Today is our inaugural Tuesday Open Thread. It’s inspired by the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab and by Danielle Baskin’s amazing Cofounder Quest. We want to know:
What are you working on and what could be useful to you?
You, our readers, come from a beautiful intersection of disciplines all interested in and/or working around the theme of public-spirited tech in some way. This is just one of the small ways we’re trying to get to know you, and offer you a chance to get to know others in our growing community.
Feel free to consider “working on” as informally as you’d like — a side project, a thesis, a work project, a book, or anything else! Share as much as you like, but ideally say enough about what you’re working on and any questions that have you stuck, or resources you can’t find, or collaborators you are in search of, so that others can helpfully chime in!
We are assuming that you, like us, are looking for more flourishing places on the internet. We want this to be one of those places! Please treat others with openness, generosity and respect.
Hey, I'm Ethan. I run a research lab at UMass Amherst focused on digital public infrastructure. We are interested in building/nurturing/learning about projects to build the digital public sphere that are owned and governed by the communities that use them. We're building "Smalltown", a fork of Mastodon designed for standalone social networks used for local civic discussions, and "Gobo", a social media aggregator that gives users more power over what they read. More on our work at publicinfrastructure.org
Thats us, we are currently navigating the legal issues with distributing ownership as widely as possible while also forming as a limited liability company. Would love to connect with you.
Hi! I'm Helena, I'm working on a little website that encourages people to go for a walk through a series of prompts. The idea is to re-discover your own neighborhood, time and time again, rather than always looking for something new. The prompts are inspired by derives, and encourages folks to make use of public spaces. Would love to know of any similar projects :) or folks who are interested in trying it soon.
Love this! Passionate pedestrian and flaneur here. Can't wait to see it.
You might love this book by Alexandra Horowitz if you haven't read it. She takes the same walk in her neighborhood with other people (e.g. architect, artist, geologist, dog, toddler) and talks about how one's way of seeing influences how they perceive place. Some inspiration for your project!
Definitely interested in trying it out! I did something similar to this by trying to go outside with a little notebook and just thinking about all the questions I had -- why is the street named this? How do vines grow up a building? What kind of flowers are in this neighborhood? I also rode around on my bike to a lot of different neighborhoods in search of Little Libraries (I know now you can look up their locations online but that would ruin my fun of discovering them). Little libraries are endlessly interesting to me because they are offering public domain in a largely private area--some have chairs/benches to relax on, some even have snacks inside, some have special collections of LGBTQ+ books, it is amazing.
You both (Taylor and Helena) might be interested in the Walking Meditation cards this person in Holland makes: http://dao2change.com
I bought them from her a few years ago while researching my book and we had a great conversation. The cards aren't on her website, but if she still makes them you can email her through it. They're very pretty and have thought-provokers like "walk with a habit" and think about how nature would respond if it had a habit you're trying to change.
Jonathan is a lovely person and has been a walkability activist and walking-as-life person for a very long time. Definitely sounds like an intersection with what you're doing, Helena. Jonathan uses the hashtag #pedestriandignity on Instagram still, I think.
Oh hey, hi, fellow walking/walkability person here! Do you know Johnathan Stalls who started Walk2Connect? He does Insight Paths now and has a lot of walking guidance. Also Annabel Abbs (author of forthcoming Windswept on women walking) is coming out with a new book that I think will involve walking prompts.
👋 ! I'm Sarah & I've recently left my last full-time job at Omidyar Network focused on responsible technology and am now on sabbatical. So I'm not ~working~ in the 9-5 sense, but trying to let my brain flourish - reading (recently loved Real Estate by Deborah Levy and Michel Faber's Crimson Petal and the White), trying to get to the end of my tabs about communityDAOs (do I get them? I'm not sure) and having nourishing catchups with friends.
Hi Sarah, we're looking for contributors and we'd love to talk to you if you're looking for some responsible technology to dip your toe into. Loving your interest in CommunityDAOs, its on our radar as well.
Thanks Sarah! We definitely need more book recommendations, especially any fiction featuring digital platforms or social media. Also, yeah, I'm not sure if I get communityDAOs either. –Josh
OK one of my only criteria for books in this particular life phase is no or little technology - I think I just overconsumed in the last year. BUT I just ordered Mercury Retrograde by Emily Segal which I hear is excellent
Not specifically social media, but I just finished Becky Chambers’s “A Closed and Common Orbit” and it’s a great read with a thoughtful take on sentient AI.
👋 Hi, I’m Melanie. I work in the social innovation space with a deep passion for community-driven design online and off, digital and analog. Currently on partial sabbatical–– a little work, a little teaching, a little collaborating and scheming. (Most recently build a community in residence program at Facebook/Instagram, but origins in community-driven design go back to super analog roots at arch/urban planning firms.)
💪🏻 One thing I'm working on:
Building a class on “life-centered design” for Copenhagen School of Interaction Design (CIID). Really nerding out on biological systems and indigenous wisdom in systems design questions. I'm also building some workshops on facilitation and hybrid/multi-faceted creative leaders.
💁♀️ Help:
Would love your favorite books or research on emergent design and inspiration from biological systems or indigenous perspectives! Also, may need some guest speakers!
Woohoo~ This is great. Thanks, Vicky. And love that she'll have more writing with NP.
I love CIID's Copenhagen home. Spent time there on a sabbatical touring Scandinavian cities/social/education systems. I'm going to be teaching with a biologist on their Costa Rica campus–– which is fun, but I'll miss it!
Do you know how to clone/teleport? Because I'd love to be in two places at once. ;)
Ah! I spent time there studying culinary culture with a researcher from Noma's Nordic Food Lab (now closed, rip). Working on the teleportation—let me know if you figure it out first :)
Hi Melanie, your work sounds really interesting. I have a background in anthropology and your question about books about biological systems made me think of an ethnography I read - The Mushroom At The End Of The World by Anna Tsing. I would recommend reading it if you have time to pore over it, it's a very interesting book about the physical ecosystems and social 'ecosystems' of global capitalism. But it takes a while to get through! Another book by Anna Tsing is Friction, which is loosely centred on Indonesian rainforests and is also very interesting.
Hi, I am working with 4 cofounders on a social network designed and architected as a utility, and based upon domain authority instead of behavioural addiction. We believe that the social web should be run as a commons, with ownership distributed as widely as possible to the people who contribute to its healthy development.
That's very cool! Is the idea that users would ultimately build and curate an "interest graph" of sorts, to potentially "connect" with other like-minded folks?
Yes, with the novelty being our algorithm. We are going back somewhat to the roots of the internet, eschewing the machine learning approach to curate content across interest communities with the comprehensible mathematics of network theory instead of the opaque environments we seem stuck with today.
Instead of optimising for attention and behavioural addiction through 'high arousal emotions' our algorithm amplifies (and suppresses) content that members agree is relevant to the intersection of an interest and a geographic area (a 'space'). Not every opinion matters though, as you build reputation in a space to earn more influence on the curation algorithm.
Really like the design philosophy, echoing the days of meaningful connections. Fingers crossed I'm picked to give it a spin! I'll drop you a line outside of here to connect as well.
Hi Sarah, sorry I wanted to give as little context in the survey as possible, to get your associations. I am making it up as I go along, so apologise if this is not the right approach.
Hiya! I’m Antonia, writing about walking, walkability, and the tension between private property and the commons. I live in a small liberal-leaning town in a very conservative county of northwest Montana, and the question of “how can we live together despite often opposing values?” is a very real daily question.
That's great to hear. As I suspect you know, we are fascinated by urbanism, especially in terms of what it can teach us about digital platforms. And this particular tension is one we're thinking about a lot as we work on our Decentralization issue of the magazine. –Josh
Yes! I think urbanism was how I found New Public. I highly highly recommend the work of The Overhead Wire, Talking Headways (podcast about transit, urban planning, etc.), and all the folks at Rail~Volution. A lot of intersections with public space and public commons.
Also - Tangent... I think about this connection between exploration of physical spaces and digital spaces constantly.
People often benefit from awareness moments to deepen their perception and preferences of spaces before proactively designing physical spaces. (e.g. we used to take clients of "field trips" to immerse and experience spaces before designing their campus). What are deeper ways to do this digitally? "This is water" moments but with space.
Awesome that you all are doing this! I'm working on quite a few projects, I think the biggest ones I need help with are the following:
Becoming a TechnoWizard - this is my personal journey that I document via a newsletter, YouTube videos, and an audiojournal podcast (feel free to click my profile if you're interested in seeing some of that content). I'm trying to figure out how to better market myself and grow my audience/fellow journey goers. I talk about everything from design to futurism, philosophy to anthropology, quantum physics to hip-hop and so much more. But how do I find folks who want to talk about so much stuff? I worry I'm too much of a polymath to be able to focus, and too much of a novice to be remarkable.
Positive Futures - I want to write a series of books (and more) about non dystopian futures. The goal is to create more things like Star Trek and the Jetsons that inspires people to imagine and be more hopeful for the future. But of course, I want to base it in the many problems of today and show how we might solve these problems in a number of ways. Right now, I am learning about what it might take to build better futures. And I am using 3 filters to pain a picture of different futures: a Human-Centered capitalist future, a decentralized communist future, and a federated anarchist future. Looking for as much info as I can find about these concepts and anything else that talks about building better futures.
Healthy Transcendence - I want to create a company or organization focused on using positive psychology to build a system that helps people live more fulfilling lives based on SB Kaufman's integrated and revised version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (and any other credible models). I need to find more information about these models and ideas on how to build humanistic scalable technology and businesses.
I know that's a lot! But that's how I like to get down 😜
Hey there! I also have a lot of different interests and find it hard to square the circle and sum myself up neatly. An online community I've found helpful and reassuring about this is Puttylike, which is a blog/community of 'multipotentialites' (aka people with lots of interests). Nice to meet you and your projects sound super interesting!
Hi, I'm Ben. I'm a brand mythologist and ethnographer. My relationship with tech/digital is not unlike a never-ending loop of the slow jam moment at an 8th grade mixer.
One of my projects is starting a research recruiting company that focuses exclusively on the marginalized aspects of human identity. We will be following a "community organizing" model to ensure power is rooted and feeds back into participating communities. How could tech help expedite the growth of participation--and even offer career path opportunities for those who are willing to participate?
Love this!! I’m an independent strategists working at the intersection of data, tech and content as well as an entrepreneur with two startups. An update of what’s going on:
- in full member acquisition mode for Overflow. An accelerator for Independent Thinkers in the areas of marketing, innovation, design and comms. Take a look at www.weareoverflow.com
- pivoting Ways, a platform for travelers yo meet makers along cultural routes in the world (I.e Camino De Santiago)
- looking for strategic projects where business growth and social impact can come together in sustainable ways.
