The board by the lift

In the lobby of a residential building in Abu Dhabi, there is a board beside the lift.

When it went up, it was useful. The management pinned a note when the water would be off, when the car park was being cleaned, when the lift was due for repair. Residents glanced at it every time they waited, because what was on it mattered.

Then it filled up. A card from a man offering driving lessons. Three flyers for cleaning services. A lost cat from a building down the road. Someone selling a sofa, then someone selling a fridge, then the same sofa again at a lower price.

None of these people meant any harm. Each one used the board the way everyone else was using it, and adding one more sheet cost them nothing.

The cost fell on everyone else. The board now asked people to search, and nobody waiting for a lift wants to search. Within a few months residents stopped looking at it at all.

So when the note about the water being off for a whole morning went up, it sat under a cleaning flyer, and most of the building found out from a dry tap.

This is how almost every open channel decays: a shared phone thread, a mailing list, a board in a lobby. Anyone can add to it, so everyone does, and the noise slowly trains people to ignore the very signal it was built to carry.

It cannot be fixed afterwards with a louder notice. The fix is in how the thing is built. A second board behind glass, which only the management can open, with nothing on it most of the time.

A channel stays worth reading only while somebody guards it.