202 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. “after greed and short-sightedness floods the commons with low-grade AI content… well-managed online communities of actual human beings [may be] the only place able to provide the sort of data tomorrow’s LLMs will need”

      The value spoken of here is that of slowly building up (evolving) directed knowledge over time. The community evolves links using work and coherence into actionable information/knowledge whereas AI currently don't have an idea of leadership or direction into which to take that knowledge, so they're just creating more related information which is interpreted as "adjacent noise". Choosing a path and building off of it to create direction is where the promise lies. Of course some paths may wither and die, but the community will manage that whereas the AI would indiscriminately keep building in all directions without the value of demise within the system.

  2. Oct 2024
    1. Viele New Yorker Juristen, darunter namhafte Staatsanwälte, unterstützen eine Resolution zur strafrechtlichen Verfolgung der großen Ölgesellschaften. Vorgeworfen wird den Firmen, fossile Brennstoffe über Jahrzehnte verkauft zu haben, ohne über die ihnen bekannten Gefahren zu informieren oder diese zu berücksichtigen. Gefordert wird eine Klage wegen fahrlässiger Gefährdung von Menschenleben. Dazu muss nicht nachgewiesen werden, dass der Tod bestimmter Menschen durch die Konzerne verursacht wurde https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/17/new-york-big-oil-fueling-climate-disasters

    1. St Columba Columba (521-597), known as Colm Cille in Ireland, went to the west coast of Scotland and to the island of Iona to do penance and escape from the blood spilled in his family battles at home in Ireland.

      for - from - AnMaonaigh - annotation - Christian Monastic Communities - from article - Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society - Michel Bauwens - Substack - https://hyp.is/iITCrH2hEe-nIc9iOR4VeQ/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/why-human-contributive-labor-remains

  3. Sep 2024
  4. Jun 2024
    1. Adler’s communityof discourse is a crucial part of this story about the great books idea
    2. Daniel Boorstin’s contemporaneous idea of “consumption commu-nities,”
    3. David Hollinger’s notion of“communities of discourse.” First forwarded at the 1977 WingspreadConference, he emphasized this mechanism as a way to wrest thefocus from singular individuals (great men) identified as intellectu-als and situate them among specific social and cultural contexts
    4. does the consumer’s integration, by choice, into largermass communities ironically tie the person to new and larger bonds

      of conformity, or create new forms of class stratification?

      Where does Chomsky's Manufactured Consent fit in here?

  5. May 2024
  6. Apr 2024
  7. Feb 2024
  8. Jan 2024
    1. four different types of initiators of new community projectsbased in neighbourhoods:local government,governmental organisations,non-governmental organisations or activists andexisting communities.
      • for: types of initiators of community projects, SONEC - initiators of community projects, question - frameworks for community projects, suggestion - collaboration with My Climate Risk, suggestion - collaboration with U of Hawaii, suggestion - collaboration with ICICLE, suggestion - collaboration with earth commission, suggestion - collaboration with DEAL

      • question: frameworks for community projects

        • If our interest is to attempt to create a global collective action campaign to address our existential polycrisis, which includes the climate crisis, then how do we mobilize at the community level in a meaningful way?

        • I suggest that this must be a cosmolocal effort. Why? Knowledge sharing across all the communities will accelerate the transition of any participating local community.

        • This means that we cannot rely on citizens living in small communities to construct an effective coordination framework for rapid de-escalation of the polycrisis. The capacity does not exist within small communities to build such a complex system. The system can be more effectively built before the collective action campaign is started by a virtual community of experts and ready for trial with pilot communities.
        • To meet this enormous challenge, it cannot be done in an adhoc way. At this point in time, many people in many communities all around the globe know of the existential crisis we face, but if we look at the annual carbon emissions, none of the existing community efforts has made a difference in their continuing escalation.
        • The knowledge required to synchronize millions of communities to have a unified wartime-scale collective action mobilization to reach decarbonization goals that the mainstream approach has not even made a dent in will be a complex problem.
        • In other words, what is proposed is a partnership.
        • Since we are faced with global commons problems that pose existential threats if not mitigated in 5 to 8 years, the scope of the problem is enormous.
        • Super wicked problems require unprecedented levels of collaboration at every level.
        • The downscaling of global planetary boundaries and doughnut economics seems the most logical way to think global, act local.
        • Building such a collaboration system requires expert knowledge. Once built, however, it requires testing in pilot communities. This is where a partnership can take place