Hi~ I work in entrepreneurial ecosystem building, the intersection of economic development and community building. I'm currently writing a blog about Bentoism & the Doughnut economy as (food inspired) frameworks for holistic and systems level thinking. My larger project is a book about ecosystem building (work in progress).
Looking forward to reading. Love her work! She said something in an interview about “only knocking on open doors” and that’s been really helpful in my own work.
Hello! I’m Kevin Maguire and Sarah sent me here via Twitter. This year I started The New Fatherhood, a newsletter, community and safe space for modern fathers to connect and discuss the changing face of fatherhood.
I’m always on the lookout for other dads with non-traditional backgrounds stories who might be interesting in contributing to the diverse set of voices on the site.
Two of my favourite pieces recently were the story of a stay-at-home dad who is the parent of a child with a limb-difference, and a non-biological mum in a same-sex partnership who had become a “dad” by default.
There's a Chinese podcast called 故事 FM (Story FM) that shares everyday stories, similar to This American Life. Episode 514 我是一名全职爸爸 ("I am a full time dad") was interesting / sounds relevant to you. Wish there was a way to easily translate it, but linking in case helpful for research purposes:
Thanks so much for chiming in everyone! Let's keep it going, and please consider asking a question or leaning into what you're looking for: what could be useful to you?
I’m perennially curious about what people are doing (or seeing) to build resilient community, not just online but where they live. It’s something that comes up a lot in urbanism conversations, and I’d love to know what other iterations people here see—in whatever communities they engage with, online and off.
I've found a lot of wisdom in re-reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster." It gives a comparative social/cultural/systems perspective on resilience in face of crisis and special attention to urban systems. I'd love to see her update this with a COVID or Climate perspective.
Happy to nerd out separately on resilience. Did a lot of work with Rockefeller's Resilient Cities initiative balancing systems thinking with participatory design approaches.
Anything like that Resilient Cities work sounds interesting to me. I’m in this place where building infrastructure resilience is hampered by deep differences in ideology, and it’s that difficulty not just in communicating across difference but communicating across difference when a significant faction isn’t interested in communication. This affects a lot of things where I live, but to take one straightforward example, we’ve been trying for years to get the county commissioners to approve a bike/ped trail system across the county. But their perception of users of those trails doesn’t allow for the idea that they would serve all kinds of people for all kinds of purposes, and we can’t seem to make any headway on that understanding. So how do you even pursue resilience when large numbers of people don’t believe it’s necessary? (See also: social media?)
Ooooh - such an interesting point. I wonder how some of the more conservative cities navigated this in the 100RC network. I wonder if Rural Studio or other rural innovation labs have some more concrete examples and learnings to share. Sometimes, it's about super plainspoken, practical examples that feel harder to politicize. But then again, everything is getting politicized these days.
I posted a few explainer videos on JerrysBrain.com. It's a 23-year-old mind map. I didn't create the software, but was on their first press tour. Started using it then, not knowing I would be curating the same data file today. Happy to explain more.
Turns out I'm way too curious for my own good, so that one mind map has info on many, many things. Here's another important node for me: https://bra.in/2vPB9q
I hail from the glacial valleys and rolling hills of the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. For the last 25 years I've worked at Cornell University's Mann Library in support of our Land Grant "knowledge with a public purpose" mission. That includes creating space (physical and virtual) supporting the storage, access and exchange of information, as well the collaborative knowledge creation process itself.
I'm increasingly interested in how we might better employ some of the sophisticated information and communications technology tools and platforms used within our ivory towers to empower the disempowered (vs those already empowered). For example, using GIS technologies to support participatory mapping. This has led to a recent career transition into Community and Economic Development, drawing on emerging fields like Community Informatics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_informatics).
I'm currently working on ideas for how new, more democratically owned and governed "socio-technical configurations" like multi-stakeholder platform cooperatives and knowledge commons might be collaboratively developed and networked within regional development ecosystems. I'd love to connect with others who share an interest in this kind of work, even if only to compare lessons learned along the way.
Hey everyone, my name is Stella. I'm 22, I live in the UK and I work as a transport planner - my current projects include researching how rail is organised in Scotland, and analysing how train guards do the doors on trains. Outside of strictly 'work work' projects I'm working towards my goal of making the transport network and industry more accessible to disabled people (including myself).
What would be useful to me right now is advice from people further along in their lives than me on how to make space for work, but also make space for my life outside work. I'm strict with my hours right now - I have to be because I'm disabled and have limited energy - but I'm struggling to avoid letting work take over all my emotional headspace, whilst also avoiding feeling guilty for having firm boundaries. If that makes sense!
Hi all! By day I work as a tech consultant building opportunities for Indigenous technologists. My side projects explore the idea of digital imperialism and the ways technology exhibit symptoms of colonisation. I write speculative fiction, essays, and poetry trying to imagine less dystopian tech futures grounded in Indigenous thinking.
I do a lot of activist work too in digital rights and am always looking for new effective ways to do community education.
I love this! I'm super interested in creative non-dystopian (but not quite 'utopian') speculative fiction, much of which would be based on indigenous thinking. Would love to hear more about your studies, work, and ideas on this topic!
Thanks for opening up this discussion :) My name is Jasmine and I'm working on The Bloom, an uplifting global impact community. Our mission is to democratize access to diverse impact-driven opportunities and resources for young changemakers. I started the project from a storage closet at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva while working as an unpaid intern, frustrated by the systemic exploitation of young people around me. Since launching in early 2020, we've grown organically to 3,000+ changemakers all over the world almost entirely through word of mouth (no social media quite yet ) through our weekly newsletter 💪🏽
Things I'm looking for 👀
-A co-founder!
-Advisers in the community-building space, ideally with multicultural/international projects
-Nontraditional book recommendations that are good resources for a newbie founder
Things I can offer💜
-Compassionate feedback on whatever you're working on
Hi I'm writing about Community, creators and the tech landscape around creator economy. I'm currently prioritizing finding new connections online, and learn about struggles creators have in day to day life.
Hi damian here - I am just finishing a graphic novel (or series of short stories) about the internet. I am looking for publishers - any suggestions very welcome please?
Great! Fellow cartoonist here, congrats on wrapping up a graphic novel! Personally intimidated by the agents/publishers process, so I wish you best of luck. –Josh
Hi there, I'm a fellow cartoonist/illustrator, I'd suggest first finding work that you admire or that intersects with yours at the bookstore, and then look in there to see who is publishing it - also, be versed in copyright and how contracts work! Especially, licenses, how a contract gets terminated and what its terms (how long, domestic vs international, etc.) are, things like that. Sometimes a small publisher will send a pretty messy basic contract your way and it's your right to rework it and ask for changes!
Hi! I’m Emma, and I learned about New Public from @Sarah and have been a fan ever since the festival and now getting to read the newsletters! I work on the responsible technology team at Omidyar network —specifically on our work related to safe, trusted, p2p messaging (what can this look like — within the bounds of privacy-respecting encrypted communication, in particular?) and also am doing some exploration and learning to better understand how we can engage gen z specifically across our work towards creating better, more inclusive technology // systems // norms?
Other interests are tech issues such as surveillance // shrinking space for civil society in a global context (how to address via human rights frameworks,) and arts and technology (theater // music lover:))
As for connections // resources :
- would love any resources or suggestion connections on both the p2p msging and gen z // responsible tech front — hoping to get sharper on who the leaders are in this space, which issues are particularly meaningful to this age group (admittedly broad) :)
Hi there! I'm John Fallot, I'm one of the co-founders of the Prosocial Design Network. We started in late 2019, and we research & curate how digital media might promote prosocial behaviors online.
One thing I'm looking for are members to join our Slack community, and possibly become volunteer community managers themselves. This would involve posing questions and sharing links to engaging news. This is especially needed on the designer-ly side of things!
I'm James, a software developer. Currently working on a COBOL-based JSON builder and parser. (project for a gov space - they weren't interested in my observation that just because something _could_ be done, that it _should_ be done.) I could benefit by hearing from anyone who has built a syntax lexer / parser in case I have questions, or just to chitchat.
I've been diving into Python and JSON over the past few months, would be interested to learn more and share what I've got so far! My most recent projects involve a bulk cover letter writer, and a bulk research paper distiller.
Hi all! I'm the founder of Daily Haloha, a simple collective daily ritual for self and group reflection and discovery. We're about to launch our community product (adding private channels to our public space) so that communities can strengthen belonging, fueled by empathy and insight.
Hi, I'm Jessica Clark—I'm working on a bunch of projects through my company, Dot Connector Studio (dotconnectorstudio.com), including launching the New/s Incubator for diverse journalism innovators, editing a series of speculative stories as part of the 20 Decades of 2020 project, and publishing Immerse.news. I recently worked on this report that might be of interest to this group: https://dotconnectorstudio.com/tech-as-art-reporthow-to-support-artists
Yep, Amelia and I are also members of the Guild of Future Architects, where a few of my projects are housed—a great network of social innovators, many of whom are interested in the same issues you are: http://guildoffuturearchitects.org/
The Tech as Art report was incredibly well done and is so essential to promoting understanding of the field to funders (and others). Very glad it exists and looking forward to digging into other Dot Connector Studio projects.
I'm Jack. My take: When a university professor asked "how can we have civil conversations online about politics?", that was in early 2010, my answer was "World of Warcraft meets global sense making". It's nice to have that concept validated: John Seely-Brown famously said "I would rather hire a high-level World of Warcraft player than an MBA from Harvard" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhuOzBS_O-M). So, here it is 2021, and we are finally bringing to light a prototype of an open source ecosystem to serve that purpose. Not by any means ready for prime time. As a new kind of social network, perhaps that's one approach to a different kind of online flourishment (I just made that up).
Hi All! Annafi here, founder of The Flip Side. We're a media startup that fact-checks and curates commentary from liberal and conservative media in a 5-minute digest each morning. With over 250,000 subscribers across the country and political spectrum, we're embarking on a new journey: creating the next generation platform for news and civic dialogue. We're looking for a founding engineer; here's the job desc! Please share far and wide 🙏 https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/19keVieBujREYOgiND9px1NQYUxuYw2DWMKhomDdzbtw/edit
Hola from Barcelona 👋, I'm Andres. I run a creative research lab (IAM) focused on helping citizens and organisations make better decisions by using futures as tools to anticipate challenges and opportunities, while exploring the socio-ecological impacts of digital technologies and the internet(s) through a lifelong learning initiative (The Billion Seconds Institute) and an annual conference (IAM Weekend).
