Using web based services to build better strata communities

0:00 – Building Better Strata Communities With Web Services

0:00 Jim Hooton: So first off, I want to welcome everyone. I put some thought into the bigger picture, if you will, and to me the bigger picture has to do with building better strata communities. And so I want to talk about that, and I want to have an honest discussion about it, because I've learned a lot of interesting things in the last four or five years that made me realize that, as someone who's really interested in technology, I have a little different perspective than maybe the average person on council.

0:41 So I'm going to talk about this: can web services really help us build better strata communities, or are we just getting caught into the hype of computers? Before I do that, first off let me just tell you very quickly who we are. Our parent company is ClearPro Software, which is an island owned and managed business. We provide web services for stratas and councils, and we call that the organizer.

1:09 We also provide a provincial bulletin board for strata owners and councils called the Forum. So that's our involvement in this business. Here's what got me going on this thing.

1:25 – Why Councils Resist Strata Web Services

1:25 Jim Hooton: I think understanding why so many councils are resisting using web services helped us in our development. It isn't about saving time, it's not about eye candy, it's not about useful, efficient routines. This is where us techies put the emphasis. We tend to look at these things and say, oh my gosh, I could save hours of time by firing around the minutes of the council meeting or whatever it is.

1:59 And, oh my gosh, this is such a lovely design, and all those sorts of things. But I'll tell you, councils don't care anything about that. And really what I have found is that councils regularly express their fear of providing a forum for bad behaviour. I've had this happen over and over again. We offer a free month, and often two or three months if councils need to have that, to explore and play with the software.

2:28 But time and time again they'll come back and they'll say, you know, we've talked about this and our concern is we're just going to provide the malcontents in our strata with one more vehicle to complain to us about. So I think there's a genuine fear there. It's a legitimate fear, and I have to confess that as a kind of techy guy I tend to ignore that. I tend to say, well, but it's so much more efficient and you're saving so much more time, doesn't that outweigh these?

3:06 No, it doesn't. These are volunteers, and they get beat up pretty bad sometimes, right? So it's a legitimate fear. So if we're going to use technology we're going to have to do some thinking about that. So I want to use the StrataCommons Forum as a test case for you, and talk about what we learned in this process.

3:33 – StrataCommons Forum as a Test Case

3:33 Jim Hooton: So I've already mentioned that we have a province wide forum. Owners and council members can ask questions. A few minutes ago somebody was talking about bonding, and whether they needed to have people who are coming on site be bonded, and somebody will answer. It's a great system. We've developed a solid core of experienced users who answer questions for us. I don't answer them, I'm the moderator, I've got to stay neutral in this thing, and you'll hear more about that.

4:07 We have 910 people on the Forum right now and it's active, there's lots of stuff going on. So in the last four years of running the Forum though, we've only had three cases of what I would call inappropriate posts. And that of course is what councils are worried about. They're worried about inappropriate posts, they're worried about being criticized, they're worried about nasty business going on. Okay, but we've only had three cases, and now I'll tell you why I think that is.

4:42 We learned a lot of stuff from others when we decided to set up the Forum. We went out and did some looking, and fortunately we kind of latched on to this idea that fear of bad behaviour is a really legitimate and serious problem. So we did some research on this. There's a number of projects looking at this fear issue, and we pulled out three or four recommendations that we learned, and I'm going to go over them in detail, but I'll just run through them quickly here.

5:16 You have to communicate expectations clearly, you have to ensure that negative behaviour is dealt with quickly and visibly, and I'm going to give you more on that. We have to ensure that the principles of administrative justice — that is, things like the right to defend yourself, or a fair hearing, and so on and so forth — are considered in the processes.

5:38 – Rules of the Road for Forums

5:38 Jim Hooton: So, taking that information, we came up with this approach. I'm going to give you an example. We developed, first off, a statement that helps us communicate the expectations, and we called it the rules of the road. And I'm going to just switch over here, and this is taking us to our documentation on our website. You can see here it's quite detailed, we've got nine items listed here.

6:09 I'm not going to go through all of them, but I just want to highlight a couple of things in here that I thought were really useful. And I want to tell you that the people who developed this actually offered it to us to use. And go ahead, copy it over for your use and edit and modify, we're just delighted that you're interested. But this is something I thought was so helpful: please treat StrataCommons Forum — and it could be, of course, your own strata organizer or whatever software you're using — with the same respect you would a public park.

6:42 We too are a shared community resource, a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation. And then we go much more into detail and depth around that kind of stuff. So you need to put the time into developing your rules of the road, because understanding what the expectations are is a big part of the deal.

