Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com

Flickr.com's Director of Community Heather Champ. Flickr.com's Director of Community Heather Champ. Photo: Photo By Heather Champ Photo: Photo By Heather Champ Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

It's 11 a.m., and a handful of Flickr.com employees have gathered around a messy conference table to discuss, as they have daily for six years, the minutiae of governing humans. First order of business, the Brazilians. It seems a suspicious number of people in Sao Paulo have been using the popular photo-hosting site to post pictures of dishware. The idea is to sell the stuff -- a clear violation of the company's no-commerce rule.

Except rules are tricky things with an operation like Flickr's. The ban on commerce seems simple enough, but as someone at the meeting points out, Brazil's secondhand economy is an integral part of life there, particularly among women. When does the enforcement of a righteous-seeming regulation become a quashing of someone's culture?

And so mushroom many conversations here -- as they would anywhere where a smattering of individuals has converged into a genuine, if confined, civilization. What began in 2004 as a handy site for sharing your latest vacation snapshots has grown into a vast society parallel to our three-dimensional one.

Thirty million members have posted 2.8 billion images (and now videos) from their lives, but more importantly the Yahoo-owned company has let them seize on the social nature of photography. Strangers convene to comment on each others' images, form groups based on common interests and share the project of documenting and categorizing the visible universe. To roam Flickr is to wander through crooked teeth, local politics, nesting osprey, birth, spaghetti, divorce and every other aspect of existence. If photos reflect life itself, so too does a Web site containing billions of them.

At first glance this parallel society has been made, quite literally, in the image of our own. But in truth it's more like a Photoshopped image -- the nice parts accentuated, the inappropriate bits cropped away. So it goes with any online community, of course. Behavior must be moderated and a communal ethos must be preserved; Wild West cliches aside, total freedom at any entity like this would sink it in a storm of lawsuits, flame wars and gridlocked cacophony. So directors of community exist. And while the job of nurturing and policing any online realm would make for a fascinating study, I was particularly curious about how it worked at Flickr.

Director of Community Heather Champ doesn't just guard the pool and blow the occasional whistle; it's a far more delicate, and revealing, dance that keeps the user population here happy, healthy and growing. In addressing that question of how much to police and how much to let things be, Champ oversees an experiment that, outside some far-flung and sandy exceptions, one rarely sees in such detail. There are no IEDs or snipers in this place, but it's hard not to conclude Flickr's conducting a kind of nation-building.

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Back to the Brazilians. An earnest, feel-our-way-in-the-dark spirit pervades community management discussions here, and there ensues a lively debate about the nature of commerce, which moves into a dissection of art, which circles back to an analysis of human interactions that are close but not quite commercial. Finally Champ ventures a consolidated philosophical guideline for cases like this one:

"Selling stuff is bad. Selling stuff you've made is less bad. Swapping stuff is less bad. Swapping stuff you've found on the street is worse than swapping stuff you've made."

Champ's pronouncement is met with approval, and the group agrees the Sao Paolo folks will receive a warning. They move on to the next item.

So goes this update of our own nation's founding, all improvisation and theories of existence and Diet Coke. If it's not dishware in Sao Paolo, it's something else. Should all nudity go behind the R-rated wall? Given the broad international scope of Flickr's members, whose cultural mores should be favored? Sure, the good of the community is central -- but what happens if the community's values shift away from those of the company itself? And what about the injunction against harassing fellow members -- what if someone feels harassed for not being free to express his harassment?

The hypotheticals can seem increasingly ridiculous, until one reflects on the absurdities that inch through our real-life courts. A society takes shape around the bizarre intersections where one freedom is pitted against another. When a Web site hosts visual representations of those intersections, weird questions get asked.

Back in the conference room, the morning meeting winds down, and attention drifts to the window of an adjoining office. On the other side, another Flickr employee smiles politely through the glass. Then he turns his back to us and lowers his pants to his ankles. It's a full and excellent moon, and our room delivers a restrained golf clap.

At some level I feel we're applauding the perfect conundrum embodied by the co-worker's butt: What we all find funny might be thoroughly offensive in another corner of the globe. How do the nation-builders of the online universe maintain harmony when the potential for disagreement exists in even the tiniest gesture? Anyway I reach for my camera, but the fellow's pants are already back up.