We just launched a call for proposals for the upcoming edition of the conference which will take place this November in Barcelona + a Planet Earth remote edition, under the theme of 'Imagining Intercitizenships'.
One of the research tracks is 'Cultivating Responsible Tech for Climate Action and Justice' and would love to learn more about related projects, case studies, initiatives, etc. Here you can read more info on the theme: https://medium.com/iam-journal/imagining-intercitizenships-f3f4bdc80b68
Hi all! I'm Vicky, an independent editor, designer, and strategist based in NYC. Excited to join in this brilliant and diverse thread.
🍇 I'm building Currant, a global media collective—think artsy, techy publication and community—paving a more equitable food future and media ecosystem. We've been featured by Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, CreativeMornings, and numerous indie pubs we admire.
👥 We're looking for a part-time Marketing & Audience Analyst and Web Designer! Have exciting plans ahead and need to grow the team to support (fyi, our team is all bootstrapping this alongside our jobs).
Find all Currant opportunities here—and please forward to anyone who might be interested in joining or contributing: https://staycurrant.com/
💡 I'm also always keen to workshop emerging community models with others who are interested in the space—e.g. talking about anything from Discord and newsletters, crypto and community tokens (not for the hype), co-ops and economy (I think what ampled.com is doing is very interesting).
Hello everyone. We're building an online community for the agricultural sector, www.agripreneur.com. Our flagship asset is a farming tabloid that goes free to all 80,000 farming households in New Zealand - now we just need to get them all into one safe digital environment! Keen to connect with rural media in other parts of the world, and others who also see the value in getting farmers into one safe cloud community. www.farmersweekly.co.nz
For many years (2009-2007) I was part of the Archive Development group where we developed the idea of the Digital Public Space, working with many other organisations. The two ideas are closely linked, and come from the understanding that the network will not automatically deliver public value or public service outcomes, and an organisation like the BBC which helped create public service broadcasting has a clear role to do the same online.
Howdy, Jerry here. As a side project, I've been feeding a single mind map for 23 years, which I publish openly online at JerrysBrain.com. Some links relevant to these fabulous conversations: Promising Solutions to World Crises and Thorny Social Problems https://bra.in/8qnZ9q Bridging the Cultural Divide https://bra.in/7p7yJj and My Non-White-Guy Canon https://bra.in/7pDkMr
I wish we were all able to share our insights in a shared memory online, which allowed each of us to represent how we see and what we care about, yet also mix them together into common insights and solutions. That's what OGM is trying to do, with only faint sparks of success so far :)
hey Jerry! my team is working in that space as well (our first product is a bi-directionally linked "digital garden": https://mysilio.com). you might be interested in checking out the Tools for Thought community, lots of us nerding out over how to connect the world's knowledge together: https://lu.ma/community/com-mmvGpDTZoRDsxou/join
Hi folks! My name is Tani, I'm spending my time these days building Mysilio (https://mysilio.com), a platform that gives everyone the power to launch their own micro-platforms and community spaces without learning how to code. We miss the old days of the web where everyone's personal web space showcased their unique personality and interests, instead of the templatized version of the web we're currently stuck with.
We're really excited to help creatives build new digital worlds, our first product - Mysilio Garden - is a zettelkasten (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten) style Digital Garden built on Solid (https://solidproject.org/). We hope your garden will feel like your own personal home on the web, where people can come visit you and hang out and share ideas. I fell in love with the idea of the Metaverse after reading Snow Crash years ago, and I'm hopeful we can lay a better foundation for creators to build their own micro-worlds within that new frontier (the idea of Facebook owning the Metaverse is truly one of the most horrifying futures I could imagine).
We believe users should own their data and identities online, and capture the staggering economic value produced by their data, and so we're hoping to eventually be a user-owned platform co-op. I'm currently in the Platform Coops course at New School, very interested in connecting with anyone working on similar ideas or interested in building software that separates user data from the application itself.
And if you're an online creator - especially a writer, as that's our first focus - we'd love to give you a garden! anyone who wants to connect can reach me at tani@mysilio.com
Hi everyone! I'm Tristan. I work at the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change (RISC) at the University of Chicago. We're a nonprofit action lab focused on applying academic insights to solving pressing social problems. (It's run by Steve Levitt, the Freakonomics guy!) I've spent a lot of my time at the center thinking about local journalism and local social networks. Right now, I'm working with Twitter on Birdwatch, a crowdsourced fact-checking system that is slowly being rolled out to American users. Our center tries to spend most of our time helping other people/organizations with their ideas (for free!) — would love to talk to anyone about their idea/project if they think we could be useful. Check us out at risc.uchicago.edu please reach out!
Hi everyone, I'm Stephanie and I live in the UK. I'm Community Manager at Podium, a community moderated social media startup https://podium-network.com/ I found New_Public via another newsletter (Platformer, I think!) about visions for the future of the internet, and it really resonated with me, particularly in an environment as toxic as Twitter! I'm really interested in the idea of healthy social media, and making space for voices that aren't always heard. I also run a Discord server for Podium, where we discuss some of the features we're working on and share our designs, so anyone here who is interested in joining would be very welcome https://discord.gg/tuQAFPXhPD
Hola from Mexico City, I'm Julie, currently a Tech and Society Fellow at the Mozilla Foundation. Building off interest and research about disinformation, I'm building a social network that uses culture as an excuse to promote more meaningful exchanges and dialogue online. Our idea is that through books and movies, users can spark conversations that allow others to have so-called "Eureka moments", changes in consciousness that will generate a new way of interacting with society. More here: https://www.eureka.club/en/about
Hi, I'm Sam. I am a frontend software engineer at the New York Public Library currently working on their Open eBooks project which aims to distribute free books to children at Title I schools.
Lately I've been thinking about UI design and asking myself "what patterns exist beyond share, comment, and like?" Interested to know if there are others here who have explored this topic and would be able to share articles, websites, or other resources for me to dive into.
I write a weekly newsletter (https://buttondown.email/samantha-andrews/) called Gradient Mesh where I share the messy and vulnerable parts of building a creative practice, keeping the promises we make to ourselves, quitting, and starting again. I encourage subscribers to make their weird art!
Hi Everyone. My name is Jose. I'm new to the thread. I'm a political science professor at California Lutheran University in Ventura County, California. I'm working on a book project that looks at how algorithms and datafication change that nature of the social contract and whether it places new obligations on citizens. I wrote a book a long time ago (2012) on how Facebook changes the nature of political identity by personalizing public discourse https://www.routledge.com/Facebook-Democracy-The-Architecture-of-Disclosure-and-the-Threat-to-Public/Marichal/p/book/9781138274662. It would be useful to find a reading/writing/thinking group that I can use to bounce ideas off of. Amazed at the wonderful work described in this thread!
Hey, I've been thinking a lot about the way that more intimate spaces like our homes get connected to larger services (and the people on the other end of that). These are devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home Hub, and other IoT devices. Bringing in the town square into our homes is not always appropriate or helpful.
I've written a few pieces about this on O'Reilly and called it communal computing:
Hi, I am grateful for this site and this thread. I have been working in how religion functions online for the last 25 years. I work on tech and religion with a large interfaith organization and have just launched a curriculum aimed at helping promote appreciation and engagement of religious diversity online - #Interfaith. You can find it here. I would love to connect with others interested in this area https://ifyc.org/interfaith-digital. Paul Raushenbush Paul@ifyc.org
I'm in the research phases of building a climate Activism social network. Would love any tips or reading suggestions or conversations to be sent to waveballoon@gmail.com
What a cool idea, the Higgs boson hypothesis, self-reflection, discussing sin, colored eggs, and bunnies on a Thursday morning. How explosive!
I think I've finally found the right place to hang out. But, I want to give you a heads up on something, and this is from an L.A. guy familiar with "the business." I've been writing "Tiny Town" for the last three years and eventually would like an Oscar. I hope that's not a problem when I want to hit the subscriber ready button.
Back to Higgs. Does it have anything to do with a word? That's been my question all along and part of the genesis of EW's. A thought, how small is that?
I think that was my intent to show. The initial statement suggested it proved or assumed God was small. So as I examined it further, it made more sense that it wasn't being addressed in a way that contemplated such a thing. Or so I thought.
As for screenplays, I assume that a change in production is still in place, that Covid allowed for interesting possibilities to arrive because of blue and green screens. That's good. And I don't really want an Oscar. Well, maybe, maybe a Globe.
God being tiny relates to the idea that there's a god particle, and how deep will science have to dig before it "discovers" that God is everywhere: infinitesimally small and large, such that language is, like the philosopher said, insufficient to the task and so, hey, shut up, Science. While Satan, on the other hand, is outside looking in, begging you to believe in him. Not unlike the unhinged ego. Hinge your ego, people.
I once had a conversation with a man who didn't believe there was a God. That for such a being to exist, one could not stand in their presence. I never forgot that. So when thinking of such things, Higgs boson, finding the keys to understanding such things is interesting but does it only scratch the surface? I assume that's what you're saying to the unhinged. For me, it has become the reality of ones and zeros, pixels, dimensions, yet here we are adjusting to nothing new under the sun and thinking we've arrived.
One might consider that God, as such, is not the highest. A unifying field at high frequencies is fascinating. But God will always and forever be inexplicable. The more so when your reality is the equivalent of ones and zeros. That's okay for computers but the human scale is ones all the way to nine. (This is the problem with the new math. It reduces the human mind to that of a computer, and thinks its doing you a favor.)
As it happens, I'm a teacher of something no one's ever heard of before. One of the teaching's main tasks is to free you from two dimensional thinking (which is flat and linear) and to invite you to observe yourself and your environment from the back of the brain (seeing in depth and accessing the imagination). If you can do this you'll escape the prison you've been captured by and schooled in all your life.
The back of the brain is the Visual cortex and the first thing you want to pay attention to is your breathing, or inspiration.
As long as you're trapped in your patterns there will be nothing new. Escape and you'll eventually come to realize that life is thousands of times stranger than you can possibly imagine. And that breathing, no matter how mundane it seems, is mystical.
I answer questions, such as: Physicists are poised to announce the discovery of the Higgs Boson (AKA the God Particle). Should I give up my search for Satan's Molecule?
Relax, we spent 10 billion dollars to find God (because he’s so tiny); Satan, on the other hand, will find you.
The Easter Bunny has always confused me. Rabbits are mammals and, therefore, do not lay eggs. So, what's with the bunny and the eggs and why do we color and hide them?