6:59 – Anonymity, Accountability and Online Abuse

7:10 Jim Hooton: Okay, so second point that we learned in the research is about immediate and visible consequences. The research suggests that online abuse is correlated with accountability. The greater the anonymity, the more you're likely to get abuse, and that's what research shows. So that's the issue in this whole thing: people with email, and people on these websites and so on and so forth, somehow have the notion that they're not accountable for their behaviour.

7:52 It's much easier, and we know this, it's much easier to use a fake email to send a message to somebody you don't like, right, because they don't know who you are and they're never going to find out, are they? You hope. It's quite a different thing if you're face to face, right, and the face to face thing has to do with accountability: he or she is standing right in front of you, you're going to have to deal with this.

8:18 So we have to have systems built into our web services that are going to manage this for us. So I'm going to take you now to show you what our website does about this. Okay, here's our approach, here we go. So what you're looking at is a demo that I put together.

8:41 – Demo: Flagging a Post for Moderation

8:41 Jim Hooton: We have a website that we use to test things in, and I'm using it. It's a little different than the Forum, for those of you who know the Forum, you're looking at this saying, well, this isn't exactly the Forum. Well, it's not, but the Forum is based on the organizer, and I'm sure you'll appreciate that I didn't want to do this on the Forum with almost a thousand people watching, right?

9:05 So the message is, I want a fake message that nobody's going to know about, and if I do it on the Forum, 910 people are going to be flagging it as a problem. So, I'm putting on my user hat right now, and I've received a summary message, or I'm on the website itself, and I see this message. And here it is, I read: I think that council is a bunch of buffoons, give your head a shake, a bunch of tinpot despots.

9:33 Who do you bloody well think you are? I know where you live. Right, says I, and in my user hat I go, geez, I don't want that kind of stuff going on in here. So what do you do? In our system — and I hope others have it as well — you go here, you have a click that opens the message, you can make a comment on it, or you can, here, flag for moderation.

10:04 You click on flag for moderation, up comes the little box and you type in whatever it is, XYZ, this is not appropriate, etc, right? And then you click on this flag. Okay, and the way it goes now, you just saw that, I hope, flash up. So I'm going to put my moderator hat on now. Taking my user hat off, putting my moderator hat on, I'm going to go to my email and, son of a gun, look at what came up: a message sent to me by our system.

10:42 It's saying that something needs to be flagged. Okay, now on my system, on the Forum, we've got a number of volunteers who are also moderators who work with me.

10:49 – Moderator Email Alerts and Response Options

10:53 Jim Hooton: I don't do this on my own, so everybody in that group would get this message. Tells us what the message is and everything, right? And we have a link here that we click, right, and it runs back here.

11:05 Ryan Grant: It wasn't… we've got a problem, it just wasn't showing the email. I think you were showing an email, right, in your email, and the email didn't show up.

11:17 Jim Hooton: No?

11:17 Ryan Grant: We didn't see it on the screen.

11:19 Jim Hooton: Now, now can you see the email?

11:22 Ryan Grant: Yes, now we can see it.

11:22 Jim Hooton: Okay. So as moderator then, in my personal email or whatever email you set up to receive this, I get this notice that says the following message flagged for moderation, and there's a link that takes me back to our service. And here's the little process for flagging something, and you can see it gives me the conversation, gives me the author, who was me. I had a bad day that day, I have to admit, wasn't too happy with council.

11:59 Anyway. And as moderator I'm given a number of choices that I can do. I can ignore it, because I decide whoever flagged this is being a little over sensitive. I will of course, in this process, as a good administrative justice process, I need to go to the author and say, you know, I've looked at this, I think you're out of line, you're being kind of… you're threatening here, this is dangerous, we don't want this stuff.

12:35 Do you want me to remove the message at your request? If not, I will remove it as inappropriate, or say it's off topic, or say it's spam. So in this case I'm going to choose, having talked with my little group of moderators, we're going to choose author's request. And by the way, that's what happens most of the time. Of the three that we've dealt with on our Forum, the author said, hey, I had a bad day and I let fly, I'm really sorry, I'm really embarrassed, but I don't know how to delete it, right, which you can't do.

13:11 So we click on that, and then what happens is, when we go back to conversations, you see this message here. This is our original conversation bulletin board, and you can see the message has been removed at the author's request. You wouldn't see this moderate this message thing, that's because I'm in admin mode here, because I want to be able to do everything that I can do. Okay, so that message has been flagged, anybody who saw that message previously is going to realize that the moderators have stepped in and taken some action on this.

