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.
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.
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?
humanity as not only the source and context for technology and its use, but its ultimate yardstick for the constructive use and impact of technology. This may sound obvious, it certainly does to me, but in practice it needs to be repeated to ensure it is used as such a yardstick from the very first design stage of any new technology.
Vgl [[Networked Agency 20160818213155]] wrt having a specific issue to address that is shared by the user group wielding a tech / tool, in their own context.
Vgl [[Open data begint buiten 20200808162905]] wrt the only yardstick for open data stems from its role as policy instrument: impact achieved outside in the aimed for policy domains through the increased agency of the open data users.
Tech impact is not to be measured in eyeballs, usage, revenue etc. That's (understandably) the corporation's singular and limited view, the rest of us should not adopt it as the only possible one.