence.  Do not redistribute private
correspondence with permission.


4. In acting as a coordinator/leader of an interest group:

o  Perform relevant groupings.  It is helpful to readers when messages
received on a common topic from diverse sources are grouped together in
a "packet" message.  Readers may well detect common threads or issues
that would otherwise have remained obscure.  Also, the packet can be
filed by subject matter as one unit, not many.

o  Use uniform packaging, especially in the "Subject:" line.  If some
part of the message header of messages routed within an interest group
have some key word or phrase in common, these messages can be filtered
out and organized by recipients using "scan" and "file" functions common
in many message systems.  Perhaps this can be as simple as the "To:"
line containing the name of the interest group.

o  Exercise reasonable editorship.  Perhaps a world without censorship
would be nice, but we're not there yet.  Messages that are not relevant
should be excluded, as should ones that are sufficiently tasteless to be
offensive.  But it is important that opinions (preferably labeled as
such) be given a hearing.  There also tends to be much redundancy of
messages and questions in these interest groups.  New people are joining
all the time, and asking questions that have been answered before.  The
group coordinator provides a very useful function by excluding these
messages from continued widespread distribution, and pointing the sender
(individually) to the group archives for the answer.  If it is a topic
that appears to be of extreme continuing interest, periodic broadcast
messages can alert new participants to the relevant archives.

o  Timeliness is important.  This medium permits rapid communication,
and that rapidity should be retained.  The coordinator should not sit on
collections of messages too long ("I'll just wait until I've got six
messages to send as a group on this topic . . .").  Electronic dialogs
that retain their momentum depend on this immediacy.  In most cases, a
48- to 72-hour holding function for editing and grouping purposes should
not be exceeded.


NOTE -- For further reading please refer to  a) The Baha'i Writings, and
b) R-3283-NSF/RC - Towards an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail
by Norman Z. Shapiro, and Robert H. Anderson July 1985.  c) The Matrix:
Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide.  by John S.
Quarterman, Digital Press, 1990, p 34-38.