Node steward is a key initial user persona. Sarah's ideas for journey's above look correct. Some general notes:
Stewarding a node is a key technical on-ramp to the project. The first experience of a Steward (either setting up a node, or onboarding to an existing node) might be their first experience with the project and is key to a good impression.
We do not assume existing technical knowledge for node stewards. It's a learning journey.
The current thinking (open for discussion) is that it's hard to protect a node from it's stewards. This is not a corporate platform with detailed authorization rules. As such, our approach is probably “trust, but audit transparently”. What a node steward does is this visible to their peers at least, and maybe also in some cases to the community of users.
Neighbourhood user feels like the second priority to me. Some notes:
Our key theory of change is that we can reduce the carbon emissions compared to big tech, but moving compute from an infinite “cloud”, into the local and physical. As such, our main nudge with users is “this compute is embedded in your local geography”. This nudge should occur subtly throughout most user journeys, while keeping it toned down enough to not cause confusion (as this is a new idea to users of the current internet).
Some neighbourhood users are potential volunteers (as node stewards or other). There should be pathways to learn more about how things are working, get more interested, and then get involved.
Users should also develop a sense that the system is maintained by real local people, and that doing so is labour. This might be made most clear if they need technical support or training. It might also be conveyed through a small cost and clear explanation of where that goes (all not-for-profit obviously).
Users will sometimes have an experience of using the system in an outage, and will have journeys that don't involve the internet.
Member of the Public
Site partner
Our nodes are all likely to go in locations not run by us. The people running those locations are key partners. There is some similarity to member of the public, in that both might want to learn about how the system is going, but it seems like site partners in particular will benefit from learning about the value they are creating by hosting a node.
Other volunteers
This should probably be broken up. However, if we look in the moderately near term, at the first two milestones on
the roadmap, then it seems like we will need to consider people
providing training.
providing tech support to users. Content moderation will become a big thing in the future, but might be small initially.
Unknown Region governance roles
Region governance is an unknown space. A LoRes region is a set of nodes across a geography like Merri-bek. There may be decisions to make at that scale. It should neither be top-down, nor should it be a process of autonomous nodes doing whatever they like. Services like training, customer support, and content moderation happen at the region level.
Additionally, there may be some sense of custom region branding.
The public branding at https://lores.tech/ has had some thought put into it. Everything is open to change, but I've currently very happy with that.
The audience for this branding is potential technical collaborators, community organisers from groups who might want to use LoRes, and potential value aligned funders. We'd particularly like to look attractive to funding on the theme of “climate resilience”.
Given these goals, we have stayed well clear of the colour green. Green is overused, and so has been watered-down. Progressives see it in corporate green-washing. Conservatives see it and see “the enemy”, fearing a loss of all aspects of their way of life.
Instead, we hope to unify across the political divide. The colours chosen for the lores.tech website are:
sky blue: conveys reliable, engineering (we use a blueprint pattern in some cases), conservative, but also blue sky, renewables
bright-orange/yellow: conveys solar, hope, renewables (especially paired with the blue).
burned-orange/red: conveys emergency, climate change, crisis (especially paired with the bright-orange).
This colouring works well for the engineering project. It *may* work well for aspects of the user-facing experience, but maybe not. For facing the community in-general, the following concepts feel important:
Not screaming “greenie” or “socialist”
Emergency resilient, but the good kind (like the way we feel about the country firefighters)
Community, local, ours (not really present in the LoRes branding)
Playful, hack-able, participatory - Like the internet that we used to love, back when we built geocities pages and everyone could have a go. Not slick, not corporate.
Hope. We can do this. It isn't insurmountable, we can take action
Not screaming “Tech”. We want to distance ourselves from tech-bros and big tech companies. Maybe reduce “masculine” vibes.