According to Rabbit Lore a rabbit took the cross in Jesus’ place and died and was skinned, cooked and then eaten. Therefore, antithetical to the current mythology, you people still have an Easter basket full of sins upon your heads. Energetically, sins are shaped like eggs and so symbolically you are making your children hunt for and then eat your sins every year. The eggs are colored and hidden because what else do you do with your sins? You paint over them and hide them.
True story: the other day a student in my class asked where the Easter tradition of rabbits and eggs came from. In response, I had a kid open up his laptop and I read the class your response to that very question (below).
They all laughed.
My question: Do you consider yourself a comedian, a deep space funnyman of some sort, and will you bill yourself as such when you set up your new age healing shop in some suburban strip mall, hopefully on the main drag in Centereach?
God bless the children. They laugh because they know it’s true. By now, we’re all pretty much a sump-load of genetic filth. If you spent three minutes in self-reflection you’d arrive at the same conclusion. Which, of course, is why we don’t do that. Hate is everywhere. Without hate there’s no need for empire. Government, politics, Wall Street, banks, big business and media are all fueled by hate. Extract hate and the whole complex collapses and the planet’s a grassy paradise again. If you thought about it for three minutes you’d see how simple and clear it is. And you’d know what to do. You’d show the hate, bring it all up, make an offering to your god or idol. Sunlight is a great antiseptic. Let’s see the hate, young people. Make June 1 National Hate Day. Go viral. So, to your question, if you think that’s funny, than, yes, I’m some kind of comedian, or something. http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l543/hercampusphoto/Her%20Campus%20USF/Blogs/d8b52c1e.jpg
Hi, I’m Rachel. I’m a media artist exploring enthusiasm, confusion, and folklore about computers and life online. I’m also a nonprofit professional working in art, gender equity, and critical/creative use of technology (presently seeking new employment).
Lately I’m doing freelance consulting on media arts projects. A current collaboration is a public art project that will connect places with histories in Austin, TX through an Augmented Reality layer of memories from the Latinx community. I’m also preparing a performance art piece that diagrams the anatomy of web search rabbit-hole.
I’m looking to connect with folks in the tech/arts, sustainability, and digital futures realms - if you are too, or if you have any weird computer stories to share, reach out! rachelstuckey.net
With the invaluable help of contributing editors and volunteer pundits, The Hustings has been offering a no-echo chamber forum for civil discourse on national political issues since last September. We are an LLC that needs more readers and a good business plan. While The Hustings (https://thehustings.news) is a website for national political news, and not local/community news, we think the format could be used by new local news websites to create a social media network with reader service similar to what The New York Times described on page 2, Sunday, Sept. 5, in "How Your Comments Make Us Better." I hope to hear from those of you interested in such a network. --todd.lassa@thehustings.news
Working out how to respond to DR. Rupert Read's message to XR rebels that the next step in the rebellion is hare local groups just go ahead and create the fossilfree egalitarian, sustainable society that governments have show themselves incapable of introducing. TOgether with pivotprojects.org I am working on introducing a local action movement called 146 which is where local constellations of maximum 146 use their buying, kindness, sharing and political power. Early stages https://146help.avbp.net
This is US-based rather than UK, but you might find ideas and inspiration from the podcast Building Local Power, produced by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance: https://ilsr.org/building-local-power/
One of their recent episodes, for example, had a state legislator in Maine talking about the legal and legislative barriers put up (to protect monopolies) to prevent local communities from creating their own power grids. Always good to be able to identify where the choke points are ...
Hi I'm Claire and have done alot of work in the area of digital identity and the necessary governance and system design necessary to make it successful and inclusive for citizens and societies. There are alot of governments investing in it and Covid was a major accelerator of it given the necessity for track and trace but I'm looking at decentralised systems. With the interest and successes of digital currencies its likely central banks could be the catalyst for digital identity to become the norm however what still remains is the governance and access to a permissioned decentralised system. It's messy with the issues of privacy and cultural norms also thrown in but it's very interesting and one that directly impacts the type of work New Public is researching. Could be a whole new paradigm shift if people can have more autonomy and transparency over their personal data and who gets access to it. Some brilliant use cases already in markets we jus need to overcome the collaborative aspect of it to ensure ti doesnt become weaponised... which is a real and significant concern for many.
Hi, I'm Patrick. I am currently running a petition on ChangeOrg to reduce the use of cruel bird deterrent measures such as bird netting and metal spikes on Britain's rooftops. My belief is upheld by anecdotal evidence is that many birds are killed or injured by the pest control measures and I think there has to be a better way. I am interested in ways to find out how many birds are injured or killed across the countries of the UK as a result of these deterrents. In particular I would like to set up a survey/database that wildlife hospitals and others such as roofers and builders can report too. Any help how to move forward on it would be much appreciated. Just for background; I have a brain injury so can struggle with long term screen time, have limited abilities techwise and annoyingly right now limited financial resources. I do though have time some tech knowledge having once run a local news website and a lot of enthusiasm! Any ideas or suggestions would be most welcome. Thank you.
Patrick, I would suggest you create an online form people use to send reports.
Secondly, think of a short project name you can register the domain for. UK domains are not expensive, maybe £8 per year.
You could use Google forms, but I would recommend Tally. It's even easier to use and free for individuals (only companies pay. Tally is a small startup in Belgium).
Let me also take this opportunity to plug our panel in NYC at the end of Sept. Check out the most recent newsletter for details!
Hey, I'm Ethan. I run a research lab at UMass Amherst focused on digital public infrastructure. We are interested in building/nurturing/learning about projects to build the digital public sphere that are owned and governed by the communities that use them. We're building "Smalltown", a fork of Mastodon designed for standalone social networks used for local civic discussions, and "Gobo", a social media aggregator that gives users more power over what they read. More on our work at publicinfrastructure.org
Ethan is a long time Friend of New_ Public and an important researcher and writer in our area. Thanks for chiming in Ethan!
Ethan is amazing. Here's my context for him: https://bra.in/2pDkRn
Smalltown sounds amazing - hi, Ethan! 👋
This sounds fantastic!
Thats us, we are currently navigating the legal issues with distributing ownership as widely as possible while also forming as a limited liability company. Would love to connect with you.
Tuvens.com
This sounds amazing.
Hi! I'm Helena, I'm working on a little website that encourages people to go for a walk through a series of prompts. The idea is to re-discover your own neighborhood, time and time again, rather than always looking for something new. The prompts are inspired by derives, and encourages folks to make use of public spaces. Would love to know of any similar projects :) or folks who are interested in trying it soon.
Woah, serendipity! Check out Antonia's post below for some possible connection-making.
Love this! Passionate pedestrian and flaneur here. Can't wait to see it.
You might love this book by Alexandra Horowitz if you haven't read it. She takes the same walk in her neighborhood with other people (e.g. architect, artist, geologist, dog, toddler) and talks about how one's way of seeing influences how they perceive place. Some inspiration for your project!
https://bookshop.org/books/on-looking-a-walker-s-guide-to-the-art-of-observation/9781439191262
A little late, but thank you! here's the site: https://wanderprompts.com/
Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi speaks directly to value in this.
I miss that podcast! It actually really informed my book about walking.
Definitely interested in trying it out! I did something similar to this by trying to go outside with a little notebook and just thinking about all the questions I had -- why is the street named this? How do vines grow up a building? What kind of flowers are in this neighborhood? I also rode around on my bike to a lot of different neighborhoods in search of Little Libraries (I know now you can look up their locations online but that would ruin my fun of discovering them). Little libraries are endlessly interesting to me because they are offering public domain in a largely private area--some have chairs/benches to relax on, some even have snacks inside, some have special collections of LGBTQ+ books, it is amazing.
You both (Taylor and Helena) might be interested in the Walking Meditation cards this person in Holland makes: http://dao2change.com
I bought them from her a few years ago while researching my book and we had a great conversation. The cards aren't on her website, but if she still makes them you can email her through it. They're very pretty and have thought-provokers like "walk with a habit" and think about how nature would respond if it had a habit you're trying to change.
Also, here is Jonathan Stalls's website, which I mentioned below: https://www.intrinsicpaths.com
Jonathan is a lovely person and has been a walkability activist and walking-as-life person for a very long time. Definitely sounds like an intersection with what you're doing, Helena. Jonathan uses the hashtag #pedestriandignity on Instagram still, I think.
Thought you all might enjoy this https://www.are.na/mindy-seu/1113367
love that!! very similar to what I ended up making: https://wanderprompts.com/
Oh hey, hi, fellow walking/walkability person here! Do you know Johnathan Stalls who started Walk2Connect? He does Insight Paths now and has a lot of walking guidance. Also Annabel Abbs (author of forthcoming Windswept on women walking) is coming out with a new book that I think will involve walking prompts.
Hi Antonia - not sure if you'll see this, but there's the site if you're interested in taking a walk with it :) https://wanderprompts.com/
Thank you! What a gorgeous site.
Oh, amazing! I wasn't familiar with Jonathan or Annabel, but extremely related. Thank you so much Anotnia!
This is my book on walking and walkability if it’s of use or interest, forgot to link to it: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/antonia-malchik/a-walking-life/9780738234885/
Just bought it! ❤️🙏🏼
Oh, goodness, thank you! Hope it brings something to your life :)
Amazing, thanks for sharing!
Pleasure! I love meeting other passionate walking people :)
ooh! website please
hi Sarah, a little late but here's the site: https://wanderprompts.com/
👋 ! I'm Sarah & I've recently left my last full-time job at Omidyar Network focused on responsible technology and am now on sabbatical. So I'm not ~working~ in the 9-5 sense, but trying to let my brain flourish - reading (recently loved Real Estate by Deborah Levy and Michel Faber's Crimson Petal and the White), trying to get to the end of my tabs about communityDAOs (do I get them? I'm not sure) and having nourishing catchups with friends.
And what I'm looking for - I guess interesting projects made with love and care (Cofounder Quest is 10,000% one of those)
Hi Sarah, we're looking for contributors and we'd love to talk to you if you're looking for some responsible technology to dip your toe into. Loving your interest in CommunityDAOs, its on our radar as well.
Thanks Sarah! We definitely need more book recommendations, especially any fiction featuring digital platforms or social media. Also, yeah, I'm not sure if I get communityDAOs either. –Josh
OK one of my only criteria for books in this particular life phase is no or little technology - I think I just overconsumed in the last year. BUT I just ordered Mercury Retrograde by Emily Segal which I hear is excellent
fair enough!
