By Tayler Mayer on Thursday, July 24th, 2008

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The revised guideline and a new guideline are posted below.

#8 Name Calling and Discrimination
DeafRead is enjoyed by all kinds of people worldwide ranging from children to senior citizens. It is also safe to assume that people from all races enjoy DeafRead. We will not post anything that is an attack on a specific race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orienation, age or religion. This offense is serious and the offending blog will be promptly considered for removal from DeafRead’s subscription.

Naming a person is still fine, however if the named person is insulted, or targeted negatively, it will raise a flag for which we will survey the post more closely. Criticizing an idea or organization is fine. Any exceedingly negative posts, regardless of whether a name is used, will be omitted.

On recorded documentation (paper and electronic), names and other identifying markers must be redacted, erased, crossed out to the point of unreadability.

We reserve the right to judge accordingly based on its degree of negativity.

#9 Changing post content/title after being published
Blogs that change their posts after its been published at DeafRead AND as a result breaches guidelines will be considered for removal.

Read the Guidelines here.

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By Tayler Mayer on Monday, July 21st, 2008

Hello everyone!

I want to discuss the last few weeks. This is happening at the right time. I had a friend who had his 30th birthday party here in Los Angeles. He’s from Northern California, but loves it here–he attended CSUN. So he has friends here, from Riverside and San Diego, and of course the Bay Area. So it was wonderful to see a lot of people and have the opportunity to discuss with several of them about the happenings on DeafRead.

Many of them were aware of what was going on. None of them were bloggers or vloggers on DeafRead, nor any of them were heavily involved with DeafRead. But they knew enough about DeafRead to offer their discussion. I really appreciate the opportunity to discuss the issues with a lot of people. Moreover, last Tuesday 4 people contacted me in one day. Most days are quiet. But as it happened 4 friends who all live here in Los Angeles contacted and reached out to me to offer their feedback and support. It was nice.

So this vlog will be based on the several discussions I’ve had with all those people. I hope to cover everything. I know there’s a lot to cover. I hope this vlog is less than 3 minutes, maybe 5 minutes, however that’s doubtful — but anyway here goes.

First of all, DeafRead is an online forum. There are other online forums with hearing participants, also those with deaf participants. Just like DeafRead, those forums will become heated, anguishing. After being fired up, they calm down just to fire up again. DeafRead isn’t the only one; other forums behaves in such cycles. A person mentioned that in AOL forums, people hurl offensive insults. Policies can be implemented to prevent this as much as possible; but being careful to avoid infringing on freedom of speech. This is the balance that is difficult to attain, arrive at.

We will do our part–our best, to find the good balance. DeafRead strongly believes in freedom of speech. And also being safe and positive as much as possible. It’s a hard balance. This relates to the post I made last week, where I said that bloggers need to take responsibility for their content, for what they say. “What they say is less important than how they say it”.

I want to combine two well-known quotes. “The pen is mightier than the sword” and “With great power comes great responsibility”.  They are famous quotes. Combing them reads: “The Pen is mightier than the sword, and with the given power, comes great responsibility.” You have a tool that is the blog. It’s up to the people to use it. Blogs can be bad, and also it can be good. It depends on the people who use it, so that’s where the responsibility lies. It can be abused. The pen that we hold. We need to think about how to use the pen. To write, to sign.

On the topic of bloggers and commenters’ responsibility, I’ve seen bloggers beginning to add commentaries about how they want their comments to be constructive and respecting. I really appreciate that.

In my previous post, I discussed the responsibility of bloggers and commenters– as well as DeafRead’s responsibility. Yes, we do have a responsibility. I’ve known that I, myself, have a responsibility. Like I said, there’s the balance of Freedom of Speech versus Censorship. I do not want DeafRead to come off as controlling, manipulating or influencing. So here’s what we want to do…to remedy this situation.

There’s two things. We will revise the guideline number 8 which addresses attacks. OK, we will add wording that addresses specifically personal attacks. Naming a person is still fine, but if the person is insulted, or targeted negatively, it will raise a red flag. We will look at it more carefully. OK? Fair?

Criticizing an idea or organization is fine. And as we’ve always done, any exceedingly negative posts will be omitted. But it’s OK to criticize an idea such as DBC, AGBell, any languages, methods or the whole picture. Insults upon a person, a president, a member will be moderated accordingly.

