Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Guidelines for E-mail use

[Kay Argyle (kay.argyle]

We don't have a written policy, but have evolved informal understandings.

- The ground rules for in-person discussions apply equally to email.
Foremost of these is No Personal Attacks. 

This is typically handled by others on the list intervening to say that some
statement was out of line.

There's a perennial disagreement about the "best" way to avoid attacks,
reanimated any time a discussion deteriorates into ad hominem argument. Some
residents would like to disallow discussions by email.  Email lacks the
nonverbal components of communication, intonation and body language - It's
too easy to have misunderstandings, they say. Others say, don't blame the
medium for people's misuse of it - certainly my viewpoint. 

Both face-to-face and email discussion have benefits and drawbacks. Used
correctly, email is an excellent medium for dissemination of information and
for reasoned argument.  The same caveat applies to face-to-face discussion's
advantages, however.  One type of "misunderstanding" that I've seen in
face-to-face conversations is when someone uses a sugar-coated tone to get
away with deliberate nastiness - the victim feels mauled, yet the witnesses
insist it didn't happen.  So I don't have much patience with people who
think face-to-face is necessarily a kinder gentler way of communicating.  

- Don't assume everyone has email. Don't assume people who have email check
it every day.

As a corollary, the paper reservation calendar has precedence over the email
calendar.

Use additional forms of communications for important messages - a note on
the mailroom board, notes taped to doors, or even going door to door to tell
everyone.  We've tried assigning someone to print out and post the more
important emails for those without, which generally only lasts a couple of
weeks.  The phone tree (person A calls B and C, B calls D and E, C calls F
and G, D calls H and I ...) we had during planning and construction went
defunct at move-in.

The repeat offenders clearly think that the solution is for those
inconsiderate people (the ones without email, I mean) to get themselves a
computer.  (This produced a rather testy exchange recently.)

We've got people who don't respond to email; we've also got people who let
the answering machine take all their calls, or who won't answer their door
after a certain hour.  You find another way of communicating with them.

- Don't push people's tolerance by posting too many messages that ought to
have gone just to a couple of individuals, or don't relate to the community.

There's a separate community list for those members who are into
politics/activism, but some members nonetheless forward messages from
various activist lists they are on to the main community list.  Periodically
someone says Enough! and for a while the forwards subside.

Kay
Wasatch Commons