Yesterday’s Rockville Roundtable Breaks Ground

If you missed yesterday’s Rockville Roundtable lunch at Benjarong Restaurant, you missed a great conversation! These monthly lunches started out as a lark back in February 2008, when I announced I would be having lunch at a certain place on a certain day, and invited whoever wanted to to join me (Dutch treat of course). I thought maybe three people would show up, but a dozen people came to join me and right then and there we decided to keep it going. Every month we meet at a different place, and we change the day of the week, too, so more people can make it over time.

At these lunches everyone is welcome and there are no set agendas. City and state elected officials have attended and it is always an interesting give-and-take. People just bring up topics that interest them and we all talk about them.

Yesterday we broke ground in two ways.

Candidates Calling

First of all, we had four candidates for office attend: Piotr Gajewski (who announced he is running for re-election to city council); Cheryl Kagan (running for state senate in 2010); Phyllis Marcuccio (running for mayor); and Waleed Ovase (running for city council).

Each one of these candidates had a chance to say a few words — and they did! Each gave a quick overview of why they are running and what they would bring to the office, if elected.

There was some controversy ahead of time, which is another first for this lunch. Piotr had let me know ahead of time that he wanted to declare his intentions at the Roundtable. While the lunches are always open to everybody, and to any topic, I was also a bit worried about how it would really work. By getting together every month with an ever-changing group of Rockville friends, we’ve created a very inviting and intimate space and I did not want to lose that. Low-key, small scale — that’s us. The Roundtable is not a “political” lunch, it’s a civic lunch. But the Gazette mentioned in yesterday’s edition that Piotr would be making an announcement and I got a few emails from regular attendees that were uncomfortable about that.

My feeling was that I would allow any candidate to do a similar thing — which is not to make a big speech but just to talk about what they are up to.

In the end that’s what happened: all the candidates got their say, but it was not a big deal. I have not spoken to some of the people who raised concerns since the lunch (I had to run and do some other work for a client right afterward), but my sense was that there was a good balance struck between fairness to all, openness of the space, and the fact that like it or not it’s election season and there are fellow community members who are standing for election and who would like to tell us about that. (I welcome differing views on how it went, either in the comments or directly by email.)

Then we moved on to what, for me, was the real ground breaking aspect of yesterday’s lunch.

Talk About Comments

As many readers know, Rockville Central has had some growing pains over the last few months. Our readership has shot up and with new friends we’ve gotten a lot more new activity in the comments. Sometimes the tone has gotten mean, and we’ve struggled to figure out a reasonable policy that balances all the values we are trying to uphold: helpfulness, openness, fairness, transparency.

The difficult thing is that there is no one correct answer to this conundrum. I have been getting many concerned emails, but they are on all sides of the issue, ranging from a strong conviction that it’s crucial to retain the ability to comment anonymously so people feel free to speak, to the equally strong conviction that we need to filter more objectionable comments than we now do and that all people should be required to give a full name and address.

So Cindy Cotte Griffiths and I have been struggling with what to do, now that we are getting, some days, ten and more comments where we used to get ten a month.

And so, we talked about it yesterday and I was simply over the moon by the time the conversation ended. Everyone had very, very good points. But even more uplifting was how the exchange of views allowed us all to see new possibilities for how we might handle the issue, and to see how other points of view besides our own — even if we don’t agree with them — are also valid.

By the end of the lunch, we had hit upon what I think is a good plan for moving forward, and I will be implementing a new comment policy over the next few days. The main points of the new comment policy will be:

• All comments will be held for review before posting
• We will apply a fairly strict rule for what gets approved. We’re not going to approve comments that criticize other people in personal or mean-spirited ways,
• Instead of just deleting such comments, though, we’ll send a note to the commenter telling them why we are not approving their comment and encouraging them to resubmit

Note that anonymous comments are OK but will have the same criteria applied. And so you will have to leave a real email address because otherwise we can’t contact you if there is an issue with your comment.

We’ll see how this goes for a while — it may be more work than Cindy and I can reasonably do, but I think it will be OK. Some folks may have to wait for up to several hours before their comment appears, if we are away from the computer for some reason.

But I think this balances a lot of the competing issues when it comes to comments. Remember, we want to be fair and open for all, but most of all we want to be helpful to the community. That means we are trying to create an online space that is polite — like a face to face town meeting, but you don’t have to get dressed up first.

I want to thank everyone who came yesterday, for helping think through this difficult issue. I also encourage people to keep up the conversation in the comments!

My plan is to begin implementing these comment policies over the next few days.

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