During FeverBee SPRINT, we received a complaint about an attendee.
This attendee was perceived as rude, overly self-promotional, critical of all group ideas, and clearly not a good match for the terrific group of community professionals at the event.
This was the same attendee who had been difficult to deal with before the event.
He criticised the speaker line-up, demanded to use multiple discount-codes, and was abbrasive to deal with throughout.
One solution would have been not to sell the attendee a ticket.
But we felt that would be unfair.
Instead we allowed him to attend. He upset one or two people and was a distraction for us to deal with on a busy day.
This links back to the ethical dilemma. If we can predict a bad member by their early actions, should we remove them before they’ve caused problems?
I think we should.
As community professionals, we have a strange concept of fairness. We allow members we know to be unsuitable for a community to join and harrass our members just so we can remove them. That’s due process right?
But this makes no sense in a community. Why allow someone to negatively influence your community when you can remove them before they do?