Not specifically social media, but I just finished Becky Chambers’s “A Closed and Common Orbit” and it’s a great read with a thoughtful take on sentient AI.
Love the whole Wayfarer series!
Other books for your booklist that have been nourishing this year. All shaped my thinking on design and community, but without being steeped in tech.
- Braiding Sweetgrass Indigenous Wisdom Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Kimmerer)
- Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (Sheldrake)
- On trails: An Exploration (Moor)
“Wisdom often wanders.” - Robert Moor
“To deftly navigate this world, we will need to understand how we make trails, and how trails make us.” - Robert Moor
(Also-so many thoughts on the power of sabbaticals and pauses. Good for you!)
Ooooh, putting these on my reading list, Sarah!
Haloha Sarah! Maybe I can entice you to flourish with us at Daily Haloha....:)
👋 Hi, I’m Melanie. I work in the social innovation space with a deep passion for community-driven design online and off, digital and analog. Currently on partial sabbatical–– a little work, a little teaching, a little collaborating and scheming. (Most recently build a community in residence program at Facebook/Instagram, but origins in community-driven design go back to super analog roots at arch/urban planning firms.)
💪🏻 One thing I'm working on:
Building a class on “life-centered design” for Copenhagen School of Interaction Design (CIID). Really nerding out on biological systems and indigenous wisdom in systems design questions. I'm also building some workshops on facilitation and hybrid/multi-faceted creative leaders.
💁♀️ Help:
Would love your favorite books or research on emergent design and inspiration from biological systems or indigenous perspectives! Also, may need some guest speakers!
A lot to engage with here. Are you in Copenhagen? Love to hear from international readers.
Actually—Brooklyn by way of the midwest (Detroit/Chicago)! I've spent time there. I'll be sure to share NP with international collaborators.
Hi Melanie! I loved Sara Hendren's talk "Design for Know-Nothings, Dilettantes, and Melancholy Interlopers" at Eyeo 2016: https://sarahendren.com/projects-lab/design-for-know-nothings-dilettantes-and-melancholy-interlopers-eyeo-2016/
Not necessarily biological systems, but I think still relevant—Hendren references Rory Hyde's book Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture, in which there is a very good intro on the disruptive power of designing from the edges: https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2012/09/future-practice-conversations-edge-architecture.html
(Also, love Copenhagen! Got to visit CIID last I was there.)
Sara is writing an article for the magazine! Get hyped!
I love Sara's work! I read her book 'How We Meet the Built World' and absolutely loved it. Looking forward to reading her article
🎉🎉
Woohoo~ This is great. Thanks, Vicky. And love that she'll have more writing with NP.
I love CIID's Copenhagen home. Spent time there on a sabbatical touring Scandinavian cities/social/education systems. I'm going to be teaching with a biologist on their Costa Rica campus–– which is fun, but I'll miss it!
Do you know how to clone/teleport? Because I'd love to be in two places at once. ;)
Ah! I spent time there studying culinary culture with a researcher from Noma's Nordic Food Lab (now closed, rip). Working on the teleportation—let me know if you figure it out first :)
Ah! Love. Will send prototype. Can't guarantee all limbs make it. 🤷🏼♀️
Interesting! I gave a talk recently on Indigenous knowledge systems and building ethical technology, and keep a reading list here: kgt.dev/iks
This is great. Thanks Kathryn! Totally bookmarking.
Love your list; thank you. My version of bookmarking is adding you to my Brain, thus: https://bra.in/4vG4Aa
Hi Melanie, your work sounds really interesting. I have a background in anthropology and your question about books about biological systems made me think of an ethnography I read - The Mushroom At The End Of The World by Anna Tsing. I would recommend reading it if you have time to pore over it, it's a very interesting book about the physical ecosystems and social 'ecosystems' of global capitalism. But it takes a while to get through! Another book by Anna Tsing is Friction, which is loosely centred on Indonesian rainforests and is also very interesting.
Love these suggestions, Stella! And your work sounds fascinating. Love the overlap between biological systems and transport–– hello slime mold!
Not sure if it’s quite related, but I just heard a really interesting interview with the author of this article on the lost indigenous forest gardens of Europe: https://www.shelterwoodforestfarm.com/blog/the-lost-forest-gardens-of-europe
Doesn’t Nora Bateson run and institute in that part of the world? She does work and talking in biological systems design, I think.
Hi, I am working with 4 cofounders on a social network designed and architected as a utility, and based upon domain authority instead of behavioural addiction. We believe that the social web should be run as a commons, with ownership distributed as widely as possible to the people who contribute to its healthy development.
https://tuvens.com
We are launching at the end of this month having been working as a team since October last year.
We will probably launch under a different name, so if anyone here wishes to help us out please do this 6min survey.
https://survey.survicate.com/c8214afddfa4db66/
Very exciting! Happy to get you on our radar.
That's very cool! Is the idea that users would ultimately build and curate an "interest graph" of sorts, to potentially "connect" with other like-minded folks?
Yes, with the novelty being our algorithm. We are going back somewhat to the roots of the internet, eschewing the machine learning approach to curate content across interest communities with the comprehensible mathematics of network theory instead of the opaque environments we seem stuck with today.
Instead of optimising for attention and behavioural addiction through 'high arousal emotions' our algorithm amplifies (and suppresses) content that members agree is relevant to the intersection of an interest and a geographic area (a 'space'). Not every opinion matters though, as you build reputation in a space to earn more influence on the curation algorithm.
Really like the design philosophy, echoing the days of meaningful connections. Fingers crossed I'm picked to give it a spin! I'll drop you a line outside of here to connect as well.
Thanks Chris, got your sign up and will be in touch soon :-)
I wish the survey started with a one-page intro to who you are and what you do - i want to take part but need more context!
Hi Sarah, sorry I wanted to give as little context in the survey as possible, to get your associations. I am making it up as I go along, so apologise if this is not the right approach.
Check out our website for more context.
Hiya! I’m Antonia, writing about walking, walkability, and the tension between private property and the commons. I live in a small liberal-leaning town in a very conservative county of northwest Montana, and the question of “how can we live together despite often opposing values?” is a very real daily question.
That's great to hear. As I suspect you know, we are fascinated by urbanism, especially in terms of what it can teach us about digital platforms. And this particular tension is one we're thinking about a lot as we work on our Decentralization issue of the magazine. –Josh
I am obviously conflating 'urbanism' with walking in a rural area, but I bet you know what I mean
Yes :)
Yes! I think urbanism was how I found New Public. I highly highly recommend the work of The Overhead Wire, Talking Headways (podcast about transit, urban planning, etc.), and all the folks at Rail~Volution. A lot of intersections with public space and public commons.
What a question to live into! Two offers:
For your love of tension between private/commons: 99PI's episode on the right to roam in UK https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/right-to-roam/
For your living together in difference: https://betterarguments.org/
love that episode, love that podcast
we need a digital version of 'always read the plaque'
Also - Tangent... I think about this connection between exploration of physical spaces and digital spaces constantly.
People often benefit from awareness moments to deepen their perception and preferences of spaces before proactively designing physical spaces. (e.g. we used to take clients of "field trips" to immerse and experience spaces before designing their campus). What are deeper ways to do this digitally? "This is water" moments but with space.
YES. This. 1000%. What would you suggest? "Always peep the code"? I can't seem to find something as charming.
Thank you! I also just finished Nick Hayes’s “The Book of Trespass” on land ownership in England. So good.
ooooo bookmarking
Awesome that you all are doing this! I'm working on quite a few projects, I think the biggest ones I need help with are the following:
Becoming a TechnoWizard - this is my personal journey that I document via a newsletter, YouTube videos, and an audiojournal podcast (feel free to click my profile if you're interested in seeing some of that content). I'm trying to figure out how to better market myself and grow my audience/fellow journey goers. I talk about everything from design to futurism, philosophy to anthropology, quantum physics to hip-hop and so much more. But how do I find folks who want to talk about so much stuff? I worry I'm too much of a polymath to be able to focus, and too much of a novice to be remarkable.
Positive Futures - I want to write a series of books (and more) about non dystopian futures. The goal is to create more things like Star Trek and the Jetsons that inspires people to imagine and be more hopeful for the future. But of course, I want to base it in the many problems of today and show how we might solve these problems in a number of ways. Right now, I am learning about what it might take to build better futures. And I am using 3 filters to pain a picture of different futures: a Human-Centered capitalist future, a decentralized communist future, and a federated anarchist future. Looking for as much info as I can find about these concepts and anything else that talks about building better futures.
Healthy Transcendence - I want to create a company or organization focused on using positive psychology to build a system that helps people live more fulfilling lives based on SB Kaufman's integrated and revised version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (and any other credible models). I need to find more information about these models and ideas on how to build humanistic scalable technology and businesses.
I know that's a lot! But that's how I like to get down 😜
Thanks for speaking up. Let's get some of those TechnoWizard links so people can check them out?
Sure thing! Here is my audiojournal: https://anchor.fm/trillionaire
And here is my YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCoiWxaPAfn6zbdcTN4Y8pKQ
And my newsletter is on my substack profile: https://elijahclaude.substack.com/
Hey there! I also have a lot of different interests and find it hard to square the circle and sum myself up neatly. An online community I've found helpful and reassuring about this is Puttylike, which is a blog/community of 'multipotentialites' (aka people with lots of interests). Nice to meet you and your projects sound super interesting!
Hello! And that sounds awesome! I'll take a look. Thanks so much for sharing. :D
I'm a techno-person. I'll take a little boo at your socials and see how I may contribute!
Thanks for taking the time! I look forward to your feedback.
Hi, I'm Ben. I'm a brand mythologist and ethnographer. My relationship with tech/digital is not unlike a never-ending loop of the slow jam moment at an 8th grade mixer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MukUjR-xzHg
One of my projects is starting a research recruiting company that focuses exclusively on the marginalized aspects of human identity. We will be following a "community organizing" model to ensure power is rooted and feeds back into participating communities. How could tech help expedite the growth of participation--and even offer career path opportunities for those who are willing to participate?
Interesting! Love "brand mythologist"
Love this!! I’m an independent strategists working at the intersection of data, tech and content as well as an entrepreneur with two startups. An update of what’s going on:
- in full member acquisition mode for Overflow. An accelerator for Independent Thinkers in the areas of marketing, innovation, design and comms. Take a look at www.weareoverflow.com
- pivoting Ways, a platform for travelers yo meet makers along cultural routes in the world (I.e Camino De Santiago)
- looking for strategic projects where business growth and social impact can come together in sustainable ways.
