Dharma Overground Moderation

DhO is moderated by volunteers who donate their time for the purpose of maintaining helpful, lively, and respectful meditation and dharma-related conversations. The current DhO moderation team is:

Daniel Ingram (Daniel M. Ingram), is a founder and sole owner of Dharma Overground. He is the author of “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha”. Daniel is a retired emergency medicine physician, a public health practitioner and a celebrated meditation teacher and lecturer. Combining these areas of his expertise, Daniel is currently leading the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium and working to obtain funding for the organization through Emergence Benefactors.

Chris Marti is a long-time meditator in the vipassana and Zen traditions. Chris is a retired IT and nonprofit executive, and leadership educator with decades of experience. Chris has moderated meditation message boards for many years at Kenneth Folk Dharma, AwakeNetwork, and Dharma Forum Refugee Camp. He has also served as a moderator and admin for Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and Fortune Magazines on the web. Contact Chris on DhO using the messaging system at "Chris M."

Linda Örulv (Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö), a dedicated meditator with a background as a researcher and teacher in interpersonal communication, intersecting with health and wellbeing as well as social change, and specializing among other things in mutual support. S/he has many years of experience of forum moderating and conflict solving, albeit mainly in more local contexts.

The Rules of Participation:

To help keep DhO more inviting of participation by those who can benefit from helpful friends supporting friends in their practices and sharing the intimate and deep adventures that these explorations can produce, the following ground rules have been adopted:

• No name-calling or ad hominem attacks
• No on-and-on repetitious, angry rants that marshal no supporting evidence, target an interlocutor, and have the effect of intimidating the interlocutor.
• No threats of violence, even if metaphorical or aimed at no one in particular
• No taunting, mocking, or intimidation of an individual or a group on the basis of race/ethnicity, sex, disability (including mental illness), sexual orientation, religious preference, or spiritual practice
• No speech acts that would be actionable under US criminal or civil tort law 
• Don't post copyrighted material that you don't have the right or permission to post or distribute except snippets allowed under fair use.

Proper Use of DhO Member Accounts

The purpose of the DhO is to foster honest, forthright communication and the sharing of information and practices around the pursuit of meditation and the fruits of spiritual life. Honest communication cannot occur when subterfuge, dishonesty, and hidden agendas exist among people. Therefore, actively creating a DhO member account to imitate or impersonate another member, real or imagined, is not permitted. Starting a new account under a different name after being banned from DhO is not permitted. Using one alias as an account name for personal privacy reasons, a longstanding and time-honored practice on the Internet, is permitted. Otherwise, deceptive and dishonestly-created member accounts as described above will be removed for the safety and benefit of the DhO community.