Soft Security
Soft Security is a mode of self governance and unobtrusive security for online communities.
Soft Security emerged out of a community necessity within Meatball wiki to have a way to deal with potential vandalizing, spamming, and general attacks upon their very open system.
The nature of Meatball Wiki is to be a community space that contains pages that are opnly editable by anyone. Some of the potential "dangers" include:
- An attacker, such as an angry user who might attack another community member with words or worse.
- A "klutz", or person who accidentally or inadvertantly destroys community work.
- A transient "vandal" who purposefully destroys work for fun, or to "spam" the community to boost their search engine rankings.
Soft Security deals with the open nature of the wiki system and it's potential dangers with a combination of technological and social solutions that have emerged from the community that makes up meatball wiki. All of the social and technological solutions rely upon the active engagement of the majority Meatball Wiki community to work. This leverages the inherent value (or streangth in numbers) of the network of people who make up Meatball wiki. Thus, Soft Security is only possible through collective action.
For instance, one Soft Security technological solution is to create an audit trail that anyone can view (recent changes), and a mechanism that allows anyone to reverse a change. But this solution requires that enough people will care enough to look at the recent changes of Meatball Wiki, and then will care enough to go and reverse the change when needed.
The core social principles of Soft Security are (quoted from MeatBall Wiki):
- AssumeGoodFaith. People are almost always trying to be helpful; so, we apply the PrincipleOfFirstTrust, confident that occasional bad will be overwhelmed by the good.
- PeerReview. Your peers can ensure that you don't damage the system.
- ForgiveAndForget. Even well-intentioned people make mistakes. They don't need to be permanent.
- LimitDamage. When unpreventable mistakes are made, keep the damage within tolerable limits.
- FairProcess. Kim and Mauborgne's theory that being transparent and giving everyone a voice are essential management skills.
- NonViolence. Do no violence lest violence seek you.
The core systemic principles of Soft Security are (quoted from MeatBall Wiki):
- ReversibleChange (as discussed above). If anything that can be done, can be undone, no damage need be permanent. Version control is one way of making changes reversible. You can reverse a change without knowing who made it originally.
- DelayAction. When you can't reverse a change, delay that action until PeerReview has a chance to prevent disaster.
- EnlargeSpace. In order to preserve GlobalResources, create more public space.
- DevolvePower. Hand over as much control of the community to the community.