        • 2024, Jan. 1 Adder

          • My Climate Risk Regional Hubs
            • time 29:46 of https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Funfccc.int%2Fevent%2Flater-is-too-late-tipping-the-balance-from-negative-to-positive&group=world
            • https://www.wcrp-climate.org/mcr-hubs
            • Suggestion:
              • SRG has long entertained a collaborative open science project for grassroots polycrisis / climate crisis education - to measure and validate latest climate departure dates
              • This would make climate change far more salient to the average person because of the observable trends in disruption of local economic activity connected to the local ecology due to climate impacts
              • This would be a synergistic project between SRG, LCE, SoNeC, My Climate Risk hubs, ICICLE and U of Hawaii
              • Our community frameworks need to go BEYOND simply adaptation though, which is what "My Climate Risk" focuses exclusively on. We need to also engage equally in climate mitigation.
        • reference
        • I coedited this volume on examples of existing cosmolocal projects
  9. Dec 2023
    1. Not sure how "communities" are going to shut down oil refineries as big as large cities in some cases.
      • for: question - can communities have real impact?

      • question: can communities have real impact?

        • In this discussion, Ross is acting as the devil's advocate questioning whether communities can have real impact. He is consistent and his comments are based on evidence and experience. He challenges everyone else to prove him wrong and makes everyone go deeper to validate their positions.
        • Ross makes valid points that so far, have not been effectively addressed, mainly because nobody has thought further of how to systematically organize communities to the scale required. It's not trivial!
    1. Renewable Energy Communities as Modes of Collective Prosumership: A Multi-Disciplinary Assessment

      Shubhra Chaudhry. Articles 2022. Hanze + Frauenhofer Institut. Renewable Energy Communities as Modes of Collective Prosumership

  10. Nov 2023
    1. Even though I've said this a million times, people don't get it. Not even Aldrich who is a professional Zettelkasten filibusterer.

      —Scott Scheper at 2023-11-06 10:05:12PM Pacific https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17m7ggz/comment/k86izlu/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      This is really the pot calling the kettle black. Read your own book lately Scott?!?

      I'd love to see his receipts with respect to a million times. Even a handful would be good, but in comparison to what he's printed in his book, saying it a million times elsewhere isn't going to carry as much weight in any case.

      My criticism of his book must have been eating him up for a full day as he came back a full day to within a minute at 2023-11-07 10:06:14PM Pacific and banned me from r/antinet.

      My apologies for trying to help out confused people who read your book there Scott.

    1. 2.Must not be a Buzzkillington3.Must not use ObsidianWe not accept bubble graph boiz, nor do we accept internally conflicted ones. 4.Must be briefTry writing posts by hand first. Don'twaste everyone's time with verbal diarrhea text walls concocted by Obsidian and digital tools. 5.Must be a practioner of ZettelkastenWe want doers, not philosophers.

      I'm reasonably certain that Scott added these rules in the last day. I hypothesize that he's using his religious zeal to actively block people out of this community.

      I think he retroactively added the brevity one as an excuse to kick me out. When I looked over the weekend as it happened, the only rule was sense of humor.

      The funny part is that a version of it was all written by hand in my own ZK and transcribed to help the guy who had issues with his numbering.

      My comment was made at 2023-11-06 11:37:52 AM Pacific. I was banned on Tuesday 2023-11-07 06:06:14 UTC

      See also: - https://hypothes.is/a/PhIcLn5WEe686PujMaaDAg (Rule 5) - https://hypothes.is/a/sljWEH5UEe6QvdOn5I4qBQ (ban)

      Archive.org indicates that the only rule was sense of humor on 2023-03-18 https://web.archive.org/web/20230318062730/https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/ Similarly for 2023-09-17: https://web.archive.org/web/20230917011101/https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/?rdt=41579

  11. Oct 2023
  12. Sep 2023
    1. The problem is that this pluriverse of system-change players remains largely disorganized. They are marginalized and eclipsed by the raw power of the market/state system.
      • for: quote, quote - David Bollier, quote - silos of communities
      • quote
        • The problem is that this pluriverse of system-change players remains largely disorganized. -They are marginalized and eclipsed by the raw power of the market/state system.
      • Author: David Bollier
    1. Gould, Jessica. “Teachers College, Columbia U. Dissolves Program behind Literacy Curriculum Used in NYC Public Schools.” Gothamist, September 8, 2023. https://gothamist.com/news/columbia-university-dissolves-program-behind-literacy-curriculum-used-in-nyc-public-schools.

      The Teachers College of Columbia University has shut down the Lucy Calkins Units of Study literacy program.