Hi Rocio! Rocio was instrumental with getting NP off the ground. Thanks for being here!
Hi~ I work in entrepreneurial ecosystem building, the intersection of economic development and community building. I'm currently writing a blog about Bentoism & the Doughnut economy as (food inspired) frameworks for holistic and systems level thinking. My larger project is a book about ecosystem building (work in progress).
I love the idea of "Bentoism & the Doughnut economy" ! Please link if you like, log rolling and promo is totally fine if you're up for sharing
I will definitely share as soon as I finish, thank you :)
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, or is this something different? Sounds interesting!
Yes, Kate Raworth, Yancey interviewed her for his podcast a while back: https://ideaspace.substack.com/p/doughnut-economics-author-kate-raworth
Looking forward to reading. Love her work! She said something in an interview about “only knocking on open doors” and that’s been really helpful in my own work.
Apologies for being tardy in posting this, here is the piece I wrote:
https://ceciliawessinger.medium.com/bentos-doughnuts-and-more-a8e76915eaaa
Love the way you use “ecosystem building”, very interested to read more as you explore these themes!
Hello! I’m Kevin Maguire and Sarah sent me here via Twitter. This year I started The New Fatherhood, a newsletter, community and safe space for modern fathers to connect and discuss the changing face of fatherhood.
www.thenewfatherhood.org
I’m always on the lookout for other dads with non-traditional backgrounds stories who might be interesting in contributing to the diverse set of voices on the site.
Two of my favourite pieces recently were the story of a stay-at-home dad who is the parent of a child with a limb-difference, and a non-biological mum in a same-sex partnership who had become a “dad” by default.
https://www.thenewfatherhood.org/p/why-i-wish-people-would-ignore-my
https://www.thenewfatherhood.org/p/dont-dad-me
There's a Chinese podcast called 故事 FM (Story FM) that shares everyday stories, similar to This American Life. Episode 514 我是一名全职爸爸 ("I am a full time dad") was interesting / sounds relevant to you. Wish there was a way to easily translate it, but linking in case helpful for research purposes:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/16otCOtgPicG7e8pNRwT3A
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/e514-%E6%88%91%E6%98%AF%E4%B8%80%E5%90%8D%E5%85%A8%E8%81%8C%E7%88%B8%E7%88%B8/id1256399960?i=1000525994680
Love this. You might like the work of a few friends:
Dadwell /Antonio Garcia - Exploring creative dads doing creative fatherhood - https://www.dadwell.co
Deep Fit Dad/Ted Gonder - Building physical, mental, relationship strength as a father - https://www.deepfitdad.com
Coupledom/Sami Packard - Understanding how people navigate and design their relationships - https://www.coupledom.me
Ted wrote this that went a little viral: https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/dad-pens-viral-post-childless-66371079
Thank you! I know Antonio but hadn’t come across the others.
Thanks so much for chiming in everyone! Let's keep it going, and please consider asking a question or leaning into what you're looking for: what could be useful to you?
I’m perennially curious about what people are doing (or seeing) to build resilient community, not just online but where they live. It’s something that comes up a lot in urbanism conversations, and I’d love to know what other iterations people here see—in whatever communities they engage with, online and off.
I've found a lot of wisdom in re-reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster." It gives a comparative social/cultural/systems perspective on resilience in face of crisis and special attention to urban systems. I'd love to see her update this with a COVID or Climate perspective.
Happy to nerd out separately on resilience. Did a lot of work with Rockefeller's Resilient Cities initiative balancing systems thinking with participatory design approaches.
Oh, yes, that book is a touchstone!
Anything like that Resilient Cities work sounds interesting to me. I’m in this place where building infrastructure resilience is hampered by deep differences in ideology, and it’s that difficulty not just in communicating across difference but communicating across difference when a significant faction isn’t interested in communication. This affects a lot of things where I live, but to take one straightforward example, we’ve been trying for years to get the county commissioners to approve a bike/ped trail system across the county. But their perception of users of those trails doesn’t allow for the idea that they would serve all kinds of people for all kinds of purposes, and we can’t seem to make any headway on that understanding. So how do you even pursue resilience when large numbers of people don’t believe it’s necessary? (See also: social media?)
Ooooh - such an interesting point. I wonder how some of the more conservative cities navigated this in the 100RC network. I wonder if Rural Studio or other rural innovation labs have some more concrete examples and learnings to share. Sometimes, it's about super plainspoken, practical examples that feel harder to politicize. But then again, everything is getting politicized these days.
gah, just seeing this. Love Rural Studio.
Too true. I guess anything that shows examples of communities with similar difficulties finding paths forward is helpful.
Some resources on resilient society and community resilience mapped here: https://bra.in/3p7zNJ
hooooly cow. That is amazing. What even is that?
I posted a few explainer videos on JerrysBrain.com. It's a 23-year-old mind map. I didn't create the software, but was on their first press tour. Started using it then, not knowing I would be curating the same data file today. Happy to explain more.
Turns out I'm way too curious for my own good, so that one mind map has info on many, many things. Here's another important node for me: https://bra.in/2vPB9q
Hi all! What a fascinating group here.
I hail from the glacial valleys and rolling hills of the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. For the last 25 years I've worked at Cornell University's Mann Library in support of our Land Grant "knowledge with a public purpose" mission. That includes creating space (physical and virtual) supporting the storage, access and exchange of information, as well the collaborative knowledge creation process itself.
I'm increasingly interested in how we might better employ some of the sophisticated information and communications technology tools and platforms used within our ivory towers to empower the disempowered (vs those already empowered). For example, using GIS technologies to support participatory mapping. This has led to a recent career transition into Community and Economic Development, drawing on emerging fields like Community Informatics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_informatics).
I'm currently working on ideas for how new, more democratically owned and governed "socio-technical configurations" like multi-stakeholder platform cooperatives and knowledge commons might be collaboratively developed and networked within regional development ecosystems. I'd love to connect with others who share an interest in this kind of work, even if only to compare lessons learned along the way.
Hey everyone, my name is Stella. I'm 22, I live in the UK and I work as a transport planner - my current projects include researching how rail is organised in Scotland, and analysing how train guards do the doors on trains. Outside of strictly 'work work' projects I'm working towards my goal of making the transport network and industry more accessible to disabled people (including myself).
What would be useful to me right now is advice from people further along in their lives than me on how to make space for work, but also make space for my life outside work. I'm strict with my hours right now - I have to be because I'm disabled and have limited energy - but I'm struggling to avoid letting work take over all my emotional headspace, whilst also avoiding feeling guilty for having firm boundaries. If that makes sense!
Hi all! By day I work as a tech consultant building opportunities for Indigenous technologists. My side projects explore the idea of digital imperialism and the ways technology exhibit symptoms of colonisation. I write speculative fiction, essays, and poetry trying to imagine less dystopian tech futures grounded in Indigenous thinking.
I do a lot of activist work too in digital rights and am always looking for new effective ways to do community education.
Awesome. We have an interview about indigenous decentralized storytelling coming up in the magazine.
Ooh interesting! Can’t wait to see who it is…
I love this! I'm super interested in creative non-dystopian (but not quite 'utopian') speculative fiction, much of which would be based on indigenous thinking. Would love to hear more about your studies, work, and ideas on this topic!
Thanks for opening up this discussion :) My name is Jasmine and I'm working on The Bloom, an uplifting global impact community. Our mission is to democratize access to diverse impact-driven opportunities and resources for young changemakers. I started the project from a storage closet at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva while working as an unpaid intern, frustrated by the systemic exploitation of young people around me. Since launching in early 2020, we've grown organically to 3,000+ changemakers all over the world almost entirely through word of mouth (no social media quite yet ) through our weekly newsletter 💪🏽
Things I'm looking for 👀
-A co-founder!
-Advisers in the community-building space, ideally with multicultural/international projects
-Nontraditional book recommendations that are good resources for a newbie founder
Things I can offer💜
-Compassionate feedback on whatever you're working on
-Copywriting support
-Advise on newsletter building
-A meaningful chat!
Thanks again and feel free to reach out to me directly through The Bloom here: https://www.readtobloom.com/
Hi I'm writing about Community, creators and the tech landscape around creator economy. I'm currently prioritizing finding new connections online, and learn about struggles creators have in day to day life.
Hey, I love that show! JK, JK, sounds interesting! –Josh
Hi damian here - I am just finishing a graphic novel (or series of short stories) about the internet. I am looking for publishers - any suggestions very welcome please?
Great! Fellow cartoonist here, congrats on wrapping up a graphic novel! Personally intimidated by the agents/publishers process, so I wish you best of luck. –Josh
Congratulations! Wishing you the best of luck. Some inspiration from a collaborator/friend who pitched the New Yorker over 100 times: https://www.ideo.com/blog/why-this-cartoonist-keeps-pitching-the-new-yorker-even-after-100-rejections
thanks very much!
Hi there, I'm a fellow cartoonist/illustrator, I'd suggest first finding work that you admire or that intersects with yours at the bookstore, and then look in there to see who is publishing it - also, be versed in copyright and how contracts work! Especially, licenses, how a contract gets terminated and what its terms (how long, domestic vs international, etc.) are, things like that. Sometimes a small publisher will send a pretty messy basic contract your way and it's your right to rework it and ask for changes!
great advice thanks
Damian!! This is cool. What about Deluge or one of the smaller presses?
I havent - do you know anyone there?
Hi! I’m Emma, and I learned about New Public from @Sarah and have been a fan ever since the festival and now getting to read the newsletters! I work on the responsible technology team at Omidyar network —specifically on our work related to safe, trusted, p2p messaging (what can this look like — within the bounds of privacy-respecting encrypted communication, in particular?) and also am doing some exploration and learning to better understand how we can engage gen z specifically across our work towards creating better, more inclusive technology // systems // norms?
Other interests are tech issues such as surveillance // shrinking space for civil society in a global context (how to address via human rights frameworks,) and arts and technology (theater // music lover:))
As for connections // resources :
- would love any resources or suggestion connections on both the p2p msging and gen z // responsible tech front — hoping to get sharper on who the leaders are in this space, which issues are particularly meaningful to this age group (admittedly broad) :)
~~ Emma
Hi there! I'm John Fallot, I'm one of the co-founders of the Prosocial Design Network. We started in late 2019, and we research & curate how digital media might promote prosocial behaviors online.
www.prosocialdesign.org
One thing I'm looking for are members to join our Slack community, and possibly become volunteer community managers themselves. This would involve posing questions and sharing links to engaging news. This is especially needed on the designer-ly side of things!
Feel free to apply on our website!
