Nathan Schneider
@evan @Identitywoman @j12t Friends, a thought: We had such an overpowering interest in the Open Social Incubator (177 apps for 8 slots) that we are thinking about creating a forum space (prob. Discourse) for people building community in open social networks. We want this to be resonant and mutually supporting with efforts like yours.
Do you see any dangers with this approach, or is there redundancy with anything you're aware of?
Nathan Schneider
@j12t @evan @Identitywoman This would be really focused on community builders, not at all devs.
Currently if we build this as part of our cohort process it would be managed by our team at MEDLab. If it has life beyond the cohort period, others might have to take it on or we could intentionally shut it down.
Johannes Ernst
@ntnsndr @evan @Identitywoman Interesting! Wow!! This is impressive!!
What kind of people do you expect to show up there (say developers vs operators vs community builders vs ... ) and what would they discuss on a day-to-day basis? Who would "own" / control / moderate that space?
Nathan Schneider
@j12t @evan @Identitywoman I imagine the discussion we'd hope for would focus on things like community management, choices in tools, tech support, governance, codes of conduct, etc.
Johannes Ernst
@ntnsndr @evan @Identitywoman Pulling in @jaz
Nathan Schneider
@j12t @evan @Identitywoman @jaz Yes, and given the nature of the group, it may be possible to transition it to participant leadership if it seems useful. We could continue to participate, but we won't have the same level of funded labor available after the program.
Johannes Ernst
@ntnsndr @evan @Identitywoman @jaz My experience has been that people generally want those groups to stay around, so I would suggest planning for the long term rather than just while your program is running.
Nathan Schneider
@j12t @evan @Identitywoman @jaz ("Exit to Community" is one of our lab's pet concepts, so theoretically we are experts in those kinds of transitions!)
Evan Prodromou
@ntnsndr @j12t @Identitywoman @jaz This sounds like a good effort.
Evan Prodromou
@jaz @ntnsndr @Identitywoman @j12t so, one thing I'd watch for is the anti-pattern of some funder "community networks", where participation in the community is a performance in hopes of getting funded.
Jaz (IFTAS)
@ntnsndr @evan @Identitywoman @j12t 177 applications to join is fantastic, although overwhelming. Clearly you've identified a broad need. My thinking would be to run the incubator as planned, but with the additional task of figuring out how to move from incubator to a forum space as part of its' activity.
There's a lot of overlap between "platform admin", "community moderators" and "community managers", anything you can do to keep the focus/mission/purpose clear will help.
Nathan Schneider
@jaz @evan @Identitywoman @j12t Thanks for this. One thing we're explicitly trying to challenge is the current overlap between admin and community; our working theory (validated by the application pool) is there is a lot of interest in these tools from people who have been intimidated by the technical barriers and the overrepresentation of techies.
Nathan Schneider
@jaz @evan @Identitywoman @j12t Totally. Glad you're really optimizing for non-technical conversations, I think that's essential.
There may be considerable overlap between what we're thinking about and IFTAS Connect—to the point that maybe we should just point people there.
I think the difference might be that a lot of our folks are still ideating, not yet in the weeds of problem solving.
Jaz (IFTAS)
@ntnsndr @evan @Identitywoman @j12t plenty of our members for sure run their own services, but we are not the resource for help with that.
And not to disparage "techies", but for the most part, the tech crowd has a very different take on "community" than non-tech. Different goals, needs, gaps.
Jaz (IFTAS)
@ntnsndr @evan @Identitywoman @j12t 100%. The vast majority of community builders in this space, albeit anecdotal on my part, is non-technical, non-sysadmin. Managed hosted, or struggling to run the services so they can build community. This is why we (on IFTAS Connect) explicitly do not host technical support conversations, we point people to those resources, for fear of becoming yet another tech admin support channel and losing the focus on community, policy, and safety.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.