They do certainly seem like the exception for high-drama Town Hall discussions (which AFAICT have usually been semi-private, sometimes deliberately excluding people Whom the Drama is About). I don’t think this fully solves the problem.
But it at least means it’s possible for me to choose to host a Town Hall meeting in a FB thread that’s deliberately fully public, and state explicitly: “I think it’s important here to make sure people can see the whole discussion here. If you’ve blocked people you expect to be participating here, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make top level comments (you can instead reply here). And, if you think you might have been blocked, I recommend viewing this post while logged out to see all comments.”
Having a high-drama discussion fully public violates a heuristic of “don’t air your dirty laundry in public”, and I don’t understand that heuristic enough to advocate it.
I wouldn’t classify all Town Hall meetings as “dirty laundry-esque.”
The most recent Town Hall that I considered hosting (but then decided not to for various reasons) was “hey everyone in the Berkeley Community, how are we feeling about coronavirus, and are there community-wide-norms we should be adopting?”
In that case I do expect there to be some drama (due to disagreement), but it’d be the sort of drama that you have in an Actual Literal Town Hall, which feels more appropriate to be public, to me.
They do certainly seem like the exception for high-drama Town Hall discussions (which AFAICT have usually been semi-private, sometimes deliberately excluding people Whom the Drama is About). I don’t think this fully solves the problem.
But it at least means it’s possible for me to choose to host a Town Hall meeting in a FB thread that’s deliberately fully public, and state explicitly: “I think it’s important here to make sure people can see the whole discussion here. If you’ve blocked people you expect to be participating here, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make top level comments (you can instead reply here). And, if you think you might have been blocked, I recommend viewing this post while logged out to see all comments.”
Having a high-drama discussion fully public violates a heuristic of “don’t air your dirty laundry in public”, and I don’t understand that heuristic enough to advocate it.
I wouldn’t classify all Town Hall meetings as “dirty laundry-esque.”
The most recent Town Hall that I considered hosting (but then decided not to for various reasons) was “hey everyone in the Berkeley Community, how are we feeling about coronavirus, and are there community-wide-norms we should be adopting?”
In that case I do expect there to be some drama (due to disagreement), but it’d be the sort of drama that you have in an Actual Literal Town Hall, which feels more appropriate to be public, to me.