      Missing from the story is more emphasis on not only the social costs, which they touch on, but the tremendous financial (sunk) cost to the system by not only adopting it but enriching Calkins and the institution (in a position of trust) which benefitted from having sold it.

      link to: https://hypothes.is/a/eicbpgSKEe6vc0fPdIm05w

  13. Aug 2023
    1. Our first attempts at building community online have had both good and bad outcomes. We know them all. But would we have expected otherwise? We are new at digital communities and are inventing them as we move forward. Of course we aren’t going to get it right the first time. But the key question is whether these technologies help us form social bonds or not. Anyone who has posted a question in a forum and received an answer from a stranger knows firsthand that they bring us together.
      • for: quote, quote - Byron Reese, quote - digital communities, quote - online communities, indyweb - support
      • quote
        • Our first attempts at building community online have had both good and bad outcomes.
        • We know them all. But would we have expected otherwise?
        • We are new at digital communities and are inventing them as we move forward.
        • Of course we aren’t going to get it right the first time. But the key question is whether these technologies help us form social bonds or not.
        • Anyone who has posted a question in a forum and received an answer from a stranger knows firsthand that they bring us together.
      • author: Byron Reese
        • futurist
        • author of "The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers and the Future of Humanity"
    1. Damanhur’s mock battles prevent the kind of burn-out you find when the most empathetic people in a community get tasked with dealing with the emotional needs of others, putting a lot a strain on the shoulders of a few.
    2. The bottom line is that many intentional communities exist because of wealthy patrons and benefactors, and courting philanthropy and start-up capital is part of the job of charismatic founders.
      • for: intentional communities - funding
      • comment
        • the fact that many intentional communities court wealthy benefactors means that they are not really autonomous or resilient but instead, parasitic on the very society they are trying to escape
        • and depending on 60% of your funding coming from workshops or spiritual tourism implies it isn't that resilient if eco-disaster were to strike.
    3. she writes about her time cutting and baling hay, making butter, driving a tractor, cutting firewood, baking bread, and taking care of children, animals and the wellbeing of her peers.
      • for: intentional communities, intentional communities - failures
      • comment
        • modern, industrialized society is still a massively interdependent system
        • what many who start intentional communities don't realize is this refined interdependency give us a lot of time savings
        • we find that out when we live in an intentional community and have to make everything ourselves
    4. When the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen established New Harmony in 1825, on 20,000 acres in Indiana, he attracted an enthusiastic following, gaining more than 800 members in just a little over six weeks.
      • for: intentional communities - case study - New Harmony
      • paraphrase
        • New Harmony
        • Year: 1825
        • Location: Indiana
        • Size: 20,000 acres
        • Members: 800 in first 6 weeks
        • ideals
          • environment
          • education
          • abolish private property
        • problems
          • low percentage of hard skills
            • 140 of 800 had skills contributing to local industry,
            • 36 were skilled farmers
          • indiscriminate and allowed too many without skills to join
          • intentional communities are often the most attractive for a dangerous constellation of actors
            • dreamers,
            • drifters,
            • seekers in need of belonging,
            • the needy and wounded,
            • the egomaniacal and power-thirsty
            • free riders, lazy and without skills
          • founder was absent a large percentage of the time
    5. the more relevant drivers that cause many communities to unravel sound more like the challenges afflicting any organisation today: capital constraints, burn-out, conflict over private property and resource management, poor systems of conflict mediation, factionalism, founder problems, reputation management, skills shortage, and failure to attract new talent or entice subsequent generations.
      • for: intentional communities, intentional communities - failure
      • paraphrase
        • reasons for failure:sound more like the challenges afflicting any organisation today:
          • capital constraints,
          • burn-out,
          • conflict over private property
          • conflict over resource management,
          • poor systems of conflict mediation,
          • factionalism,
          • founder problems,
          • reputation management,
          • skills shortage,
          • failure to attract new talent
          • failure to entice subsequent generations.
    6. the irony is that many of the administrative and managerial forces that individuals are running away from within mainstream society are exactly the organisational tools that would make intentional communities more resilient:
      • for: intentional communities,
      • irony
      • paraphrase
        • the irony is that many of the administrative and managerial forces that individuals are running away from within mainstream society
          • are exactly the organisational tools that would make intentional communities more resilient
    7. attrition rates for intentional communities are not all that different from many other types of human endeavour.
      • for: stats, intentional community, intentional communities, - stats - intentional communities
        • intentional communities fail at a rate slightly higher than most startups
        • startup failure rate is around 90%
        • longevity of Fortune 500 companies listed in 1955 to 2017
          • failure rate of 88%
        • S&P companies average lifespan: 15 years
    8. Generally, intentional communities fail at a rate slightly higher than that of most start-ups. Only a handful of communities founded in the US during the 19th century’s ‘golden age of communities’ lasted beyond a century; most folded in a matter of months. This golden age birthed more than 100 experimental communities, with more than 100,000 members in total who, according to the historian Mark Holloway in Heavens on Earth (1951)
      • for: stats, intentional community, intentional communities, stats - intentional communities
        • intentional communities fail at a rate slightly higher than most startups
      • for: intentional community, intentional communities, eco-community, ecocommunity
      • title
        • Utopia Inc Most utopian communities are, like most start-ups, short-lived. What makes the difference between failure and success?
    1. “If everyone did it the world would be a better place.”
      • for: intentional communities - failure
      • comment
        • moral highground and not actually having a collective scaling strategy are the reasons why this typically fails
    2. these kinds of issues are systemic and intrinsic and maybe even foundational to intentional communities.
      • for: intentional community, intentional communities, intentional communities - failure
      • claim
        • intentional communities have a fatal flaw, an intrinsic Achilles Heel
    3. 478 intentional communities since the 1820s have now shrunk to 112 worldwide in the last 30 years)
      • for: intentional community, intentional communities, intentional communities - failure, stats, stats - intentional communities
      • stats
        • of 478 intentional communities since the 1820s,
        • 112 exist worldwide in the last 30 years (1988 - 2018
      • for: intentional community, intentional communities, intentional communities - failure, stats, stats - intentional communities
      • stats
        • of 478 intentional communities since the 1820s,
        • 112 exist worldwide in the last 30 years (1988 - 2018
    1. how do you how do you think about what that community looks like and how you communicate that because in many senses you could say obviously you're hoping to build utopia 00:09:30 not dystopia right but but utopia and dystopia are different things with different people right and you could start out on this journey with uh with everyone saying we're going 00:09:42 to go to here point point a and then actually they decide their life changes they have a family or whatever they want to go over here and they put a lot of time into this or and equally point a could actually end up not looking like what they want to to be 00:09:55 part of how are you managing that journey for the people as part of the path
      • for: intentional community, intentional communities, DAO community, decentralized cities, Jonathan Hillis, Nora Bateson, intentional communities - failure
      • comment
        • this is a critical question
        • unfortunately, many people have tried living in intentional communities over many decades and the success rate is not high
        • listen to what Nora Bateson has to say about her experience of living in idealistic intentional communities and why they fail

