Nora Charles

When you organize an event, you try to formulate the rules so they're general, clear, cover the issues you think are most likely to come up, and not so specific that participants feel overwhelmed.

Inevitably, someone will ask for clarification on specific points, or someone will misinterpret the rules in a way you hadn't anticipated, and then you'll have to tell that person that they can or can not do that specific thing according to general rule number whatever, or you may even have to add an entirely new rule to your policy.

Adding the new rule is adding the new rule, all participants can go read the rules when they want to, and you can even make a statement that the rules have been updated.

But policy clarifications are more tricky - how should you handle those?

You might not want to make anyone feel singled out or shamed by talking about their specific issue or misbehavior publicly. On the other hand, if one person didn't know what to do, there might be 10 others feeling confused and doubtful, or just getting ready to do the same thing.

This is my suggestion: when possible, clarify publicly in a way which anonymizes the participant requiring the clarification.

Have an official channel of communication which you and all your co-mods know to use. It doesn't have to be the primary channel of communication, as long as you copy the anonymized clarification there. It could for example be a livejournal or a mailing list, something easy and quick to update.

If you use that same journal or list for all communication regarding your event, then tagging or bookmarking or adding to memories would be a good idea, just so they don't get lost in the crowd.

Remember, there is no such thing as common sense. There is no such thing as shared cultural norms - even participants from the same country may come from very different subcultures. Many people are not good at picking up on vibes from others, so they can't tell when they're upsetting them.

You don't know how many of the participants in your event are feeling insecure about having picked up the unwritten rules correctly, because people who are anxious about participating in organized group events tend to avoid drawing attention to themselves or try to pretend to fit in.

Make it clear that the actual general rules are the rules. The policy clarifications are there as a further datapoints for participants who are in doubt, but are not an exhaustive list of every possible interpretation of the rules.

I'm not suggesting you rush out and make a huge database going back years of every PM, email, and verbal answer you've ever given to any participant in one of your events. I'm suggesting that starting now, you tag or otherwise make findable your public policy clarifications.