In With the In Crowd

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One thing that I attempt with this blog is to share what I know. It may not be much and it may not be exactly what someone is looking for, but I always think that knowledge is accretive. Like a puzzle, a bit gets added here and there until the picture comes into being. I don’t know what pieces other people are missing. I often find a missing piece by going to other sources (although, increasingly, those sites are becoming poisoned by the after-effects of artificial intelligence). Sometimes I don’t know what pieces I’m missing until I write something down. It’s a professional struggle, then, when I find myself in a closed group.

I had been working at the American Bar Association for perhaps a month, newly arrived from Texas, when a local gave me some advice: you may think you are working with the inner circle but there is another circle beyond that from which you are excluded. That observation has sat with me over the years as I saw groups rise and fall, sometimes splintering and forming new arrangements. We might label some of these cliques but just as often, you’ll find an organization: founders, a formal arrangement, perhaps membership rights or dues or prerequisites to participation.

There can be a fear of missing out if you are excluded from these selective groups, if you are even aware that they exist. You may have FOMO that they do exist and you are the only one not included. That can color how you approach your work and even impact how you select the people you want to collaborate with. If, for example, you fear being excluded, you may want to try to join the in-crowd by working with someone within it, who might act as a patron to your own membership.

I’ve been fascinated by the number of in-groups in law libraries, often at the director level. There is an academic law library director list that is closed to all but directors. There are similar closed-director lists in other parts of law librarianship. I expect that, anywhere you work, you will find these sorts of closed resources.

There can be a certain cachet in belonging to a closed group, although far less so if you are included because of your role. That sort of unvetted inclusion seems to me the least offensive, the least likely to exclude for personality or other subjective issues. Still, I frequently wonder whether they really require exclusion at all.

One challenge with having an objective criteria is that it still excludes those people or organizations who don’t meet it. The reason they don’t meet it may not be objective, so it compounds their exclusion by keeping voices out.

One place I’ve experienced this was when a director’s group was discussing operational choices. In most of the places I’ve worked, while I have a director’s knowledge of the work, I usually have people far more expert at the work than I am: people in charge of cataloging and access, or outreach and training. It would often make more sense for these people to be involved in the discussion but, by dint of not being directors, they are excluded from conversations where not only would the outcome probably be more informed, the participants would probably learn more from the experts directly.

This sort of exclusion can extend to group discussions when, for example, they’re governed by things like the Chatham House Rule. I’ve always found this a bit goofy, if only because, if you know the people attending—say, a group of similarly situated directors—then knowing the perspective can be pinned to likely sources. While I understand that people don’t want to speak out of turn or perhaps be held up for controversial statements, so many of these discussions seem to be uncontroversial.

The exclusivity exists for edge cases that may or may never arise when people are careful about what they say. One in-group that included me said that it was exclusive because we might discuss salary information. But we worked in organizations where salaries were often subject to FOIA or sunshine laws. In the event, I don’t recall us ever talking about that sort of detail on personnel costs, but our exclusivity kept voices out.

It is all well and good to say, well, then don’t participate. But there is a potential value in being able to interact with people who have the expertise you seek to acquire or who are similarly situated. It can feel like a missed opportunity to grow if one holds oneself aloof or steps out of the in-group. There is, of course, the perspective you create, particularly in a professional space, that your non-conformity is a statement or a value judgement (negative) of the in-group. In some groups, I was included without being asked, on the assumption that I would want to be part of the group.

And yet. I had the opportunity to participate in one law library in-group and, over time, decided to stop participating. When someone from the group reached out to me, I said I’d love to participate but felt that the membership list was a bit narrow and that other folks, whose libraries were as qualified as mine to belong, should be invited too. This broadening never occurred and so I continued to do my own thing rather than contribute to something where I knew I was excluding similarly situated colleagues.

In some cases, the in-group exists to exist and doesn’t create those opportunities for new ascendants to a role or organization to grow and learn. In one case, I stopped attending regular meetings of an in-group because, as I put it to another colleague, “they were not having the conversations that I was interested in having.” I also get that it’s a position of privilege to walk away from groups like these, especially professional ones.

Objective criteria-based in-groups lump you together with people based on a job title, not a shared sense of purpose or goals. In fact, this sort of group can have a culture that is unnecessarily constraining, since it may not be clear what is allowed and who sets the norms. An attempt to work within the group can run into obstacles; attempts to work outside of the group may be seen as threatening or attacks. Either way, the group’s impact isn’t positive.

It is always funny to me that the in-groups almost never have the deep, secret conversations they could have. Lots of discussions are about every day issues or a quick survey on a topic that may, depending on the group norms, not generate any responses. Often, it’s the same people who engage in the discussions. In other words, the 90-9-1 rule exists even within in-groups. Unless the in-group is in-person, most people will lurk, happy (or at least content) to be included but not interested in more engagement.

Given that tendency for a small group to drive a lot of the discussion, I would just as soon operate in the open than in closed groups. An open community—even when based around a given role, like director or middle manager—will be more likely to let potential role-takers look under the hood a bit. At the same time, most of the secrecy of the in-group is already happening in one-to-one conversations (as represented by “I will respond to you but do not share my answer with the group” emails) and might as well continue to happen with less exclusivity.

There’s nothing wrong with off list discussions. I completely understand why, from a goal of keeping the noise down for everyone else to wanting to share helpful information while still being careful, people prefer to share within the exclusive group but not with the entire group. But offline discussions beg the question of the purpose of a closed group. If even that isn’t sufficiently guarded enough, it may be that the group is only providing a directory of possibly similarly situated people.

My preference is for open groups where the norms are built around contributions rather than exclusivity. The drawback, these days, is the open groups may be at risk of having their contributions ingested and re-purposed. If the Q&A, the learning from experts, is happening between knowledge seekers and AI, it will impact those who are interested in contributing. That lack of continued knowledge sharing will create a similar challenge as AI will when we direct it to the “low value” and yet key tasks that build expertise.

Even this website now actively blocks many search engines when they are indistinguishable from AI scrapers. I block all known AI scrapers and am leveraging every new bot block that Cloudflare rolls out. This means that, although I’m sharing my own discoveries, I may be sharing them in a much smaller universe than I was before. I will say that, so far, I have not seen any drop off in search engine-powered traffic.

While a blog seems like the ultimate open contributor, and so a group of blogs authored by connected experts that share information on a topic or link between each other could create a great deal of sharing, it’s not ideal. I like blogging because, unlike email in-groups, where there is no record of past discussions for new participants, blogs or discussion boards will preserve that shared knowledge. One reason I like Teams channels—and keep them open to everyone in our organization, so people can learn about what they want to know, not just about what they’re allowed to know—is that it becomes a knowledge source for future staff. The exclusivity of not having belonged in the past isn’t a hurdle to learning.

The question I ask myself is to what extent I want to remain part of any in-groups. What role do they play for me? My rule for meetings is that I do not take them unless (a) I can provide value or (b) I can gain value by attending. I try to be expansive in determining that value aspect but I feel the same about groups. Is it important to belong to a group even if you are no longer getting anything out of it? And, if the answer is no, why would it make sense to join a different group which will have the same limitations, the same exclusivity?

The conundrum is not so much whether to put my energy elsewhere but where. There are plenty of social networks and places to contribute and ask where, even if they are moderated, they are not walled gardens. As in so many places in life, it’s a matter of making a decision to use resources some place new.