Feeling Safe In Social Networks

I'm thinking a lot about this - about what you can do to make people feel OK in places like this. "Places like this" is a very imprecise term for the things that my work is about. I've spent the last few years in one particular community-building effort, but I'm back now to thinking more generally and seeing what other kinds of community I can contribute to and to which my thinking adds value.

It can be easy to slip into thinking that eveyrone's safe in networks that are generally friendly, but a lot of that is a function of privilege. I don't see a lot of abuse because I'm a comfortable white guy living in a liberal democracy (for now) - if people try to chuck stuff at me, it's easy for me to withdraw and go somewhere else. For years, I had my contact details out in the open everywhere, and it's been helpful to me because people can find me easily, but most of my women friends have a completely different experience of that, feeling that if they put a personal phone number up online they would get more unwanted (and likely unpleasant) contact that anything positive.

I'm looking now at the threads of this that have shown up in my most recent work but also in a couple of new networks that I'm kind of consulting on and thinking about how you balance keeping things open while safe and what that means to different people, but also about what sort of red flags you might see in people's behaviour that mean they need to either change or go somewhere else themselves. We may think these are all obvious, but I've seen a few examples recently that have made me question whether that's so.

In particular, I'm trying to take a pragmatic and experiential approach rather than getting bogged down in abstract examples and theoretical ideas.