      and

      https://hyp.is/ISC75i5JEe6lgW93D0Ye_A/docdrop.org/video/GE39xfNRRyw/

      • for: decentralized cities, DAO city, intentional community, intentional communities
      • Description
        • Jonathan Hillis is interviewed about his decentralized cities project
    1. I   grew up at Esalen and all these crazy new age-ey  sort of places, and I can tell you that I have   00:54:38 seen every flavor of self-help and personal  development that you could shake a stick at.   And none of them work. They all breed assholes.  I mean, I'm sorry, but if you're an asshole,   there's no way around it. Nothing's going to fix  you. And if you're not an asshole, then everything   is going to make you less of an asshole. So the reason that's important is that there's   00:55:02 a lot of pressure on how people should live, how  they should think, how they should be, how they   should feel. And this top-down instructional of  telling people how to live, think and feel is,   I think, a completely un-ecological process that  is interrupting the possibilities
      • for: intentional community, intentional communities,
    2. I can tell you that   my experience is that intentional communities  are not only not fun, but a disaster.   00:51:53 And one of the reasons they're both not fun and  a disaster is that they have a mission statement.   They already know where they're going and there's  some abstracted map-like idea that everyone thinks   that they're cohering to. But then it turns  out that everyone actually interpreted that   differently and the way they interpreted it  yesterday changed. And so that thing becomes   00:52:16 the territory on which you are in polarity with  each other and not the thing that you agree about.   The thing you fight about most is the mission  statement.
      • for: ecological civilization
        • Nora Bateson
          • Nora shares about the many diverse intentional communities she has lived in and found them all dysfunctional.
          • The problem is that they have a mission statement, a purpose.
          • The perspectival knowing is different for each person.
          • How do you nurture unintentional community?
          • support unintentional possibility
          • top-down instructional is an unecological process
          • The question "who can you be when you are with me?" is preferred over "what should you be?"
    1. At the same time, our whole sense of community has been lost as the requirement of modern societies rely on us living in anonymous neighbourhoods with people we don’t know or share much of anything in common. Who are these representatives presuming to represent anymore anyway?
    2. It’s no wonder that fewer than half of citizens can be bothered to vote
      • for: broken system, voting, low turnout, low voter turnout, together alone
      • adjacency
        • low turnout
        • low voter turnout
        • alienation
        • anonymous neighbourhoods
        • anonymous community
    1. What is more needed in our time than a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer? A healthy church can be a safety net in the harsh American economy by offering its members material assistance in times of need: meals after a baby is born, money for rent after a layoff. Perhaps more important, it reminds people that their identity is not in their job or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.