13:52 – Administrative Justice and Fair Process

13:52 Jim Hooton: Okay, so, quick word about administrative justice. You've got to be upfront about the process, and right, there's no surprise management here. You don't want to surprise people with rules that they aren't aware of. You have to give the person who's accused of writing a bad post an opportunity for some input in this thing. And like I say, nine times out of 10 they'll say, bad day, little too much wine, nine o'clock at night, I should have been going to bed, and blah blah blah.

14:23 I like to have somebody in the strata, or on the forum, who everybody respects, as a third party in the process. That's a very helpful thing to do.

14:35 – Anti-Bullying Bylaw and Tribunal Limits

14:37 Jim Hooton: Last but not least, I want to make a comment. I learned this just a couple of weeks ago, I was at a CHOA conference, it was a really good seminar, and the keynote speaker there was Cora Wilson, who's a strata lawyer on the island here. And I learned something that I didn't know, and that is that if you don't have a bylaw that speaks about anti-bullying and harassment, the tribunal isn't going to help you.

15:06 Now, I realize that's a last resort, but I think it should just be mentioned in this thing, because sometimes you're going to have to go to the last resort, sometimes somebody's going to push real hard, so you want to be able to use all the tools that you possibly can. Okay, so I just wanted to mention that, because I didn't know that. So we need to develop an anti-bullying and harassment bylaw for our strata here, right?

15:35 So, to wrap things up and allow lots of time for questions: yes, I think we can use web services to build community, but we need to lay the groundwork. You've got to prepare to move into these things, you can't just expose people to it and expect it to work.

15:55 – Groundwork for Adopting Web Services

15:57 Jim Hooton: So, communicate your expectations to your users. Okay, that's what we call rules of the road. Work with them, in fact get a group of people in your strata together to say, let's try to express what we want to see in terms of behaviour. Two: use a service that allows for removal of inappropriate content. You've got to be able to get rid of that stuff, you don't want to leave it lying around.

16:23 That same service needs to be public — I don't mean public, I mean public to your strata, right, needs to be public to your strata, so everybody knows. That's the accountability mechanism, they know there's a moderator, they know something's going to happen to the message. And by the way, I'll just mention, on the Forum we've kind of got part of those rules where three times and you're out.

16:47 If you do this three times we're kicking you out of here. So, administrative justice, don't forget, people have some rights when you're making administrative decisions related to services you're providing to them. Consider those. And lastly, you better think about a bullying and harassment bylaw. There we go, thanks for listening. Here's where you can find us if you want more information.

17:16 Ryan Grant: Awesome, that was great.

17:20 – Q&A: Self-Managed Stratas and System Admins

17:20 Ryan Grant: Let's see if there's any additional comments or questions here. There is one question regarding self-managed. They wanted to know, do they need any managed staff to be helping out as well? Do you recommend, or is this really streamlined and designed and efficient for self-run stratas?

17:56 Jim Hooton: Well, that's mostly where we provide service, to self-managed stratas for sure. What you really need — you don't need to have a special tech, but you do need someone who's going to be the advocate for the software. You need somebody in the strata who's interested in this stuff, likes it, and they'll become the… they'll sow the seeds, if you will, encourage everybody. And that's how we work, by the way.

18:31 I mean, I don't deal with individual owners in all the stratas that we've got signed on. What I deal with is what we call our system admins. So there's one person for council who becomes the administrator, and they're kind of the key person. They learn the software, we'll train them, I train them, so that they're feeling comfortable and good about it. So yeah.

18:54 Ryan Grant: Awesome. There's not a question but a statement, somebody said they are a Forum user for the last few years and they find the Forum helpful, the public community one at StrataCommons.

19:11 Jim Hooton: So, exactly, just mentioned that. And I know I alluded to this, but we developed the organizer first as a platform and then we developed the Forum after it. And basically the Forum is identical to the organizer, it's just that we've pulled a couple of services out. Like, you don't need projects and you don't need requests and stuff like that, but everything else is the same and it works the same.

19:42 So it's very simple, very clean, very fast, very straightforward.

19:48 Ryan Grant: Awesome. Let's see, it looks like that's it for questions. I guess again they can find out more information at stratacommons.ca. Thank you so much Jim, and it looks like we are just on time for the next presenter, so that was great.

20:11 Jim Hooton: All right, thanks for the opportunity.

20:11 Ryan Grant: Yes, anytime. Thanks for coming Jim, and we'll talk to you soon.

20:17 Jim Hooton: Take care.

20:17 Ryan Grant: Bye for now.