Thoughts by Techxplorer

One of the themes that came out of the presentation by Jimmy Wales at the education.au seminar on Monday was the idea of Gatekeeping vs. Accountability. The main idea here is that the “traditional” way of thinking about system design is to build into it controls to stop people from doing things. In this way the “Gatekeepers” stop you from doing something that you may want to do on the system.

Take for example the idea of people commenting on books that are listed in our catalogues. There are two schools of thought on this. The first is that it is bad. It is bad because they, the users, might say bad things about the books. They might use offensive language, they might say the book wasn’t any good, or they might even compare it to a book that we don’t hold. For these and numerous other reasons, users are stopped from commenting. Or at the very least there are limits put in place to restrict the facility to only those comments that are thought to be worthwhile. This of course assumes the catalogue even has such a capability!

The second school of thought belongs to those who think along the lines of accountability. Yes users may do all of those bad things, but they may do many good things as well. They may comment on the book and say it was really useful for their course of study. They may say that the Library was right to purchase this book and others like it would be useful to the university community. The comments may help other users looking for similar books or resources decide if they want to use them. In this way the users are doing good things with the facility to comment.

The idea here is that you presume, to a reasonable extent, that users are good and that they have good motivations. You provide them with the facility to comment, but you hold them accountable for their actions. If they post something that was deemed to be inappropriate, according to published guidelines, then you politely point out their error and fix-up or remove their comment. If they persist in not following the guidelines you block that individual from commenting.

It is this second type of thinking that has proven to be so revolutionary at Wikipedia. I also think it is this type of thinking that has been embodied in most of the Web 2.0 / Library 2.0 projects as well. For users to create content for your site you need to have a certain level of trust in them.

I hope the idea of accountability spreads to other areas of technology and outside the sphere of those of us who are using these technologies and wish to implement them in our systems to those who who “make the big decisions”. It’s going to take some time but I think, hope, it will happen.