      Why can't these community activities be done in a religion-free environment? Is God actually needed here? What else could serve as the glue? Or is community itself the glue.

  14. Jul 2023
  15. May 2023
    1. They work, they go to the pub and while they share cooking duties they’re not against ordering a takeaway on a Friday night. ‘I would argue that quite often intentional communities reflect the period in which they were formed,’ explains Kirsten Stevens-Wood, a senior lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University and lead for the Intentional Communities Research Group.

      Interesting person to contact Kirsten Stevens-Wood

  16. Mar 2023
  17. Jan 2023
  18. Dec 2022
    1. "Queer people built the Fediverse," she said, adding that four of the five authors of the ActivityPub standard identify as queer. As a result, protections against undesired interaction are built into ActivityPub and the various front ends. Systems for blocking entire instances with a culture of trolling can save users the exhausting process of blocking one troll at a time. If a post includes a “summary” field, Mastodon uses that summary as a content warning.
    1. For most Americans, poverty is seen as an individualized conditionthat exclusively affects those individuals, their families, and perhaps theirneighborhoods. Rarely do we conceptualize a stranger’s poverty as having adirect or indirect effect on our own well-being.

      The Golden Rule not only benefits your neighbor, but you as well.

  19. Nov 2022
    1. A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the oldart-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out ofnowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. Ibecame (and still am) more and more convinced that the importantchanges in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. Icall this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius. This word isnow starting to gain some currency - the philosopher James Ogilvy uses itin his most recent book.

      Book Source: Eno, Brian. A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary. 1st edition. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Section: A Letter to Dave Stewart, p 354

      Cross reference quote and further usage/refinement of the word from popular blog post by Kevin Kelly Scenius, or Communal Genius: https://hypothes.is/a/SgYqomnBEe2_Yaf4i1JnCg

  20. Jul 2022
    1. One interesting observation about these markets is that the upper-limit for value creation of individual ventures here, one creator, one community, etc, is smaller than startups. There are only a handful of trillion-dollar communities in the history of humanity, and no trillion-dollar influencers or entertainers. Scale will come more from breadth, not just making one good bet, as is the case in startups.
    2. The next Y Combinator will identify an industry where most people are under-valuing a certain class of talent in an industry poised to grow rapidly, gather a community to commoditize tribal knowledge, and over time scale it into a self-sustaining flywheel that helps them grow their gravitational field. As for which industry, my guess is as good as anyone else’s – unpredictability is a core element of disruption, almost definitionally – but I think there’s a good chance it’ll come from one of these areas: The creator economy – people who can independently grow an audience and monetize them sustainably. Entertainment, as an old, bureaucratic industry adjacent to this space, is also an interesting target. Communities – I’ve written extensively about my bullishness on communities elsewhere. Higher education – what replaces Harvard and Stanford?
  21. Jun 2022
    1. He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

      It no longer resolves, but outside.in sounds like the sort of project that fits into the sort of space similar to Darius Kazemi's Run Your Own Social.

      Archive.org makes it look like a hyperlocal space done at larger scale though... perhaps in a shape more similar to Patch? https://web.archive.org/web/20090618030413/http://outside.in/

    1. User participation in any online internet community generally follows the 90-9-1 rule:90% of community members are lurkers who read or observe, but don’t contribute9% of community members edit or respond to content but don’t create content of their own1% of community members create new content
  22. May 2022
    1. a society-wide hyperconversation. This hyperconversation operationalizes continuous discourse, including its differentiation and emergent framing aspects. It aims to assist people in developing their own ways of framing and conceiving the problem that makes sense given their social, cultural, and environmental contexts. As depicted in table 1, the hyperconversation also reflects a slower, more deliberate approach to discourse; this acknowledges damaged democratic processes and fractured societal social cohesion. Its optimal design would require input from other relevant disciplines and expertise,

      The public Indyweb is eminently designed as a public space for holding deep, continuous, asynchronous conversations with provenance. That is, if the partcipant consents to public conversation, ideas can be publicly tracked. Whoever reads your public ideas can be traced.and this paper trail is immutably stored, allowing anyone to see the evolution of ideas in real time.

      In theory, this does away with the need for patents and copyrights, as all ideas are traceable to the contributors and each contribution is also known. This allows for the system to embed crowdsourced microfunding, supporting the best (upvoted) ideas to surface.