The second thing that DeafRead will proceed to do.. we will set up a new feature to make it easier for you to communicate with us. To inform us when a post may raise some flags. The feature will allow you to flag a post. You know other sites have this feature, for example, YouTube. We’ll be adding this feature.

Understand that to use this feature, cookies are required. If there are no cookies, it will not work. The reason is that this system will be easily abused. There are people who dislike bloggers, regardless of what they say. So DeafRead will take the number of flags with a grain of salt, and not allow it to automatically omit a post, but instead bring it to our attention, and maybe re-evaluate the post. Maybe our decision wasn’t right, and we will re-consider and have it moved to DeafRead Extra for discussion. So we’ll be working this feature in DeafRead this week. To make it easy for everyone, it will appear below the post title and summary.

So those are the two things we’ll do. Revise the guidelines to more closely monitor offending posts that include names. And the flag feature. Thumbs up?

I want to address an issue I’ve seen in a blog comment. The commenter wrote that s/he felt the editors controlled information, controlled content. That we hide posts that we don’t want people to see on DeafRead. I want to let you know that this is a very old issue.

The beautiful thing about DeafRead is DeafRead Extra. Not many people go over to DeafRead Extra to read it, but we publish everything. If it’s not on DeafRead, it’s on DeafRead Extra. Readers can see for themselves. Nothing is hidden. DeafRead cannot hide posts.

As always, if you feel that a post is deaf-related–that’s the main purpose of DeafRead, to publish deaf-related posts, if it’s not deaf-related, it’s published to DeafRead Extra–the DeafRead community has a voice. Vote to move a post to DeafRead. That’s how it’s been done on DeafRead all along. I want to emphasize that editors have always published posts that they are not in agreement with. And also, remember that DeafRead publishes posts that criticizes DeafRead. We publish them all. We have nothing to hide. If a post is published to either DeafRead or DeafRead Extra, you will see it.

Also another concern I’m addressing. A few people have asked to see which editor approved which post. I disallow this for a good reason. It is for safety. You’re positive and healthy people, but there’s some out there that aren’t. For that reason, I want to protect the team from what they could do. Harass. Cyberbullying. Or even physically –god-forbid! I hope it never reaches this point–physical threats. Ultimately, I am responsible for all editorializing on DeafRead. It is like in an organization. When the subordinates makes an error, the organization head needs to be the one who’s responsible. I accept that responsibility. If you have a beef with DeafRead, an objection, take it up with me. You can e-mail all of us, that function has been long available. You can communicate your feelings, but knowing who approved which post will never happen. If someone wants to discuss a post, it is welcomed within the team. But the final responsiblity goes with me, so if you want to hate or threaten anyone, hate or threaten me. I’ll take it. Although people know that when I created DeafRead, I didn’t realize how much it would impact the deaf community and the responsibility it requires. Because I don’t want to close DeafRead, I made the choice to take the responsibility.

I think I’ve covered enough for now. This vlog is running past 11 minutes! I apologize. I know there’s much more to the issues. Wow, there’s a lot of issues so complicated that people who began to read DeafRead in the past week missed so much, and also there’s the history that adds up.

So in summary, there will be two things DeafRead will do. Continue communicating with us through our blogs or by e-mail. Thumbs up. Thanks!

27 Comments »

By Tayler Mayer on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

These last few days have been heart-wrenching. We want you to know that it hasn’t been fun for us. We are feeling torn by what has been going on.

Whose responsibility is it to ensure that DeafRead continues as a healthy system? I say all of us, the stakeholders of DeafRead. The bloggers, vloggers, commenters, readers and the DeafRead team.

We believe that, by accepting responsibility, each stakeholder of DeafRead can do their part to maintain a healthy blogosphere. Empowering all to speak out, we wish that the truth is told, but in a constructive and positive way. It’s all in the presentation: it’s not what is said, but how it is said.

This goes for commenters too. Further, once posts are published, we have no control over the blog comments. Editorial responsibility is the blogger’s alone.

The DeafRead team’s responsibility will be to ensure that the Guidelines are followed to the best of our ability.

DeafRead is filled with people of differing opinions, sprouting from unique backgrounds. It’s up to you to harness this diversity and yet still find common ground in making our lives better. We must find it in ourselves to respect each other, and if it is at all possible, to work together.

