Addition of Community Service Model to Behavioral Points System
Great news everyone!
This post outlines an integration to the current Behavioral Point System (BPS) - “Community Service”.
We relaunched BPS in 2020 with an improved version to process and track behavioral and safety reports. The process was designed to offer an opportunity to improve and keep our people accountable for their behavior. The purpose was to provide better help & support and a compassionate environment to all.
We figured out that it is not enough to guide our people to improve their behavior. Because the current system shares what they did and what they are supposed to do in order to flourish in a helpful, supportive, and compassionate environment. But, it does not tell how to improve the behavior. What steps they can take to work on their behavior to better improve it. And, this is where “Community Service” comes into the picture. Because it outlines some key steps that one can take to demonstrate that they are working to improve their behavior. More specifically, improve by learning and doing.
Continuing the example of growing a plant, community service here entails all steps you are required to take in order to get the plant growing. Knowing the right steps is significant for a seed to grow into a healthy plant.
We believe in second chances, inclusivity, accountability, and transparency. But we also believe in encouragement. The Behavioral Point System is designed to encourage our people to proactively work on their behavior in order to better it. Because we all have scope for improvement. And, community service is a way to encourage our people to take some small steps and improve while learning and serving.
For starters, the below community service model has been designed with the focus on “Group Support Chatrooms”. As it is something new we will be trialing it first in the chatrooms and based on the feedback we receive, we will iterate this process and also implement it for forums, 1-1 or other areas of the community to meet our community needs as well as offering all support and key steps to work on the behavior and stay accountable and encouraged to better.
Objective: To encourage community users to take some small steps in order to improve their behavior as well as demonstrate that they are learning to evolve, serve and support.
How will it work?
- For the initial phase, the model will be implemented in Group Support. Based on the outcomes of the first phase, it can be applied to 1-1 and forums and other areas of the community.
- Users who received behavioral points ranging from 1-3 will be the focused group for community service. If they receive more than 3 behavior points, it will follow the BPS protocols to put them on break for 2 weeks or more.
- Under Community Service, users will be provided some steps to work on their behavior. The steps will vary depending upon the point and broadly these steps will include
- Completing certain training or guidance.
- Reading some posts
- Completing X amount of group support chats in a month.
- At the successful completion of Community Service, the assigned behavioral point will be reduced by 80%. For example, if you received 1 behavior point and completed community service steps, at the end of the month, your point will be reduced to 0.2 (Point to note: In the current BPS protocol, it takes 3 months to get your behavior point down by 80%.)
- The rest of the process from filing reports to the applicability of the system will remain the same as outlined in the BPS post here.
- The community service model will be applicable moving forward.
I hope you all may find this addition helpful and please know we all are here to support and guide you. We will continue to reiterate and improve the process to better serve you and the community. We believe in you.
All comments, thoughts, and feedback are welcome.
@ASilentObserver is it really helping more to improve? The feedback so general such "improve your professional levels" never gave enough informations for listeners be able to improve. As a mentor I struggle often to help listeners to understand where is their review from. And as someone who already received this kind of report, I never really been able to know what exactly I did wrong and have to improve. If you want people know what they can do for improving, then give more specific feedback. Thank you
@vivelespatates
Excellent! I have got report when I didn't know what was wrong. I also got report when the mod said I wrote this and that, I asked her to go back to read once more because I didn't write what she said, she never asked for apologize.
I'm not opposed to this but I am confused about trialing something new when what already exists is very confusing and needs work.
We still don't have a set of rules all stated in one place.
When it comes to forum moderation, some capabilities were revoked without any information regarding that and when I asked about it my question wasn't answered while someone who asked a question hours after me had theirs answered.
Things are being handled in a backwards manner IMO. Instead of making it clear to members what can and cannot be done, community service is being implemented. This should only come afterwards. Also, we should have higher standards for listeners knowing the rules, not lower. Why is confidentiality for example 0 points, especially with the ability to reduce it? If we give listeners the grace of oops, didn't know, shouldn't we offer the same to members who are not trained when coming here?