      Participants in the public Indyweb ecosystem are called Indyviduals and each has their own private data hub called an Indyhub. Since Indyweb is interpersonal computing, each person is the center of their indyweb universe. Through the discoverability built into the Indyweb, anything of immediate salience is surfaced to your private hub. No applications can use your data unless you give exact permission on which data to use and how it shall be used. Each user sets the condition for their data usage. Instead of a user's data stored in silos of servers all over the web as is current practice, any data you generate, in conversation, media or data files is immediately accessible on your own Indyhub.

      Indyweb supports symmathesy, the exchange of ideas based on an appropriate epistemological model that reflects how human INTERbeings learn as a dynamic interplay between individual and collective learning. Furthermore, all data that participants choose to share is immutably stored on content addressable web3 storage forever. It is not concentrated on any server but the data is stored on the entire IPFS network:

      "IPFS works through content adddressibility. It is a peer-to-peer (p2p) storage network. Content is accessible through peers located anywhere in the world, that might relay information, store it, or do both. IPFS knows how to find what you ask for using its content address rather than its location.

      There are three fundamental principles to understanding IPFS:

      Unique identification via content addressing Content linking via directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) Content discovery via distributed hash tables (DHTs)" (Source: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/how-ipfs-works/)

      The privacy, scalability, discoverability, public immutability and provenance of the public Indyweb makes it ideal for supporting hyperconversations that emerge tomorrows collectively emergent solutions. It is based on the principles of thought augmentation developed by computer industry pioneers such as Doug Englebart and Ted Nelson who many decades earlier in their prescience foresaw the need for computing tools to augment thought and provide the ability to form Network Improvement Communities (NIC) to solve a new generation of complex human challenges.

    1. Here's a link to the penultimate draft (not for citation): https://www.academia.edu/46814693/The_Signaling_Function_of_Sharing_Fake_Stories

      This broad thesis sounds to me like something I've read before, perhaps in George Lakoff about people signaling group membership or perhaps people with respect to their voting tendencies. The question isn't who should I vote for specifically, but who would someone like me (ie. who would my group, my tribe) vote for?

      This sort of phenomena is likely easier to see/show in sports fans who will tell blatant untruths or delude themselves about the teams of which they are fans.The team winning at all costs will cause them to put on blinders.

      A particular recent example of something like this with relation to what might otherwise be a logical business decision is seen in incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy nixing the idea of building in Philadelphia due to his own NFL fandom https://www.phillyvoice.com/amazon-hq2-philly-eagles-giants-rivalry-andy-jassy-jeff-bezos-amazon-unbound/

      Why would someone make a potential multi-million dollar decision over their sports preference?

  23. Apr 2022
  24. Mar 2022
    1. Learning happens when a connection is made between these nodes;

      I think that this is a powerful statement - it shows that true learning occurs when we share, experience and learn from each other and through networking.

    2. PLE is the educational manifestation of the web’s “small pieces loosely joined,” a “world of pure connection, free of the arbitrary constraints of matter, distance, and time.”

      The quotation here is a strong one because I have always felt that many curriculums are constrained by the rules and laws that govern certain institutes - it leaves little to be explored and imagined sometimes ... so the aspect of small pieces coming together to create a larger whole feeds into that aspects of 'ecology'. It is what we might refer to in the design/ art space as gestalt.

    3. PLNs (professional learning networks) and their role in supporting the development of  ‘connected educators’.

      Professional learning networks support professional development of educators (who are digitally literate). Is this a more modern connected version or an extension of communities of practice?

    1. We’re building a knowledge base, so if one writer collects information for an article, their research is made available to the other writers in the collective. 

      How does one equitably and logically build a communally shared knowledge base for a for-profit space?

      How might a communal zettelkasten work? A solid index for creating links between pieces is incredibly important here, but who does this work? How is it valued?

  25. Jan 2022
    1. Companies should not assume they can release a product without thinking about its unintended uses and then undo the harm that results. This often doesn’t work.Some technology

      Many products, including technology and social media products, can have a multitude of uses including unintended off-label uses. This can lead to harmful and deleterious effects on large groups of people.

      On the other hand, some users may also see great benefits from off-label use cases. As an example, despite it being a vector for attacks and abuse, some marginalized groups have benefited from social media through increased visibility, the ability to create community, and expand their digital access.

      As a result it's important to look at how a product is being used in the marketplace and change or modify it or create similar but different products to amplify the good and mitigate the bad.

  26. Dec 2021
    1. I think this new identity should… build upon a diverse group of people and ideas remember, but not revere, past research and tradition welcome independent contributors, and view itself as a collective of people, not an industry of companies work in the open, and value building and testing ideas over spreading them.

      From the jump, I can't help but think that it sounds like he's looking for a niche within the IndieWeb space.

