Or … “Why I WILL learn to be a social coder”
Image credits? Image somehow meant to convey the general concept of “social”.
Beautiful artwork, wrong set of logo’s! Image credit by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Hey there, fellow community members!
Just a little update on a major shift in focus and direction.
Some time ago I stepped down after years being your facilitator/janitator here on this forum. Alongside that I am dropping hats in all my other community roles e.g. my fedi + FOSS evangelism/advocacy, weaving in public to help foster cohesion. All these intensive and time-consuming chores that come with community work.
This so I can become distraction-free to reorient myself in a new direction and adopt a new role:
Social experience designer.
My work field will be social web technology for building open social stacks, where human needs and humanity are central, on the trajectory to a peopleverse. A ‘peopleverse’ will use as analogy, and to project shining beacon on the horizon to energize and drive us forward with a united voice. I will take the risk and venture out, wade into an as yet unexplored morass: to find the missing social layers and build rafts there that can float needed solutions to expecting people across the ocean of our technical core.
One channel where I will drop off nuggets and tidbits of info on new social coding and social experience design progress and insights is:
Social Experience Design on Matrix chat.
Everyone that is remotely interested in social coding and social experience design is most welcome to participate. Monitor the social coding channels for interesting areas and start doing something useful to you that fits in the larger whole. That simple. Do-ocracy is the absolute mimimum collab level a movement can start with. The trajectory is towards a model based on adhocracy and supported eventually by implemented artifacts coming out of the SX pipeline. Like from the hedonic peer production idea that I’ll elaborate in my spare time, for instance. Or other spare organizations that are more social-technically oriented and able to help balance against the hard tech and app-delivery mindsets that dominate the ecosystem at large.
I would especially like to extend my invitation to @dansup. A person that has been a great inspiration to me, and I can’t even begin to explain my utmost admiration on all he has single-handledly shaped out of the bare ground, plus the finesse and care with which that was done.
When I first came to the fedi as founder-facilitator of Humane Tech Community, my mind was still full of the idea that we might adopt the “global awareness and cultural awakening” rallying cry from humanetech.com (our forum provider and close affiliate then) and feed that into big commons-owned grassroots environments of FOSS and fedi. My hopes and expectations were for this veritable “humane tech field lab” of the fediverse I had stumbled into, could be both the power house and staging ground for the transition to humane technology designed to serve people, and not the other way round.
Among the first people I “followed around” on the fedi and later chatted with was Daniel. And he explained why he did all that hard work with Pixelfed for the community and the commons… why he spent all the blood, sweat and tears. Namely to ensure that one day perhaps his at the time young niece would have a humane alternative to Instagram. That was his passion, his driver, his dream…
A dream worth sacrificing everything for…
This incentive to help his young niece drove Daniel’s intrinsic motivation.
And hereby Daniel stole my heart and fedi-boosted my motivation even further to make myself a home with you all in this beautiful crazy fedi of ours and work in this humane tech lab, which I hereby officially rename. The communal construction yards for human web and social fabric I shall call Groundwork Labs as here solid foundations are built to carry a peopleverse that may one day unite us online.
Daniel, you are always so attentive to community, your companions in your quest. Dealing out praise, while staying humble yourself. Being open to learn from your mistakes. That we may all take example from such behavior. As software developers we should learn that not just talk feeds into our requirements docs, but emotions, feelings, sentiments and the whole half-forgotten spectrum of human virtues too. And I ask myself frequently… what would be the data model of that?
(OT: The usual response is like “don’t use FooBar
as a key-value store for that” or something. While the agenda topic was “Release socialcode _v0.01
to fediverse installed base” the discussion veers off into FooBar
’s config file format being yaml.
Coding is social, so social coders should code the social code of the social network.
( Now hurry up… repeat that 20 times, quickly )
To conclude this overly long notice of new direction as social experience designer…
Thank you, Daniel, for that beacon of hope !
All this typing is well worth the effort, a tiny gesture, to convey my appreciation for you as a person.