- Dec 2022
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techpolicy.press techpolicy.press
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Build a stronger social and institutional layer. There are many experts in community- and network-building who should be interested in working on such a project.
Yes. It requires however letting go of starting from the tech as a single plaform or the presumption of scale, and starting from community and network. The group once formed shapes/defines the tech tools used. Then link those tools used up into a federated whole, that in turn may need its own governance structures. Vgl [[Waardevol op zich, waardevoller verbonden 20190513163855]] (valuable on its own, more valuable connected)
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Mastodon is a sustainable, healthy network that reached – before the migration begun – an equilibrium of around 5 million overall, with half a million active users. So why does it need to grow further? Because millions more people need access to healthy, just, sustainable, user-friendly communication tools. Hans Gerwitz described it as seeing the network’s growth as “souls saved,” instead of “eyeballs captured.”
An eye-opening metric. 'souls saved' vs eyeballs. As in, the number of people with access to a community values reinforcing platform. Vgl [[EU Digital Rights and Principles]] and [[Digital Services Act 20210319103722]] more geared to things that aren't specifically aimed at the culture of interaction, but at things that can be regulated (in the hope that it will impact culture of interaction).
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- Sep 2022
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www.onthecommons.org www.onthecommons.org
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8 Principles for Managing a Commons
take note, and compare to e.g. [[Community building 20100210214508]] a la Wenger. Which overlap / are expressions of the same thing on a different scale? Which are qualitatively different?
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harihareswara.net harihareswara.net
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written by Alex Bayley, first published November 9, 2009 and licensed CC BY-SA
The entire 2009 posting by Alex Bayley is provided here. Sumana's response is marked further down. The original Yahoo text is at https://web.archive.org/web/20140916121930/https://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/social/people/reputation/competitive.html At the top it's labeled 'best practice', which is a tell of not actually understanding community building/stewarding. At the bottom there it mentions Tara Hunt on healthy community, which brings us back to Wenger's work I think. Yahoo was after design patterns here, which make sense as such. I think my issue is that such design choices in a platform tend to be fixed after design and thus can become dominant. The natural flow of a community interaction likely will go in multiple directions over time. Would any such platforms, not the ones mentioned by Yahoo as examples, be ever able to change which design patterns come to the fore? Meaning, built your platform to have all of these available, with the community using a platform able to choose time and place where one of those design patterns is expressed in the platform.
It's a category error to equate the users of a platfom, or worse the platform itself, with a community. A tech company's view is often limited to customer audience, and dubs it community. A person's view starts from within the communities they're already part of: how does a tool support (my role in) my communities? Vgl https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/09/on-being-human-tech-and-the-abuse-of-community/
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"The community spectrum: caring to combative" - Insight From Alex Bayley
At first instance not convinced of this spectrum. Is a group still a community if it's combative (or competitive) as a group? I do recognise that each of those spectral 'lines' occur within any community. Yet, the defining aspect of community is its social cohesion, pointing towards the collaborative end of things.
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It’s part of a larger set of social patterns related to reputation
That's a good observation, this tie in to reputation. It connects to individual action, within the context of a community, with the purpose of gaining reputation. Vgl the role of identity as alternative in building scientific reputation as opposed to journal publishing. [[Identiteit als wetenschappelijk reputatieinstrument 20091019074407]] Vgl Jim Wales wrt wikipedians, "I don't need to know who you are, I need to know who you are within Wikipedia", as sort of a faceted reputation.
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I have found that starting a tidepool, nurturing it along, and then demonstrating concrete results that benefit the larger "ocean" is a fairly reliable part of a strategy for encouraging change in an open source/culture project, as with the Wikimedia code of conduct. Those are examples of people creating more caring/collaborative tidepools in competitive/combative environments, but if you wish that your more caring/collaborative environment had a more competitive/combative tidepool, you could set up a challenge or tournament! But be careful of competition leaking out and affecting people who find it discouraging: there's a reason why, Dreamwidth, for instance, avoids leaderboards.
nice metaphor, tide pools. The examples are intra-communal though, not defining the community as the spectrum seems to imply. Formulated this way it falls back to [[Community building 20100210214508]] a la Etienne Wenger, where varying spaces, juxtaposing internal/external perspectives, balancing safety for members with excitement of stuff happening, rhythm, and pathways for more/less engagement are the knobs one can turn after reflecting on the overall situation of a community of practice. In such reflection individual's behaviours are part of what leads to (probing) interventions.
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www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
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grating to come across people talking about how to create a community for their tech to help it scale.
This is the wrong way around, positioning the tech corp's perspective as more imporant than society's. It's insulting to position community as a means, similar to talking about users which limits the view one has of people and what they try to achieve to only their interaction with a tool.
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Scaling is in our human structures. Artists don’t scale, road building doesn’t scale but art and road networks are at scale. Communities don’t scale, they’re fine as they are, but they are the grain of scale, resulting in society which is at scale. Don’t seek to scale your tech, seek to let your tech reinforce societal scaling, our overlapping communities, our cultures. Let your tech be scaffolding for a richer expression of society.
The aim of scaling tech is again a tech company's limited view of the world, that should not be adopted by people using a tech tool. Individual acts scale to community to society/culture, but that's a different type of scaling. One through sideways copying and adoption. Not to scale a tool but to amplify/scale an effect or impact. Tech is a scaffold for enriching society, society is not there to scale tech corps.
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Why doesn’t tech usually focus on me using it for my communities as is, and rather present itself as having me join a made up community whose raison d’etre is exploiting our attention for profit? That’s not community building, that’s extraction, instrumentalising your users, while dehumanising them along the way. To me it’s in those communities everyone is already part of where the scaling for technology is to be found.
A tech company's view is often limited to customer audience, and dubs it community. A person's view starts from within the communities they're already part of: how does a tool support (my role in) my communities?
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the ancient cathedrals and La Sagrada Familia, though unfinished, are meaningful. They are testimony to the community and community processes over generations that built them. Barn raising is way more important than having a barn built by a contractor, even though the result in terms of barns is the same.
Cathedral building or its more practical and common relative barn raising are expressions of communal effort, and a monument to a community's value/coherence. What a community creates for communal use can be proxy for its meaning. It's a result from community feeding back into community. I've also used the metaphor of mushrooms on mycelium (also comparing orgs to mushrooms)
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branch.climateaction.tech branch.climateaction.tech
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quote by Cornel West: “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
Cornel West, US philosopher / activisti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornel_West Full quote: "Justice is what love looks like in public. Tenderness is what love looks like in private." Justice as an expression of love, to make manifest that you include all within humanity. It seems in some YT clips it's also a call to introduce more tenderness into systems. Sounds like a [[Multidimensionaal gaan ipv platslaan 20200826121720]] variant, of even better a [[Macroscope 20090702120700]] in the sense of [[Macroscope for new civil society 20181105203829]] where just systems surround tender interactions.
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I think social infrastructure is what love looks like in public. It listens and responds to the needs of people. It’s a fabric that weaves people together towards a shared community thriving. If we’re to survive the worst of what’s to come, we need to build and embolden public systems of care.
"Social infrastructure is what love looks like in public" Social infrastructure is an expression of community/communal values, and an active intervention in bringing about that community and building those communal values. Result and intervention. In community building you can use this, create the intervention and people will treat it as a result (and thus act within that community as member), Vgl [[Community building 20100210214508]] Wenger et al. I realise I never made a Notion about 'cathedral building' as a testament to community created / strength https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2010/05/working_on_stuf/ . Social infrastructure is a form of 'cathedral building', or more modest 'barn raising', where the process is a community intervention and expression, and the result feeds back into that.
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