Wellbeing, participation, processes and policies

Community
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SocialHub Policies

Given the Fediverse landscape today I would drop the Community Values Policy and would instead use this Discourse Policies feature in a different manner.

First for a healthy community itself a robust wellbeing track needs to be in place, which SocialHub should re-establish. I am not going into this, but it starts with CoC and builds on that with a whole range of moderation practices and a diverse (culture, ethnicity, skillset) group of people involved in wellbeing procedures.

As @strypey rightfully indicates there are a bunch of impracticalities to using a Policy to reinforce a code of conduct ‘at the forum door’.

At social coding movement instead of a “command” to conduct, there is a “demand” for your participation. A friendlier positioning of things. The movement has adopted guidelines as used by Mozilla and adapted them for its own use:

What is interesting for SocialHub community is that:

  • The social coding community participation guidelines is adoptable by anyone.
  • Similar to the Contributor Convenant it is a crowdsourced, versioned and evolving artifact.

So SocialHub can adopt this as-is and contribute to its improvement. Even better, social coding is a movement, not a community. Alignment with its ideas is enough to be part of the movement. So SocialHub, in a new positioning towards its future, might consider itself under social coding umbrella. And if that is the case, can benefit from facilities and services provided by the movement’s other direct participants, which are all otherwise independent party.

This “movement” concept is a first step to ensuring that foundational social web technologies can be “of the people, and by the people” i.e. commons-based and evolving according to the needs of the commons. Not the needs of hypercapitalism that a corporate takeover would entail, for instance.

Now on to those Policies…

General participation guidelines are in place. How about richer collaborative relationships which are of much more value, than what casual discussion may bring? Collaboration is the absolute Achilles Heel of the fediverse.

:point_right:  Collaborating involves relying on each other.

My minumum requirement for “community” is collaboration, not merely discussion. Here’s where policies can define and reinforce the minimum participation guidelines of various different community processes and practices.

Instead of one Guardian Policy gatekeeping the door of this forum, you get many policies targeted to streamline the efficiency of ongoing community activity. To each policy further workflow can be defined and possibly automated, which would be a great thing to have as an ongoing practice to reduce the boring chores that are killing for a volunteer community.

Proposal and votes

I have a proposal that comes in 3 parts that can be separately improved, approved or rejected …

1. Community participation

  • I am in favor of the proposal, because …
  • I am not in favor of the proposal, because …
  • I am neutral. I am not in favor and not against.
0 voters

2. SocialHub repositioning

  • Reposition (conceptually) SocialHub to be under social coding movement umbrella.
    • Social coding movement already considers itself liaisoned to SocialHub.
    • Social coding movement’s themes are all complementary to SocialHub’s.
    • Social coding movement and SocialHub are ‘values & vision’-aligned.
    • Social coding movement raison d’être is to do as movement what community can’t do.
    • Social coding movement is about social web based co-creation of the social web.

  • I am in favor of the proposal, because …
  • I am not in favor of the proposal, because …
  • I am neutral. I am not in favor and not against.
0 voters

3. Co-created community policies

  • Co-create “Community Policies” in a collaboration between movement and SocialHub.
    • Community policies are building block of sustainable software & standards development.
    • Social coding movement collects these for a Patterns & Practices library.
    • The movement is interested in the design of the concept, SocialHub for its application.
    • “Community Policies” become generally available for other projects and initiatives.

  • I am in favor of the proposal, because …
  • I am not in favor of the proposal, because …
  • I am neutral. I am not in favor and not against.
0 voters
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I like the idea of reorienting the SocialHub forum based on the needs of those who are actively using it. As well as those who might start using it, if they felt their needs would be taken into account. Whether or not that involves social coding movement and its documents and processes is up for debate.

Personally I’m a fan of the GNU Kind Communications Guidelines. But I’m not attached to any particular approach. I’ll work within any guidelines or processes as long as they’re decided by consensus (deliberation and voluntary agreement, not necessarily unanimous) of those actively participating.

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Maybe I should’ve split the poll into multiple ones that apply for the individual parts of the proposal.

Update: I split things in 3 polls now, @strypey

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The motivation of pushing like this is often more of an issue than the text being pushed, this language and process spring from the identity politics movement Google Search and the current hard shifts to the right shows this is likely not helping.

“regardless of:” we need to stop doing these endless lists, it makes no sense and is never ending.

In my thinking, the first step is the subject, the second step is governance, the third step is what we as a “collective” do with these first steps - then the “policing of bad behaver” is a product of the first two steps.

NOT the first step itself.

  • We have no consensus on the subject of socialhub - as can be seen by the pushing out of political tech and pushing up of “non-political” coding a few years ago in the space, without consensus.

  • We have no governance to mediate this.

With the current political mess of the #dotcons shifting to the hard right, the politics or more likely the unspoken lack of politics of the fediverse is a question we need to be clear about and likely underlies these issues.

What is this openweb reboot?

Vision-on-tv
Vision-on-tv275×347 41.5 KB

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Yes, agreed. We need fresh carrots… :carrot::carrot::carrot:

I outlined a different approach above and in this topic so I will not repeat that.

But I would like to touch on other points. It is often mentioned here and across the fedi that: “you can’t herd cats” i.e. you can’t project onto and enforce power structures on fiercely autonomously operating individuals and groups of people, hope that they will just listen and obey.

The reason we think we need such power structures is that we want to feel we have a certain measure of control. While that is needed, designing it as a ‘rigid house’ gives these endless discussions where the boundaries, the walls, should be. It is, to refer to @RokeJulianLockhart’s argument as nuanced as morals, ethics and values can get… and then drag in philosophy and all social sciences, etc.