  27. Nov 2021
    1. Secretive procedures that take place outside the law and leave the accused feeling helpless and isolated have been an element of control in authoritarian regimes across the centuries,

      Anne Applebaum indicates that the secretive procedures being practiced at American colleges and universities to prosecute their community members is very similar to authoritarian governments like the Argentine junta, Franco's Spain, and Stalin's troikas.

    2. Kipnis, who was accused of sexual misconduct because she wrote about sexual harassment, was not initially allowed to know who her accusers were either, nor would anyone explain the rules governing her case. Nor, for that matter, were the rules clear to the people applying them, because, as she wrote in Unwanted Advances, “there’s no established or nationally uniform set of procedures.” On top of all that, Kipnis was supposed to keep the whole thing confidential: “I’d been plunged into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it,’’ she wrote. This chimes with the story of another academic, who told me that his university “never even talked to me before it decided to actually punish me. They read the reports from the investigators, but they never brought me in a room, they never called me on the phone, so that I could say anything about my side of the story. And they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

      While the accusers should definitely be believed and given a space to be heard and prosecute their cases, one of the most drastic harms I see here and repeated frequently are Universities sitting as judges and juries for harms that should be tried in the courts.

      These cases have been removed entirely from the public social justice system and are tried in a space that is horribly ill-equipped to handle them. This results in tremendous potential for miscarriage of justice.

      If universities are going to engage in these sorts of practices, they should at least endeavor to allow all parties to present their sides and provide some sort of restorative justice.

      Somewhere I've read and linked to (Reddit?) communities practicing restorative justice in doing these practices. As I recall, it took a lot of work and effort to sort them out, but it also pointed to stronger and healthier communities over time. Why aren't colleges and universities looking into and practicing this if they're going to be wielding institutional power over individuals? Moving the case from one space to the next is simply passing the buck.

    1. I want a [[community]], not an [[audience]]. Audience is stuff like reach, personality/celebrity, spectacle, anxiety, alienation, competition. Community is more like voice, discussion, comradery.

      I love this sentiment.

      It's an analogy that reminds me of a quote by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington:

      Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories– distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody. I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three.

  28. Oct 2021
  29. Sep 2021
    1. address historical and ongoing injustice and imagine new ways of teaching, researching, and engaging with community

      This is a pretty impressive list of initiatives above. It would be great to have people link similar initiatives from other institutions here to get a sense of how widespread this kind of activity is and help make connections across efforts.

    1. Smart leaders will not focus so much on exhorting people not to be afraid of change and will instead work to do everything they can to increase a sense of stable, supportive community. Unfortunately, many leaders see stability, community, and a sense of belonging as enemies of innovation — when in reality they are the prerequisites.
  30. Aug 2021
    1. For someone who wants to extend the platform, particularly developers, my best advice would be to ignore the hype. For now things can still be built without all the fancy tools. The difference is that I think it is safe to say few getting into WordPress development will have the next big plugin or theme. What is more likely is that new developers in WordPress will have rewarding careers working for hosts and other larger, established companies in the space.

      The higher complexity also means more power will be placed in the hands of Automattic and their engineers. The previously more open platform will tend to be more closed and the cash flows will move in the direction of a much smaller group of larger corporations.

      To some extent Drupal made their core product more difficult to use starting around 2015. WordPress seems to be following suit, but with a slightly different flavor.

  31. Jul 2021
    1. In 1996, technology historian Jennifer S. Light compared the talk of “cyberoptimists” about virtual communities to city planners’ earlier optimistic predictions about shopping malls. As the automobile colonized U.S. cities in the 1950s, planners promised that malls would be enclosed public spaces to replace Main Streets. But as Light pointed out, the transition to suburban malls brought new inequities of access and limited the space’s functions to those that served commercial interests.

      Nice historical comparison.

    1. Platforms of the Facebook walled-factory type are unsuited to thework of building community, whether globally or locally, becausesuch platforms are unresponsive to their users, and unresponsive bydesign (design that is driven by a desire to be universal in scope). Itis virtually impossible to contact anyone at Google, Facebook,Twitter, or Instagram, and that is so that those platforms can trainus to do what they want us to do, rather than be accountable to ourdesires and needs

      This is one of the biggest underlying problems that centralized platforms often have. It's also a solid reason why EdTech platforms are pernicious as well.

  32. Jun 2021
  33. May 2021
    1. These sound like some interesting structures around which a community could easily and interestingly create content.

      Worth delving into seeing how they work.

    1. “Monetising what we see as sacred knowledge, our way of being – driving, walking – is sacred knowledge and the only people who should have any purview over that is our community. … What if we look at what the data could do for our community and how to achieve that? … We are gathering our data because we love our people, we want a better future for the next generations. What if all data was gathered for those reasons? What would it look like?”

