Facilitation, Moderation and Hosting

Facilitation, moderation and hosting are differentiated by how they relate to responsibility, affordance and power.

Facilitation doesn’t specify how power is acted out, sometimes it’s positive power, sometimes negative one, and maybe at more times it focuses more on sharing power.

But fundamentally it affords a space (mostly social and cultural space) and takes responsibility.‬

Both hosting and moderation assume specific ways of acting out power, but in different aspects.

Hosting affords a space (physical, virtual, social, cultural), but it doesn’t take responsibility (e.g. social media platforms).

Moderation assumes responsibility by control. Specifically, moderation acts out power in both positive and negative manners by controlling what, where, when, how things happen (even though it doesn’t have to explain why).

By contrast, facilitation almost always needs to offer a why in one way or another.

(Note: this post first appeared unedited as replies to this tweet.)

{END}