I'm James, a software developer. Currently working on a COBOL-based JSON builder and parser. (project for a gov space - they weren't interested in my observation that just because something _could_ be done, that it _should_ be done.) I could benefit by hearing from anyone who has built a syntax lexer / parser in case I have questions, or just to chitchat.
I've been diving into Python and JSON over the past few months, would be interested to learn more and share what I've got so far! My most recent projects involve a bulk cover letter writer, and a bulk research paper distiller.
Hi all! I'm the founder of Daily Haloha, a simple collective daily ritual for self and group reflection and discovery. We're about to launch our community product (adding private channels to our public space) so that communities can strengthen belonging, fueled by empathy and insight.
I'm looking for pilot partners and collaborators. Intro here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iLr6Aw9LOjh5AZJayD3LM5kVZO_iEbi5/view?usp=sharing
Thank you!
Interesting! Welcome
Hi, I'm Jessica Clark—I'm working on a bunch of projects through my company, Dot Connector Studio (dotconnectorstudio.com), including launching the New/s Incubator for diverse journalism innovators, editing a series of speculative stories as part of the 20 Decades of 2020 project, and publishing Immerse.news. I recently worked on this report that might be of interest to this group: https://dotconnectorstudio.com/tech-as-art-reporthow-to-support-artists
Ah, very nice. One of our magazine contributors, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, has a piece up on Immerse that's really great.
Yep, Amelia and I are also members of the Guild of Future Architects, where a few of my projects are housed—a great network of social innovators, many of whom are interested in the same issues you are: http://guildoffuturearchitects.org/
The Tech as Art report was incredibly well done and is so essential to promoting understanding of the field to funders (and others). Very glad it exists and looking forward to digging into other Dot Connector Studio projects.
Thanks!
I'm Jack. My take: When a university professor asked "how can we have civil conversations online about politics?", that was in early 2010, my answer was "World of Warcraft meets global sense making". It's nice to have that concept validated: John Seely-Brown famously said "I would rather hire a high-level World of Warcraft player than an MBA from Harvard" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhuOzBS_O-M). So, here it is 2021, and we are finally bringing to light a prototype of an open source ecosystem to serve that purpose. Not by any means ready for prime time. As a new kind of social network, perhaps that's one approach to a different kind of online flourishment (I just made that up).
Hi All! Annafi here, founder of The Flip Side. We're a media startup that fact-checks and curates commentary from liberal and conservative media in a 5-minute digest each morning. With over 250,000 subscribers across the country and political spectrum, we're embarking on a new journey: creating the next generation platform for news and civic dialogue. We're looking for a founding engineer; here's the job desc! Please share far and wide 🙏 https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/19keVieBujREYOgiND9px1NQYUxuYw2DWMKhomDdzbtw/edit
Woah, interesting. What's the latest thing/piece you're working on? –Josh
This is our website! https://www.theflipside.io/ and this is the grand vision we're working toward: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g3GWS70jzHextRLLKv2sgWvXWrN8F6J7/view
Hola from Barcelona 👋, I'm Andres. I run a creative research lab (IAM) focused on helping citizens and organisations make better decisions by using futures as tools to anticipate challenges and opportunities, while exploring the socio-ecological impacts of digital technologies and the internet(s) through a lifelong learning initiative (The Billion Seconds Institute) and an annual conference (IAM Weekend).
We just launched a call for proposals for the upcoming edition of the conference which will take place this November in Barcelona + a Planet Earth remote edition, under the theme of 'Imagining Intercitizenships'.
One of the research tracks is 'Cultivating Responsible Tech for Climate Action and Justice' and would love to learn more about related projects, case studies, initiatives, etc. Here you can read more info on the theme: https://medium.com/iam-journal/imagining-intercitizenships-f3f4bdc80b68
Hi all! I'm Vicky, an independent editor, designer, and strategist based in NYC. Excited to join in this brilliant and diverse thread.
🍇 I'm building Currant, a global media collective—think artsy, techy publication and community—paving a more equitable food future and media ecosystem. We've been featured by Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, CreativeMornings, and numerous indie pubs we admire.
👥 We're looking for a part-time Marketing & Audience Analyst and Web Designer! Have exciting plans ahead and need to grow the team to support (fyi, our team is all bootstrapping this alongside our jobs).
Find all Currant opportunities here—and please forward to anyone who might be interested in joining or contributing: https://staycurrant.com/
💡 I'm also always keen to workshop emerging community models with others who are interested in the space—e.g. talking about anything from Discord and newsletters, crypto and community tokens (not for the hype), co-ops and economy (I think what ampled.com is doing is very interesting).
More on me here: https://vickygu.com/
Excellent. Will check out Currant.
Hello everyone. We're building an online community for the agricultural sector, www.agripreneur.com. Our flagship asset is a farming tabloid that goes free to all 80,000 farming households in New Zealand - now we just need to get them all into one safe digital environment! Keen to connect with rural media in other parts of the world, and others who also see the value in getting farmers into one safe cloud community. www.farmersweekly.co.nz
I'm Bill Thompson (@billt). Working with Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) I lead a strand of work within the BBC's Research & Development department
Public Service Internet blog post: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/public-service-internet
Public Service Internet (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkLFvieNDtU
For many years (2009-2007) I was part of the Archive Development group where we developed the idea of the Digital Public Space, working with many other organisations. The two ideas are closely linked, and come from the understanding that the network will not automatically deliver public value or public service outcomes, and an organisation like the BBC which helped create public service broadcasting has a clear role to do the same online.
Digital Public Space: https://futureeverything.org/news/digital-public-spaces/
My work in this area goes back a long way, as this pamphlet about 'e-mutualism', written in 2000 for the UK Co-operative Party, shows
https://billt.medium.com/e-mutualism-or-the-tragedy-of-the-dot-commons-489bfbd965ea
This sounds so important. Thank you for sharing.
Howdy, Jerry here. As a side project, I've been feeding a single mind map for 23 years, which I publish openly online at JerrysBrain.com. Some links relevant to these fabulous conversations: Promising Solutions to World Crises and Thorny Social Problems https://bra.in/8qnZ9q Bridging the Cultural Divide https://bra.in/7p7yJj and My Non-White-Guy Canon https://bra.in/7pDkMr
My passion project is OpenGlobalMind.com, which connects to DesignfromTrust.com and many other things.
I wish we were all able to share our insights in a shared memory online, which allowed each of us to represent how we see and what we care about, yet also mix them together into common insights and solutions. That's what OGM is trying to do, with only faint sparks of success so far :)
hey Jerry! my team is working in that space as well (our first product is a bi-directionally linked "digital garden": https://mysilio.com). you might be interested in checking out the Tools for Thought community, lots of us nerding out over how to connect the world's knowledge together: https://lu.ma/community/com-mmvGpDTZoRDsxou/join
Hi folks! My name is Tani, I'm spending my time these days building Mysilio (https://mysilio.com), a platform that gives everyone the power to launch their own micro-platforms and community spaces without learning how to code. We miss the old days of the web where everyone's personal web space showcased their unique personality and interests, instead of the templatized version of the web we're currently stuck with.
We're really excited to help creatives build new digital worlds, our first product - Mysilio Garden - is a zettelkasten (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten) style Digital Garden built on Solid (https://solidproject.org/). We hope your garden will feel like your own personal home on the web, where people can come visit you and hang out and share ideas. I fell in love with the idea of the Metaverse after reading Snow Crash years ago, and I'm hopeful we can lay a better foundation for creators to build their own micro-worlds within that new frontier (the idea of Facebook owning the Metaverse is truly one of the most horrifying futures I could imagine).
We believe users should own their data and identities online, and capture the staggering economic value produced by their data, and so we're hoping to eventually be a user-owned platform co-op. I'm currently in the Platform Coops course at New School, very interested in connecting with anyone working on similar ideas or interested in building software that separates user data from the application itself.
And if you're an online creator - especially a writer, as that's our first focus - we'd love to give you a garden! anyone who wants to connect can reach me at tani@mysilio.com
Hi everyone! I'm Tristan. I work at the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change (RISC) at the University of Chicago. We're a nonprofit action lab focused on applying academic insights to solving pressing social problems. (It's run by Steve Levitt, the Freakonomics guy!) I've spent a lot of my time at the center thinking about local journalism and local social networks. Right now, I'm working with Twitter on Birdwatch, a crowdsourced fact-checking system that is slowly being rolled out to American users. Our center tries to spend most of our time helping other people/organizations with their ideas (for free!) — would love to talk to anyone about their idea/project if they think we could be useful. Check us out at risc.uchicago.edu please reach out!
Hi everyone, I'm Stephanie and I live in the UK. I'm Community Manager at Podium, a community moderated social media startup https://podium-network.com/ I found New_Public via another newsletter (Platformer, I think!) about visions for the future of the internet, and it really resonated with me, particularly in an environment as toxic as Twitter! I'm really interested in the idea of healthy social media, and making space for voices that aren't always heard. I also run a Discord server for Podium, where we discuss some of the features we're working on and share our designs, so anyone here who is interested in joining would be very welcome https://discord.gg/tuQAFPXhPD
Hola from Mexico City, I'm Julie, currently a Tech and Society Fellow at the Mozilla Foundation. Building off interest and research about disinformation, I'm building a social network that uses culture as an excuse to promote more meaningful exchanges and dialogue online. Our idea is that through books and movies, users can spark conversations that allow others to have so-called "Eureka moments", changes in consciousness that will generate a new way of interacting with society. More here: https://www.eureka.club/en/about
Hi, I'm Sam. I am a frontend software engineer at the New York Public Library currently working on their Open eBooks project which aims to distribute free books to children at Title I schools.
Lately I've been thinking about UI design and asking myself "what patterns exist beyond share, comment, and like?" Interested to know if there are others here who have explored this topic and would be able to share articles, websites, or other resources for me to dive into.
If you're a fan of fun one-page websites and web apps, I've been collecting a list of them here! Send me a tweet @samandrewsmakes if you'd like to share one and have it added to the list. https://samandrews.notion.site/One-Page-Web-Apps-be7d3f4bddc349bdac382c60879542d7
I've also been collecting various screenshots and adding them to this are.na board https://www.are.na/samantha-andrews/screenshots-rom_k7kfyby. I think of it as my weird digital scrapbook. Anyone else collect screenshots?
I write a weekly newsletter (https://buttondown.email/samantha-andrews/) called Gradient Mesh where I share the messy and vulnerable parts of building a creative practice, keeping the promises we make to ourselves, quitting, and starting again. I encourage subscribers to make their weird art!
