Came across this nice Slideshare on Community 2.0: The Business of Online Communities, and spotted HBO’s Standards page on slide 29 with these examples of acceptable and unacceptable comment:

1. Be respectful and civil to other members, even if you disagree with them. Differences of opinion are OK; personal attacks are not. ACCEPTABLE POST: Member X, what you said is stupid and irrelevant. Why would you believe that? UNACCEPTABLE: Member X, you are a stupid idiot. Only a jackass would believe that.
2. Any unacceptable content (posts, member names, or subject lines containing profanity, sexually graphic or offensive language, etc) will be deleted. ACCEPTABLE POST: Wow! The shit sure hit the fan on The Wire last night! UNACCEPTABLE: Member X, I can’t believe you didn’t like last night’s episode, what a dumb shit you are!

While we wouldn’t consider using examples like these, it got me thinking what would be good examples be for professional online communities?

Likewise we wouldn’t have a line which talks about “reserving the right to remove any material that does not (in our judgment) comply with these standards and to revoke posting privileges at our discretion and without warning or explanation” as per HBO’s. But what would be best practice on professional communities?

Related posts:

1. Member organisations and online communities
2. Complexity in practice
3. Applying lean start-up principles and practice to building corporate communities
4. Networks vs communities
5. The value of online communities