Discuss and edit the article:

http://ivartj.wikidot.com/autistic-online-community

For those who don’t recognise it – this is a wikified post. It is displayed through the signature of the user. Contributions to the article are very much welcome.

I’m interested in seeing an online community that is well-planned and which is effective at supporting autistic individuals on many different levels. I hope ideas for an online community could mature with time and exposure to different views through this wiki-article.

This post was last modified: 06-13-2010 10:25 AM by Ivar T.

lol Ivar T - you are brilliant! - i feel as if i have wandered into professor robotnic's flying machine - freaky!

Part of the reason why I start this article is that my previous attempts at starting an online community by and for people on the spectrum in Norway have been largely unsuccessful. I want my next push to be so that one can’t say that it wasn’t properly coordinated.

I would like it to be warm and fuzzy and inviting.

^
This is what I'm trying to explain to my mother.... something that's warm and fuzzy and accepts and not downgrades my intelligence to a 6 year old. (long story)

A question that I find relevant – what should be demanded from members?

Some people, myself included, would like to have as much output from reading posts per sentence as possible. I’m intrigued by the contrast between the culture on this forum, and what that is demanded from members on the Arch Linux forum. To summarise some of these contrasts:

• Rants are highly discouraged, and tend to be deleted.
  
• Threads that go off-topic are placed in “quarantine.”
  
• Members are to avoid controversial topics.
  
• Posts that merely state agreement with previous posters are classed as meaningless, and are discouraged.

I reckon such rules promotes a positive form of emotional detachment, which allows the community to focus on more informative discussion and keep it clean from quarrels. If an autism forum were to follow such rules and demand a high standard of quality in posts, I suspect it would either just die... or have posts with a quality more like that of scientific papers.

As the AFF forum in large part functions as a support forum for troubled individuals, enforcing such rules might not be appropriate, and might even be perceived as cruel. However, when such things as medical advice are asked for on an online forum, it becomes completely irresponsible to allow others to recommend potentially dangerous therapies based on unproven claims – something which has been done many times on forums for parents of autistic children.

I don't like it at all.

I looked that message up on Google. It seems like your company doesn’t like you visiting social networking sites while at work and use WebSense to filter web pages. One blog post indicates that Twitter.com is inaccessible to you as well – is this the case?

Anyway, if you really wish to see the wiki article that currently only I have contributed to, you may try using some free proxy to circumvent the censorship.

Nice not living in China over here.

Ok, works for me. When anyone editing the page blocks it for 900 seconds, we might have to form a queue !

This post was last modified: 06-18-2010 09:56 PM by Shnoing.

I think it is important for autistic individuals to have an accessible platform on the web on which they will be taken seriously.

Picture this;

The idea is to create a website with high impact and a credibility similar to that of a newspaper. I imagine a blog with an associated wiki. The blog and the wiki has the only stated purpose of advocating and working for the interests of autistic individuals. It should otherwise welcome authors with diverse views.

The blog will take submissions for publications that are reviewed for quality. Beside such things as factuality and notability, your credibility to the reviewers may also be a factor in whether your piece will get published – it would help to have participated in offline meetups which other online identities confirm and if possible a verifiable official diagnosis.

Apparently Google News considers Age of Autism an online newspaper. If anti-vaxxers can do it, why not autistic self-advocates?

I like the place the way it is ...an ever evolving work in progress...the sum of all its members

I am bumping this, as we now hear that there is quarreling on the WrongPlanet.net online community because of decisions made by an administrator, and that dissenting views have been censored on the website.

I believe many of the problems that arise in such situations could be avoided if the online community doesn’t depend on such a small set of individuals. An example of a type of online community that doesn’t depend on a small set of individuals is a blogging community which blogs link to each other and are hosted on different web servers. Perhaps a similar “alliance” of Internet forums could be created, to make our online community more resilient.

Ivar, it would be good to have a stable enviroment to post papers* and other documents that explain some the concepts of Neurodiversity.  The FAQs on various sites do not seem to be working.  

* While a peer-review process might be unavailable at this point in time, a formal paper process might be useful.