On Building a Respectful Communications System All interpersonal communications are to be separated into push and pull delivery.
Push Immediate notification, per User settings. Ineligible for first-time communications. Cold calling is impossible. All first-time communications are routed to Pull delivery.
Pull Senders may designate as Urgent a new request to initiate communication. Misuse of the Urgent label is determined by Recipients. When a Recipient indicates that a message labeled Urgent is not Urgent, the Sender is notified. That Sender is no longer able to designate messages Urgent to that Recipient. All further messages from that Sender to that Recipient will go into NonUrgent. The Recipient may also decide not to receive any messages from a particular Sender. Recipients may choose to inform or not inform Senders of how their messages are being routed.
Certification All Users of the Communication Exchange (CommEx) are Certified. The System records all data relating to message transmission except the contents of messages. Abusive Senders may lose their Sending Privileges. These actions happen automatically (with degrees of advance notice). It is never up to any single user to discipline any other single user. That is why we are building a system. There are professional communications workers who will perform human checks on the system, when requested and authorized to do so.
Abuse of CommEx [1] It is believed that abuse will go down as its success goes down. We strive to build a system that offers no incentive for abuse. Financial incentives will fade as our society reduces all financial motivations for behavior. Emotional motives for abusive communication will likely never be fully eliminated. Users of the network who receive such messages may report them in such a way that directs increased community care and attention to the Senders. [2]
More on Pull Messages' Labels It will probably always be true that more information exists than any one person can consider in a lifetime. It will thus most likely remain the case that we receive more messages than we can attend to. Labels help keep the system running smoothly. Labels are subject to revision. Currently considered Labels include: Official, Urgent, Personal, Social, Commercial, and General.
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[1] You know what I don't like this name, CommEx. I'll reconsider it. All this material is rough rough draft, you know.
[2] Based on many stories our brains may be prompted to view such a statement as a sinister threat. We will “direct increased community care and attention” to you! We have far too much experience dreaming of dystopias. We will link to the related section in the Social Compact when it becomes available. As we all know this project is our group effort and always subject to revision.
Taking a break