Hi all
Thank you, Teresa, for starting this informative discussion.
Just wanted to share something quickly, about the damage I see it doing to
allow people to remain on the listserve after engaging in bullying
behavior. Personally, although I know many in this thread have called for a
more forgiving approach, I support banning anyone from the listserve who
purposefully bullies or abuses another member, unless perhaps they are
willing to apologize fully and publically and promise not to act this way
again. If so, they should still be placed on moderated post permanently.
This isn't because I want to punish these people or I hate them or anything
like that--I don't. It's because I think we lose much more than we gain by
letting the very few people who can't keep abusive language out of the
conversation exclude disproportionately more people. Even if these few
might have a lot of experience and insight, I believe they are still
excluding more experience and birding knowledge than they are contributing.
Here's my evidence:
There are five birders that I've had the privilege of birding with in
Oregon whose skills, knowledge, and passion far surpass anyone else I have
met. Of these five birders, none of them use OBOL regularly, and three of
them never use it. Two of these people I've discussed this with at length,
and they say that the only reason they are not on OBOL is because of
bullying and abusive behavior. These two people are not even from
underrepresented groups, so it's likely that women and BIPOC would have had
even worse experiences than they did. Some of the best birders I've met in
Oregon are women and people of color. None of the ones I know well post
more than occasionally, at most.
By allowing the few experienced birders who repeatedly bully others, we
lose vastly more of the best and brightest voices in our community than we
are retaining. By not taking strong and quick action to remove bullying
immediately and create a safe space without abusive people, we exclude tens
or maybe hundreds of voices, many of them with vast amounts of knowledge
and expertise to contribute, for the sake of keeping maybe ten people who
act in an unsafe way included.
Much of this bullying takes place privately, off-list, so I suggest that we
ask people to report bullying emails they see off-list to the moderator and
to the OBA, and that people who engage in this behavior off-list are banned
as well. One of the people who engaged in the recent thread about
#believewomen continued bullying Courtney and I off-list after he was
moderated on-list.
Please, I implore this community to not lose sight of what matters here and
revert to the old state of things. We have a choice here. We can make OBOL
a truly safe place for the full diversity of birders, or we can see more
and more people abandon this list until it is a discussion board for only a
small group of old-timers, and everyone else in the community has moved
elsewhere.
Thanks for reading.
Best wishes and wonderful birds to all,
Caleb