A lot of activism today is based on the idea that a rigig frameworks and - more importantly - a moral test and also willingness sacrifice (sacrifice-based activism) to participation is needed as the pre-condition to participate. And all kinds anti-patterns flow from this in actual practice, where imho activism is more likely to backfire than help. I sent a range of toots out on my account on the subject, like this one I tooted today. Because they are ephemeral I will include it below:

ThoughtProvoker. We need NuancedActivism that can pull people gently by the shirt timely enough to bring them back into the fold of Civil Society where truth and Critical Thinking can be nurtured again. What we have is Repellent Activism that puts a hot iron to anyone acting suspicious, and ensures they're so hurt never to return. Repellent activism is loved by extremists both on the left and right as it feeds into voracious Purity Spirals and suck more people into deep radicalisation.
ThoughtProvoker. We need NuancedActivism that can pull people gently by the shirt timely enough to bring them back into the fold of Civil Society where truth and Critical Thinking can be nurtured again. What we have is Repellent Activism that puts a hot iron to anyone acting suspicious, and ensures they're so hurt never to return. Repellent activism is loved by extremists both on the left and right as it feeds into voracious Purity Spirals and suck more people into deep radicalisation.434×865 95 KB

Here btw is some writing I did years ago at Humane Technology on the dynamics around purity spirals. I think these are the winning weapons of fascism today, that just keep on giving and giving:

I might refer to many other posts I created there when the community was still very active (it is dormant now, waiting patiently for either dispersal of value or continuation with sustainable force, i.e. the community is ‘emergent’ under social coding movement umbrella, also emergent):

Quoting Huxley:

“Take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely func­tional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily cooperating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Govern­ment.”

“Therefore, if you wish to avoid the spiritual impoverishment of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive the small country community, or alternately humanize the me­tropolis by creating within its network of mechanical organization the urban equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and co­operate as complete persons, not as the mere embodi­ments of specialized functions.”

So what are different ways we can walk?

Well, first of all find, take notes and analyse all the gazillion anti-patterns that are brimming wildly on our current fedi. Fedi has social and culture sauce, but things explode into parasociality based on a simple typo. It is paradise for a culture warrior who has ‘special purposes’ for the echo chamber that flocks to their sphere of influence.

I called current fedi doomed for a long time… not doomed as viable social media. But doomed as next-gen commons-based social networking environment that is able to “reimagine social and uphold a peopleverse” that is in turn able to carry a global society. Unless several severe challenges are tackled first.

These challenges I study (as a ‘professional hobbyist’ as it were), interested in the unique social dynamics that exist in grassroots environments. There are several wicked problems to deal with. Yet looking at root causes there’s one overall wicked solution that can solve them all:

:point_right:   Foster emergent collaborative forces and ways to allow them to choreograph strategically.

That’s a different approach than creating a bunker with policy walls, or @hamish approach of creating a one-size-fits-all governance approach, where people should willingly give up control of their pet projects to varying extent. It might well work, but I lack the experience to think how it could.

So what does this “fostering of emergence” mean?

It means attracting good players while repelling bad actors… in natural ways. For good players, and for players one step better, there should be ever increasing synergy and value, low-hanging fruits. Intrinsic motivators to be even better in aligning to what people generally need to live together in harmony. Like the humane harmonious technologies of the open social web. Now we get workable material: What is humane technology, what is a harmonious technology system? All these things I made part of social coding movement (where “feeling” yourself a member is enoug to become a social coder and follow that path further).

I mentioned multiple wicked problems. One is that the FOSS movement is inherently unsustainable, and never in current form able to fend off any kind of serious corporate takeover. I am not going to bikeshed the following point, but imho Meta has taken over strategically. It is now the big spider waiting, biding her time. We are the opposite sex, tiny spiders improving Meta’s web. Thinking ourselves free, while we help build skynet instead. Big Tech is the real benefactor of FOSS imho (no need to discuss, I did that already).

“FOSS” is a totally unworkable concept, only usable to discuss software freedoms from license and legal perspective. Hence I defined SOSS which stands for Sustainable open social software / systems / services. Now SOSS follows the best-practices of the Free software development lifecycle, the FSDL. This make SOSS measurable for its suitable as building block for a Peopleverse.

If Mastodon significantly drops the ball on facilitating Gab by their software, then that is something that can be specifically pointed out in ways that make it better addressable. Projects can be ranked for these kinds of things. And projects - if that ranking happens at SocialHub - can serious egg on their faces, if not publicly shamed, if the ball-dropping continues without serious attempts to improve.

At The Center for Humane Technologies they have a Ledger of Harms (unfortunately a static pamplhet). Alja Isacovic and her husband developed a pledge framework at Responsible Tech Work that social coding movement intents to take inspiration from or adopt and extend. A Hall of Shame might be created for those fediverse projects that go deeply off the virtuous track.

SocialHub can experiment with these attracting and repelling forces to create gravity and convergence around her mission and vision. The social coding movement functions as the ‘value accretion disk’ where best-practices are crowdsourced over time by proactive participation and synergetic mutualistic relationships that are being fostered and strengthened.

PS. I think I will follow up with a topic at social coding movement, because …

:point_right:   Foster emergent collaborative forces and ways to allow them to choreograph strategically.

… can be established by moving from working-in-public to working-in-commons, the wicked solution.

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Here you see the issue SocialHub has: A poll has been out for 2 weeks, and hurray 4 people voted, 1 the admin of the community and one former moderator. Do we have do-ocracy and can I consider the 3 proposals accepted? Who is the decider on that? Here you clearly see that SocialHub is just a discussion forum, not a community.

:point_right: Hereby I pronounce the :magnet: Intent to build liaison to SocialHub as described above.

An Intent only, zero expectations, as the lukewarm interest does not warrant any more commitment.