What do we mean by "All topics of interest to the LGBT community"?

[Ms. Toad]

21. Maybe I can be a bit clearer

I am not trying to make you feel uncomfortable - I see this as a learning process, using my locked thread as a tool. No hard feelings on my part, and no alterior motive. My discussions behind the scene with HillWilliam were friendly and I am convinced that all of you were acting with the best of intentions for the group in a situation in which everyone was dealing with completely new rules, everyone is a volunteer without unlimited quantities of time to spend learning the rules, and you made the best decision you could to try to avoid the problems of DU2.

What I am driving at is getting clear about what the rules say should happen, what did happen, and how to create some guidelines (or tweak our purpose) so that when the new host(s) is chosen she has better guidelines to act on - and to back her up for the actions she takes so she doesn't burn out immediately because of all the heat that squabbling about whether her actions were legitimate might create.

So - from Skinner's journal about group hosts: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=journals&uid=100801

"As I've said many times, Forum Hosts can do only one thing: lock a discussion thread that goes against the Statement of Purpose of a particular forum. . . . In short: On DU2 a thread can be locked for any reason or no reason at all . . .On DU3, the Forum Hosts can't pull some random rule out of their backside to justify locking anything. They get only ONE rule to enforce: The Statement of Purpose of their forum. That's it. If they lock for any other reason they have overstepped their authority.

So, in practice, you could throw up the most offensive, most inflammatory piece of garbage, and if it was on-topic for the forum the Host could not legitimately lock it. Now, it would likely get alerted as a community standards violation, but that goes to the randomly-selected jury -- not the Hosts.

From the Community Moderating System: (http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=modsystem )
Group Hosts perform a similar role to forum Hosts, but they have additional powers. 1) They can lock threads which they believe violate their group's stated purpose; 2) they can pin threads to the top of their group; 3) they can block out members whom they believe are not adhering to their group's purpose; 4) they can make other members Hosts of their group; and 5) they can remove any Host of their group that became a Host after they did.

Now back to me

So - based on your post (and on the comments HillWilliam made to me in our behind the scenes conversations), it seems to me that you didn't really decide whether the topic of the discussion I started was of interest to the LGBT community - what you (collectively) decided was the thread should be locked. Perhaps for good reasons (and certainly with your hearts in the right place for this group) - but not for the one reason that DU3 allows a host to lock a thread.

Maybe we need to change the purpose of the group (and I don't know if we can, or how, we do that) - it may be better not to discuss certain things for a while. If that is the case, maybe we can change our purpose to "all topics of interest to the LGBT community except" and add a list of topics that we, collectively, think we shouldn't be talking about - at least until feelings mend, even though they are of interest to the LGBT community. Speculation about how this new system in DU3 might impact members of this group might be one of those topics.

What I am hoping by this subthread to do is clarify the steps that ought to be taken before a thread is locked, and the reason a thread can be locked, so that when a more heated topic comes along and a thread is locked, the hosts can easily point to our statement of purpose and say, "See - you were discussing X, and X is not a legitimate topic to discuss because it says so right here in our statement of purpose."

Or - in the alternative - we might affirm that we really do want to be able to discuss anything of interest to the LGBT community here, even if having some of those discussions right now make us uncomfortable.