Best practice for professional communities

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?

John Pearce explains the ICAEW’s ion community plans

I like the point where John says: “It’s a learning curve,and a cultural change, and (in response to a question from Dennis Howlett) …we are not frightened to fail”.

Interesting to see how it’s developing after my involvement working as community manager from December 07 to January 09 to help set up the ion communities. Nice indicator of popularity that 1,500 folk have joined the top level community which is essentially an entry page; I guess they all get an invitation or e-newsletter to follow that up marketing wise.

With CIMA about to launch it’s own global community in the next few months, I wonder if ACCA will follow suit with its own initiative?