      A great quote and framing from Abigail Echo-Hawk.

      This reliance on going to community elders (primarily because they have more knowledge and wisdom) is similar to designing for the commons and working backward. Elders in many indigenous cultures represent the the commons.

      This isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to innovate and explore the evolutionary space for better answers, but going slow and fixing things is far more likely to be helpful than moving fast and breaking things as has been the mode for the last fifteen years. Who's watching the long horizon in these scenarios?

      This quote and set up deserves some additional thought into the ideas and power structures described by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture

    1. According to a study published last year by researchers at the University of California San Diego, more than three-quarters of American adults now experience moderate to high levels of loneliness — rates that have more than doubled over the last 50 years. Despite rising housing costs across the country, more Americans are living alone today than ever before. As Boone Wheeler, a 33-year-old member of East Wind, told me, “There are literal health consequences to loneliness: Your quality of life goes down due to lack of community — you will die sooner.”

      Loneliness is growing and communities address that ...

    2. IN 2017 BJORN GRINDE and Ranghild Bang Nes, researchers with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, co-authored a paper on the quality of life among North Americans living in intentional communities. Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups. Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.”

      People in intentional communities are happier according to a 2017 study.

  34. Apr 2021
    1. Darius Kazemi randomly tweets out pages from books in the Internet Archive as a means of creating discovery and serendipity.

      Library Futures, Jennie Rose Halperin @Library_futures @little_wow

      Idea of artificial scarcity being imposed on digital objects is a damaging thing for society.

      Ideas to explore:

      Libraries as a free resource could be reframed as a human right within a community.

      Librarians as local community tummelers around information.

      Joanne McNeill

  35. Mar 2021
    1. Americans worked together: “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out; and when they have found each other, they unite.”

      The IndieWeb is very much this.

    2. Famously, he found many of the answers in state, local, and even neighborhood institutions. He wrote approvingly of American federalism, which “permits the Union to enjoy the power of a great republic and the security of a small one.” He liked the traditions of local democracy too, the “township institutions” that “give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free.” Despite the vast empty spaces of their country, Americans met one another, made decisions together, carried out projects together. Americans were good at democracy because they practiced democracy. They formed what he called “associations,” the myriad organizations that we now call “civil society,” and they did so everywhere:Not only do [Americans] have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools … Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.

      Small individual communities all making and promoting things can be a powerful thing.

      Where have we gone wrong?

    1. What I’d like more of is a social web that sits between these two extremes, something with a small town feel. So you can see people are around, and you can give directions and a friendly nod, but there’s no need to stop and chat, and it’s not in your face. It’s what I’ve talked about before as social peripheral vision (that post is about why it should be build into the OS).

      I love the idea of social peripheral vision online.

    1. It turns out it’s really difficult to get people to rebel against something if they can’t see it, don’t feel empowered to make choices about, and don’t really understand it.
    1. Summary of moving from in person to online events a year ago.

      I like her admonition to consider welcoming new people to a community in an online only space.

      Try to avoid in-jokes. Make space for more phatic communication. Make considerations for parents, particularly around mealtimes and bedtimes.

    1. the community is both endlessly creative and genuinely interested in solving big issues in meaningful ways. Whether it's their commitment to careful (and caring) community stewardship or their particular strain of techno-ethics, I have been consistently (and pleasantly) surprised at what I've seen during the last twelve months. I don't always see eye-to-eye with their decisions and I don't think that the community is perfect, but it's consistently (and deliberately) striving to be better, and that's a fairly rare thing, online or off.
    1. Because annotating a syllabus conveys a message–from day one–that course documents are not static artifacts, that something authored by an instructor is not unwelcoming of feedback, and that student voice is both appreciated and necessary for a shared endeavor.

      This helps to turn the class into a community.

      It also establishes the class as an ongoing conversation of learning with all the participants.

      It sets up the teacher not simply as the unquestionable "sage-on-the-stage" but as a guide through the material.

      If we didn't question our teachers, their ideas, their writings, and learn new things, we could have stopped at Aristotle and everyone would still think the Earth was the center of the universe and that feathers fall as fast as bowling balls.

    2. Annotate Your Syllabus 3.0

      Potential sub-title: "The syllabus is a living conversation"

  36. Feb 2021
    1. These days I find myself away from broadcast tools and more in the insular channels of my friend groups. What I want from technology is to share life with my friends; to be given the opportunity, and the power, to share that life, and all it includes… showing them care, or sharing the bits of knowledge that seem important to us as a group.
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