| Tradition 11: Our relations with the general public should be characterized by personal anonymity. We think A.A. ought to avoid sensational advertising. Our names and pictures as A.A. members ought not to be broadcast, filmed,or publicly printed. Our public relations should be guided by the principle of attraction rather than promotion. There is never need to praise ourselves. We feel it better to let our friends recommend us.
Our WMAA website should be considered a public forum. It is accessible to the public much the same as you would experience in a local, national or even world wide newspaper publication circulation. A quick scan as of this date shows over 7,000 views of posts on our Discussion forum. Members who add content, and especially those who use the Discussion pages, should be careful to contribute in much the same way as you would talk to a newspaper reporter, or television correspondent. Our personal identity, full name and photograph, should not be a part of our user profile or public discussions.
When constructing your user accounts I would avoid using your full name. I would recommend using only your first name and the initial of your last name for example. Don’t add your picture to your profile. For your user name be creative and construct a fun user name. Something like, only2officer, bythebook, just1more, whatstep_r_u_on, you know – have fun with it. We are not a glum lot! You need not worry about your address and phone numbers in your user profile. These are not accessible to the public.
Another public identity consideration may be your e-mail account address. Sometimes people are inclined to use their full names in their e-mail addresses. This is probably a practice A.A.’s have used outside the fellowship to communicate in business and with non-A.A. family and friends. This practice isn’t appropriate when communicating publicly about A.A. matters. Private communication among A.A. members using your full name in A.A. matters is not something that our public relations policy concerns itself with. That decision is left up to the individual.
After experimenting with cloaking my identity for public A.A. purposes, especially e-mail, I have settled on setting up a free gmail account. This permits me to send and receive e-mails without revealing my full name. When I use this account with other A.A. members I will add my name, full name if appropriate, manually in the text of my message. If I am communicating with non-A.A. members, for instance professionals seeking assistance for some ‘project’ they are working on, and I’m not comfortable revealing my full identity, I can add only my first name and last initial to the correspondence if that is appropriate.
Glenn S., Hartford Group G.S.R. & WMAA Website Chair 2008 [email protected] |
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