In addition to have a one stop spot for guidelines/rules what is posted elsewhere should really be consistent. As an example, for rules relating to profiles we have:
Please choose a head shot (picture of your face), nature scene, art/symbol/image (i.e, Hope), or animal. Please do not include pictures of famous people, sexually suggestive pics, or cartoon pics. You must be fully clothed in your picture. The goal of the picture is to express warmth, compassion, and kindness. Images must be in JPG or PNG format and less than 5MB. Thank you!
Usernames - Using terms like 'Therapist' or 'Life Coach' ... in the user name are not allowed.
Celebrity usernames ✔
Celebrity photos - for listeners ✖
- Celebrity photos - for members ✔
- Cartoons ✔
(In the 4 points above, ✔ means allowed, all of those below is the opposite, they get flagged)
Listeners (usernames)-
Saying they are a doctor, nurse, psychologist, counsellor or therapist etc. ✔
Anything relating to drugs/alcohol ✔
-
Celebrities ✖
Members (usernames)
Anything about suicide ✔
Celebrities ✖
Listeners Bios
-
Saying they are a doctor, nurse, psychologist, counsellor or therapist etc. ✔
Listener (Profile PIctures)
- Celebrities ✔
Member (Profile Pictures)
- Inappropriate cartoons ✔
-
Celebrities ✖
I went to multiple places to get these and as a long term member I actually have to think this through about what the celebrity rules are for me. To be fair here, the points with the checks aren't meant for the average member using the site, but this is actually the only place where there is clear verification of what rules are being used for celebrity related things that I know of. Ditto for the suicide mentions, I knew that members cannot be currently in crisis but I had no idea that past crisis experiences for example can't be mentioned in bios.
We are said to have a service leadership model here:
"Traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the top of the pyramid. By comparison, the servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible."
In many ways I think we do this well. Currently our guidelines don't, I think they are most confusing and difficult to find to the people we are meant to be serving. If members aren't understanding them I don't think the solution is to put the onus on them to educate themselves better, the onus is on us, 7 cups to offer them easy to access and understandable information. Right now some chatroom rules involve a forum hunt, that's not fair.
I do realize things are currently a work in progress. It seems odd to me though that we would implement something where members need to put in effort and learn to reduce behaviour points when they didn't even realize they did something wrong to begin with because the guidelines are a mishmash. I would much rather see effort being put into fixing the existing problems first, then we can trial new things.
I also find it odd we would treat similar violations differently. If one user does something in the chatrooms and someone else does the same in the forums, why do we allow one to be reduced and not the other?
Sorry for the multiple fonts, copying and pasting from multiple places isn't cleaning up nicely.
@AffyAvo Thank you for the support and sharing your feedback, Affy. It is helpful. We are always up to simplify the process in order to offer a better experience to our community. The team and I are discussing ways to consolidate and simplify it for the better. I could use all your help in making it possible. I will be reaching out to you for further discussion on it. Thank you for being thoughtful.
Thanks Obs! I know simplifying the piecemealed guidelines that have been implemented over time isn't a simple thing to do.
TL;DR Because yikes that is a big post.
Put the effort into fixing the guidelines and points system first. Add this in after, don't penalize people harsher based on where the same violation occurs on the site.
It sounds like it would be helpful to deal with toxic behavior that could impact negative on some people.
We have to remember that users are often vulnerable so I think protection and prevention would be better but this helps
The safety of people should come firsr.
I think this could be a way of protecting people from continuing to make not good decisions and affecting people they come into contact with directly.
We need to avoud situations where people can use a platform like this for reasons other then what it was intended for.
Empathy, compassion, understanding etc
@imaginativePear6493 Agreed with you, Pear. Providing a safe and supportive environment to share, listen and support is our priority. We will not be compromising the safety of our users but at the same time encouraging our people to take steps to improve their behavior. And, we are constantly striving to make our community better.
@ASilentObserver
That's what I got from this post. It's to help people to improve by giving them the chance to. If they are given the chance to and possibly shown how to improve it's for the better not just for them but for everyone it helps to prevent people from falling through the cracks but also protects the dignity and safety of users. I'd really like to see people work through it, because it is possible.