* * * * *

Champ, 45, is a lifelong photographer and a longtime geek. Still, her three and a half years toiling amid the full-color images of humanity have done much for her worldliness. As Champ puts it, "I'm a nice Canadian girl. I'd never even heard of a Dirty Sanchez when I started here, much less seen a photo of one."

The essence of Champ's job, she says, boils down to defending this imprecise but holy "spirit of Flickr." Indeed, imprecision is an art here. The list of community guidelines is an assortment of lawyer-vexing instructions like "Don't be creepy. You know the guy. Don't be that guy," and "Don't forget the children." If you've spent any time online, you instantly recognize these to be meaningful and clear edicts. Champ is only half joking when she says her is responsibility is to keep things from "encroaching on Flickr's serenity."

"The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual and the community," she explains.

Indeed, for all its color, the site is governed by gray. Take, for example, what I call the penis quandary, endemic to any operation like this: A photo of a penis will be flagged on Flickr as offensive and relegated to the site's version of an adults-only zone. But what about a photo of the word "penis"? What about a cloud that looks like a penis? What about a penis on a Greek statue?

Then there's the matter of hate speech, forbidden on Flickr. Could someone argue that the company compromises its larger goal by limiting representations of the outside world to only the non-racists among us? Where is the line drawn in these cases?

In public life, we know how the line is drawn. It's drawn ploddingly by legislative and judicial bodies -- a maddening process often, but theoretically an accountable one. In the public-private sphere of online communities, however, a company like Flickr is only as accountable as it chooses to be.

Anyone familiar with the reigning ethos at Flickr might find it strange to even mention such things -- if our public officials were half as thoughtful, attentive and responsible as the Flickr folks, the world would be a saner place. But the company's good juju doesn't diminish the fact of its power, circumscribed as it is, and the larger trend of this power migrating from public zones to private ones.

Champ, for her part, has no qualms defending "the Flickrness of Flickr." A while back a group calling itself "Islam is Hell on Earth" was removed. Champ is unapologetic: "We don't need to be the photo-sharing site for all people. We don't need to take all comers. It's important to me that Flickr was built on certain principles."

And so they're defended -- and evaluated -- constantly. One person wanted some unflattering photos taken down and enlisted the help of an American police officer to write a note. No dice. In other cases a parent without custodial rights wants photos of his child, posted by the other parent, removed. Who's the relevant custodian here? On the day I hover over Champ's shoulder, a woman writes to complain that her ex-boyfriend is posting inappropriate photos of her and calling her names.

"People bring their human relationships to Flickr, and we end up having to police them," Champ says. She sends a warning to the ex, and explains her actions to the woman.

Lest your inner libertarian objects to such interventions, Champ is quick to correct the idea that the community would ultimately find its own balance.

"The amount of time it would take for the community to self-regulate -- I don't think it could sustain itself in the meantime," she says. "Anyway, I can't think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own."

In this sense, Champ doesn't just shepherd along the Flickr ethos; she's a larger advocate of intelligent growth in an often chaotic zone.

"People become disassociated from one another online. The computer somehow nullifies the social contract," she says. In other words, people sometimes go nuts amid the anonymity of the Internet.

Later, she recalls one of the more inflamed periods in Flickr's history: the purist fury loosed upon the company when it decided to host short videos in addition to photos.

"The passion that people expressed then and at a few other times -- if you could harness that, you could turn wind turbines," she says, laughing.

Mostly, though, Champ finds humanity, or at least Flickr's segment of it, remarkably inspiring.

"People have fallen in love on Flickr. Some have proposed over Flickr. It's just a delightful thing for so many people, and I get to spend my days with them."

Indeed, Flickr's members tend to be dramatically more civil than those of, say, YouTube. This is Champ's work, though she would humbly credit the community itself and its commitment to having a place of beauty and reason online. What they've created isn't just a mirror held up to our society -- it's a sanitized, civilized mirror, with the illegal, hurtful and nasty elements largely pruned away. Sort of makes for a nice picture, when you think about it.

Chris Colin has worked as a writer-editor at Salon, and before that a busboy, a bread deliverer and a bike messenger, among other things. He's the author of "What Really Happened to the Class of '93," about the lives of his former high school classmates, and co-author of "The Blue Pages," a directory of companies rated by their politics and social practices. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, the New York Observer, McSweeney's Quarterly and several anthologies. He lives in San Francisco.