By Justin Bigos, Staff Writer
After 12 years, Woodstock resident David Brown has moved on from serving as volunteer administrator of the Woodstock Community Listserv, formerly known as the Woodstock Community Crier. Owned and managed by the Upper Valley nonprofit Vital Communities, the listserv has participants not only from Woodstock but also its seven surrounding towns — a feature initiated by Brown. Any resident or business from the eight towns is allowed to post to the Woodstock listserv.
David Brown
“Harkening back to when Vital Communities came to me and said, ‘We’d like you to do this job,’ I said, ‘Well, the thing you have to understand is that Woodstock does not exist in isolation. It functions as a community of several different towns.’ And they said, ‘Tell us more.’ And I said, ‘Well, it functions as the conglomeration of Woodstock, Barnard, Pomfret, Reading, Bridgewater and [Quechee, Hartland and West Windsor],” Brown told the Standard of his early stipulation before he accepted the role as volunteer administrator.
Having been raised in central Massachusetts, Brown and his wife have now lived in Woodstock for almost 40 years. The sense of community that he helped foster is something that Brown prizes. “I take a great deal of pleasure in doing something to contribute to the community here in Woodstock. When I think about all the places we could have settled, my wife and I both agree that one of the things that makes Woodstock special is a sense of community here that we don’t see in lots of other places. Being able to manage this [listserv] that people appreciate has been one way of demonstrating that commitment to community — whether you’re trying to sell a used bicycle or you lost your cat — it’s all a good thing to do,” he said.
Despite the rewards of administering the listserv, the role has not been without tensions, according to Brown. “One of the challenges has been understanding how the listserv actually functions,” he said. “I think there’s has been — and probably still is — a misapprehension that submissions somehow come to my desk and I look at them and pass judgment as to whether they’re worthy of any exposure. That is actually not the case. What I was not very successful doing is convincing people that most often I see posts about the same time that they do, and whether I agree with what’s being said or have some different point of view doesn’t matter whatsoever.”
On the Woodstock Community Listserv website, there is a set of 10 guidelines, including “Keep it local,” “Keep it respectful,” “Keep it original,” and “Keep it short.” Another guideline, “Sign your post,” was especially important for him to enforce, Brown said. “I developed a set of templates for what I call ‘friendly reminders,’ and the one that I used most often was the guideline that Vital Communities established that said that you have to identify yourself with your full name and town,” he said.
In fact, enforcing this guideline proved to be much of Brown’s labor, he said. “Most of my activities actually were related to reminding people to sign their full name and town. And 90% of the time people [forgot to, they] would say, ‘Oh, terribly sorry, I forgot, I didn’t know.’ Great, fine, there was no further action needed,” he said.
One violation Brown needed to enforce a few times was posters being disrespectful to each other. “Very rarely, there were posts that identified individual people that the poster didn’t like. That’s squarely a violation of one of the guidelines. I think that’s probably been the most problematic, but just on a percentage basis, it’s almost insignificant.”
Until last year, Brown had worked for ECFiber, a community-owned, nonprofit fiber-optic internet service provider serving the Upper Valley. During that time, he began investigating online forums. “I was investigating Front Porch Forum as a mechanism for spreading the word about the ECFiber model, and I learned that was a moderated forum. In other words, you submitted something, and they looked at it and said maybe [yes], maybe not,” said Brown. “The Vital Communities model was entirely different. You could post anything you want. If you want to post that the moon is made out of green cheese, regardless of any scientific evidence to the contrary, you’re certainly welcome to do that,” he said.
Contentiousness is nothing new, and Brown has noticed its presence in Woodstock and neighboring towns, too — and not just on listervs and other forms of social media. “There are always things that people disagree with. When my kids were in elementary school and then high school, we would have meetings about the school budget, and some of them were pretty contentious. I remember a couple budgets where people would come and be really unpleasant about their opinion,” said Brown. “Recently, there’s the issue here in Woodstock about the police department,” he said. “I don’t really get involved in that. There’s been some rough talk related to that, but I have to choose my battles,” said Brown.
“I was tired of doing it, and wanted to do something else with my mornings,” Brown said of his decision to step away from Woodstock Community Listserv. “I took it on as a help to the community. I had done it for 12 years, and I was looking at a very busy summer and spending a fair amount of time up in Maine,” where he owns property near Acadia National Park, he said.
What will he do next? “My kids think I should do something to keep my brain sharp, and they suggested that I should play more Trivial Pursuit,” said Brown. “So, rather than working on the listserv every morning, I’ve been taking the card deck and memorizing the answers.”