We need to be aware of what could happen good and bad
I agree with you totally on this one @silentobserver
@ASilentObserver
The fact that a whole bunch of my posts got deleted without warning, comment, notification, feedback or apology demonstrates otherwise.
Especially when the trigger didn't seem to be the insulting/demeaning comments directed towards me (which stayed up for a few days), but rather that I followed my Listener training (Let the member know you are uncomfortable and end the chat) as the posts got deleted within hours of me doing just that..Everything needs context. Intentional or misunderstood or
@ASilentObserver That's a very thoughtful idea, thank you for the post.
How will repeated misdemeanor be taken into account? Especially if they repeat their behaviour despite reading the guides?
Also like @vivelespatates mentioned, would it be a better idea to provide more specific feedback so that the offenders know what exactly they did wrong so they won't repeat it?
@LavenderHere Thank you for the thoughts, Lav. Good questions. We will be keeping our people accountable for their all behavior and processed as per the behavioral point system. And, for the starters, we keeping the trial of this initiative limited for the group who received points in the range of 1-3.
And, we are working on providing specific feedback at the best of our abilities.
@ASilentObserver Thank you for your response and looking forward to the update
> All comments, thoughts, and feedback are welcome.
There is such a well known bias where people will prefer a solution they have invested in over a better solution, such an invitation at this point (i.e. at launch, after 100% of expected time/effort committed) seems like an empty one.
In case it's not, 7cups needs to prioritise making the rules knowable because they are currently not. I've seen people be told to "not use censored words" but when I ask the person who gave that instruction for the list of words that can't be used, they aren't even aware of such a list to provide. You must follow this instruction or you face punishment, but you can't actually reasonably follow it. Considering one of the censored words is ginger, a cooking ingredient (the context it is repeatedly discovered by people as a censored word in, including a Mod).. it's actually ridiculous.
I reckon I can get in trouble for breaking a "guideline" without actually breaking it, simply because the system is so broken..
@ListeningDoll
About a week ago, I had a 1-on-1 chat where my member got censored for using the word "ginger".
After we figured out what was happening, I used the Censor Updates form (listed on the 7CupsCommunity profile page) to request that this word be removed from the censor list. Hopefully it gets updated.
@ListeningDoll Ginger is censored because it's the name of a competitor in the online therapy and mental health support market. Just a few of our other competitors are also censored.
There are four lists of words, phrases and word patterns, censored in different ways in different contexts, and totalling maybe 3,000 words. The lists are not hard to find, but I don't think it's practical to memorize them.
I agree that the current system is broken. A solution would be to allow all messages to be sent, provide a filter to prevent the display of certain words and phrases, and provide an opt-out in Settings for experienced members and listeners who don't want the censorship.
Charlie
@RarelyCharlie
Thanks for context. That does seem unhelpful
Hey obs can I pm you About this
@HopieRemi Sure Remi
Okay waiting for your reply @ASilentObserver <3
This seems like a good idea, in theory. The members who are genuinely working towards improving, will of course do better. However, If someone is going into the chat rooms intent on causing a disruption it's not going to matter to them about a point system or doing community service. The same applies for the forums. They will simply create a new account and return. Until there is some way to prevent repeat offenders from returning, I'm afraid that no amount of points or community service will help, but this is just my opinion. To grow a healthy plant you need to have a good "seed" to start with and not all "seeds" are good.
@mytwistedsoul I agree. This may help with people who really didn't understand something or just got caught up in something. Those who purposely come to troll or harass, no.
"disobedience is caused by misunderstanding, confusion, inconsistency or lack of reinforcement, never by refusal to obey."
this update:
- doesn't remove the confusion : the listeners still don't know what improve, and there is still no clear rules or guidelines.
- it increase inconsistency : the offences in an area of site be treated differently.
- doesn't reduce the inconsistency present in the rules, neither in how mods and admins enforce differently rules
- renforcement : it only plays a bit here, but then, it renforce to do more, and not really an alternative behavior or what is done well. like if an user has no report at all in a long time or really make positive contribution to the site, it NEEDED to get behavior reports instead.
