And that is precisely my concern.
But, assuming that I am wrong and those running the show really do believe it off topic, we need to be clearer about the purpose of the group. "Of interest to the LGBT community" is a pretty broad purpose.
If our hosts do not have clear guidelines about how to handle the disparate views of whether a topic is or is not of interest to the LGBT community we are going to burn out hosts out very quickly.
Authors will, as I did, correspond with the locking host asking for explanations. That involved a considerable amount of HillWilliam's time and mine, and that of the other hosts consulted.
I am in process/structure building mode right now - it is not a substantive topic in which I am emotionally invested. My reaction, when I discovered my thread was locked, was Huh? How on earth is a thread talking about the treatment of LGBT DUers off topic in the DU LGBT group? That is still my reaction.
Had this been a contentious issue within in our community, and the subject of a robust substantive discussion that was locked because of an alert (or more than one) by someone who found the discussion uncomfortable, I suspect the discussions (in addition to just being time consuming) would not have been pretty.
Our hosts need to be able to clearly articulate why a topic is not of interest to the LGBT community (i.e. off topic) - particularly when there is broad participation in a thread that is expressly about our community. If we don't give them the tools to do that, we are leaving them vulnerable to allegations of playing favorites, closing threads based on the host's level of comfort with challenging discussions, etc.
Tools might include:
Narrowing - or better articulating - the purpose of the group
Providing a list of the kinds of topics which are of interest to the LGBT community
Providing a list of the kinds of topics that are not of interest to the LGBT community
Carving out discussions from the purpose that we decide (preferably as a group) are not in our best interest to have right now - and identifying them as carve-outs from the purpose in the statement of purpose.
Setting out guidelines about what do when there is a clear public expression of interest in an LGBT specific topic (making the discussion clearly within the purpose of the group) but a private expression of disinterest (the alert(s))
Expressly permitting the host to lock threads for reasons other than being off topic (and to be able to give that different reason in the public locking explanations)
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