Below I am opening a dialogue and for the sake of starting off on the right foot, be mature and respectful. I will be responsible for the comments below.

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By Jared Evans on Monday, June 9th, 2008

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DeafRead highly values the true ethos of blogging- that is a blogger sharing independent thought, meaningful analysis and personal opinions without undue influence.

When a blogger is part of an organization backed by a for-profit corporation and both of them can stand to benefit financially from the blogging effort, there is an inherent conflict of interest. These bloggers can optionally receive other means of compensation. The integrity of the blog posts then is called into question. The blogger can run the risk of becoming a mouthpiece for the corporation.

DeafRead prefers to distance ourselves from these types of blogs. This is why we continue to allow personal blogs of CI bloggers who display the true ethos of blogging. Any blog that start to push for a product to the point of almost becoming commercialized will be revisited by the DeafRead team for a possible change in its subscription status.

For example, I work for Viable VRS. If I blog about Viable VRS and to be fair to others who read it, I will put in a disclosure that I am a Viable VRS employee because I stand to benefit financially. When DeafRead picks it up, editors will know that it should be moved to DeafRead Extra. If I kept quiet the fact that I work for Viable VRS and blog often about Viable VRS and later my relationship to Viable VRS is discovered by the editors- they have the right to remove me from DeafRead due to violation of the guideline about commercial sites.

If a blog rarely talks about affiliated products, the DeafRead team will likely let the blog exist on DeafRead. It’s only when it becomes commonplace on the blog, will we revisit the blog. We are not going to remove a blog at the first sight of an affiliated product.

These are guidelines to understand the ethos of blogging.

1) Posts about non-profit organizations are entirely OK

2) Posts about for-profit organizations are OK as long as:
- the blogger is not in any way affiliated with said organization and/or
- not paid by the said organization in any form (currencies, freebies, reimbursements etc)

3) Advertisements outside of the posts are allowed

We ask that bloggers who may occasionally post about a for-profit organization, including its services and products, to mark each post as such. They will be moved to DeafRead Extra. Blogs that post about the affiliated for-profit organization endlessly won’t be subscribed to.

I hope this vlog makes it clear the reason why we recently removed an aggressively marketing blog when its relationship to a corporation was discovered. As long as there is proper disclosure or the blogger stays true to the ethos of blogging, DeafRead will continue to list deaf-related posts of the blog.

Any decision to remove a blog from DeafRead is never made lightly. Only after doing our homework, we always reach this step as a last resort. When a blog has been removed for violating the commercial site item in the guidelines, readers should be assured that this has been done because the DeafRead team found compelling and convincing evidence that the blogger has an affiliation with the for-profit company. The blogger does not need to actually receive a paycheck directly from the company. The blogger(s) may benefit in other ways, such as receiving a free trip, receiving a discount on the company’s product/service, or obtaining a scholarship. We believe it is petty behavior to target a blog by disclosing evidence.

6 Comments »

By Tayler Mayer on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

As a moderated aggregator, DeafRead publishes a wide variety of blogs and vlogs, bringing them to a bigger audience. It provides a venue for personal and not-for-profit bloggers and vloggers. We accept in good faith that all adhere to the guidelines of DeafRead unless it is proven differently. One of the DeafRead Guidelines mandates that published entries should not promote or market a product by a blogger affiliated with the product’s provider. The exception is being that of the company sponsoring DeafRead.

To be clear, blogs can carry advertisements outside the entry. We understand the need to make ends meet. However, product promotion of any type cannot exist in the entry itself. This is different from a neutral blogger who, for example, is reviewing a product.

Recently a blog was discovered to carry undisclosed ties to a major commercial industry. This blog is part of a network whose purpose is to bring awareness about a company’s product; furthermore, the blog content fits into the network’s mission statement. Consequently it has been disqualified.

To be a responsible and ethical blogger, one must reveal any commercial affiliation. Not to do so jeopardizes the credibility of the whole blog and DeafRead. The lack of transparency also violates the trust of DeafRead viewers. See #6 Disclose professional relationships

DeafRead does not tolerate any deliberate deception by any blogs. DeafRead values its credibility and embraces impartiality by enforcing its guidelines.

38 Comments »