Hi Everyone. My name is Jose. I'm new to the thread. I'm a political science professor at California Lutheran University in Ventura County, California. I'm working on a book project that looks at how algorithms and datafication change that nature of the social contract and whether it places new obligations on citizens. I wrote a book a long time ago (2012) on how Facebook changes the nature of political identity by personalizing public discourse https://www.routledge.com/Facebook-Democracy-The-Architecture-of-Disclosure-and-the-Threat-to-Public/Marichal/p/book/9781138274662. It would be useful to find a reading/writing/thinking group that I can use to bounce ideas off of. Amazed at the wonderful work described in this thread!
Hey, I've been thinking a lot about the way that more intimate spaces like our homes get connected to larger services (and the people on the other end of that). These are devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home Hub, and other IoT devices. Bringing in the town square into our homes is not always appropriate or helpful.
I've written a few pieces about this on O'Reilly and called it communal computing:
Communal Computing intro - https://www.oreilly.com/radar/communal-computing/
Communal Computing’s Many Problems - https://www.oreilly.com/radar/communal-computings-many-problems/
A Way Forward with Communal Computing - https://www.oreilly.com/radar/a-way-forward-with-communal-computing/
Would love to hear people's reactions to these concepts and how they solve them!
We are planning a workshop with DesignxAI in September if people are interested:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/aixdesign-design-for-communal-computing-devices-workshop-w-chris-butler-tickets-168959888575
I forgot to mention that in the last piece about communal computing I reference New Public!
Hi, I am grateful for this site and this thread. I have been working in how religion functions online for the last 25 years. I work on tech and religion with a large interfaith organization and have just launched a curriculum aimed at helping promote appreciation and engagement of religious diversity online - #Interfaith. You can find it here. I would love to connect with others interested in this area https://ifyc.org/interfaith-digital. Paul Raushenbush Paul@ifyc.org
I'm in the research phases of building a climate Activism social network. Would love any tips or reading suggestions or conversations to be sent to waveballoon@gmail.com
What a cool idea, the Higgs boson hypothesis, self-reflection, discussing sin, colored eggs, and bunnies on a Thursday morning. How explosive!
I think I've finally found the right place to hang out. But, I want to give you a heads up on something, and this is from an L.A. guy familiar with "the business." I've been writing "Tiny Town" for the last three years and eventually would like an Oscar. I hope that's not a problem when I want to hit the subscriber ready button.
Back to Higgs. Does it have anything to do with a word? That's been my question all along and part of the genesis of EW's. A thought, how small is that?
A thought may be small, but few things in the world travel faster and farther with such an ability to expand infinitely.
Hit the button. I'll hit you back. (I wrote an awful screenplay. And took a long time to do it.}
I think that was my intent to show. The initial statement suggested it proved or assumed God was small. So as I examined it further, it made more sense that it wasn't being addressed in a way that contemplated such a thing. Or so I thought.
As for screenplays, I assume that a change in production is still in place, that Covid allowed for interesting possibilities to arrive because of blue and green screens. That's good. And I don't really want an Oscar. Well, maybe, maybe a Globe.
God being tiny relates to the idea that there's a god particle, and how deep will science have to dig before it "discovers" that God is everywhere: infinitesimally small and large, such that language is, like the philosopher said, insufficient to the task and so, hey, shut up, Science. While Satan, on the other hand, is outside looking in, begging you to believe in him. Not unlike the unhinged ego. Hinge your ego, people.
I once had a conversation with a man who didn't believe there was a God. That for such a being to exist, one could not stand in their presence. I never forgot that. So when thinking of such things, Higgs boson, finding the keys to understanding such things is interesting but does it only scratch the surface? I assume that's what you're saying to the unhinged. For me, it has become the reality of ones and zeros, pixels, dimensions, yet here we are adjusting to nothing new under the sun and thinking we've arrived.
Back from vacation.
One might consider that God, as such, is not the highest. A unifying field at high frequencies is fascinating. But God will always and forever be inexplicable. The more so when your reality is the equivalent of ones and zeros. That's okay for computers but the human scale is ones all the way to nine. (This is the problem with the new math. It reduces the human mind to that of a computer, and thinks its doing you a favor.)
As it happens, I'm a teacher of something no one's ever heard of before. One of the teaching's main tasks is to free you from two dimensional thinking (which is flat and linear) and to invite you to observe yourself and your environment from the back of the brain (seeing in depth and accessing the imagination). If you can do this you'll escape the prison you've been captured by and schooled in all your life.
The back of the brain is the Visual cortex and the first thing you want to pay attention to is your breathing, or inspiration.
As long as you're trapped in your patterns there will be nothing new. Escape and you'll eventually come to realize that life is thousands of times stranger than you can possibly imagine. And that breathing, no matter how mundane it seems, is mystical.
I answer questions, such as: Physicists are poised to announce the discovery of the Higgs Boson (AKA the God Particle). Should I give up my search for Satan's Molecule?
Relax, we spent 10 billion dollars to find God (because he’s so tiny); Satan, on the other hand, will find you.
http://www.naturalnews.com/images/Glyphosate-MonSatanPoster-v1.jpg
The Easter Bunny has always confused me. Rabbits are mammals and, therefore, do not lay eggs. So, what's with the bunny and the eggs and why do we color and hide them?
According to Rabbit Lore a rabbit took the cross in Jesus’ place and died and was skinned, cooked and then eaten. Therefore, antithetical to the current mythology, you people still have an Easter basket full of sins upon your heads. Energetically, sins are shaped like eggs and so symbolically you are making your children hunt for and then eat your sins every year. The eggs are colored and hidden because what else do you do with your sins? You paint over them and hide them.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UQ9rn6e1TmQ/TnIYm-Fz1NI/AAAAAAAAWR4/tZkLJ6B_sR0/s1600/image-1.jpeg
True story: the other day a student in my class asked where the Easter tradition of rabbits and eggs came from. In response, I had a kid open up his laptop and I read the class your response to that very question (below).
They all laughed.
My question: Do you consider yourself a comedian, a deep space funnyman of some sort, and will you bill yourself as such when you set up your new age healing shop in some suburban strip mall, hopefully on the main drag in Centereach?
God bless the children. They laugh because they know it’s true. By now, we’re all pretty much a sump-load of genetic filth. If you spent three minutes in self-reflection you’d arrive at the same conclusion. Which, of course, is why we don’t do that. Hate is everywhere. Without hate there’s no need for empire. Government, politics, Wall Street, banks, big business and media are all fueled by hate. Extract hate and the whole complex collapses and the planet’s a grassy paradise again. If you thought about it for three minutes you’d see how simple and clear it is. And you’d know what to do. You’d show the hate, bring it all up, make an offering to your god or idol. Sunlight is a great antiseptic. Let’s see the hate, young people. Make June 1 National Hate Day. Go viral. So, to your question, if you think that’s funny, than, yes, I’m some kind of comedian, or something. http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l543/hercampusphoto/Her%20Campus%20USF/Blogs/d8b52c1e.jpg
Hi, I’m Rachel. I’m a media artist exploring enthusiasm, confusion, and folklore about computers and life online. I’m also a nonprofit professional working in art, gender equity, and critical/creative use of technology (presently seeking new employment).
Lately I’m doing freelance consulting on media arts projects. A current collaboration is a public art project that will connect places with histories in Austin, TX through an Augmented Reality layer of memories from the Latinx community. I’m also preparing a performance art piece that diagrams the anatomy of web search rabbit-hole.
I’m looking to connect with folks in the tech/arts, sustainability, and digital futures realms - if you are too, or if you have any weird computer stories to share, reach out! rachelstuckey.net
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Working out how to respond to DR. Rupert Read's message to XR rebels that the next step in the rebellion is hare local groups just go ahead and create the fossilfree egalitarian, sustainable society that governments have show themselves incapable of introducing. TOgether with pivotprojects.org I am working on introducing a local action movement called 146 which is where local constellations of maximum 146 use their buying, kindness, sharing and political power. Early stages https://146help.avbp.net
This is US-based rather than UK, but you might find ideas and inspiration from the podcast Building Local Power, produced by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance: https://ilsr.org/building-local-power/
One of their recent episodes, for example, had a state legislator in Maine talking about the legal and legislative barriers put up (to protect monopolies) to prevent local communities from creating their own power grids. Always good to be able to identify where the choke points are ...
Yeah 146 will launch in the US thanks to our US representative group. (Under formation) This is global!
Hi I'm Claire and have done alot of work in the area of digital identity and the necessary governance and system design necessary to make it successful and inclusive for citizens and societies. There are alot of governments investing in it and Covid was a major accelerator of it given the necessity for track and trace but I'm looking at decentralised systems. With the interest and successes of digital currencies its likely central banks could be the catalyst for digital identity to become the norm however what still remains is the governance and access to a permissioned decentralised system. It's messy with the issues of privacy and cultural norms also thrown in but it's very interesting and one that directly impacts the type of work New Public is researching. Could be a whole new paradigm shift if people can have more autonomy and transparency over their personal data and who gets access to it. Some brilliant use cases already in markets we jus need to overcome the collaborative aspect of it to ensure ti doesnt become weaponised... which is a real and significant concern for many.
Hi, I'm Patrick. I am currently running a petition on ChangeOrg to reduce the use of cruel bird deterrent measures such as bird netting and metal spikes on Britain's rooftops. My belief is upheld by anecdotal evidence is that many birds are killed or injured by the pest control measures and I think there has to be a better way. I am interested in ways to find out how many birds are injured or killed across the countries of the UK as a result of these deterrents. In particular I would like to set up a survey/database that wildlife hospitals and others such as roofers and builders can report too. Any help how to move forward on it would be much appreciated. Just for background; I have a brain injury so can struggle with long term screen time, have limited abilities techwise and annoyingly right now limited financial resources. I do though have time some tech knowledge having once run a local news website and a lot of enthusiasm! Any ideas or suggestions would be most welcome. Thank you.
Patrick, I would suggest you create an online form people use to send reports.
Secondly, think of a short project name you can register the domain for. UK domains are not expensive, maybe £8 per year.
You could use Google forms, but I would recommend Tally. It's even easier to use and free for individuals (only companies pay. Tally is a small startup in Belgium).
https://tally.so/
The web form can be your one page website for now. You register the domain and then point it to your web form. If you need technical help just ask.
I imagine most of the work is getting the word out to people who can collect the data for you. That's why a good memorable name is important.
Thanks Marcus. Very helpful. Am working to get the request for reports out there to the right people. Many thanks for the suggestions. Patrick