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Social Networking WG Meeting 2025-06-07
A meeting of the Social Networking working group.
Facilitator: Sarah Present 6
What would you like to see come out of this project?
- I would like to hear how you plan to run meetings in the future as you discuss all the aspects of such a project. To work efficiently in all that complexity.
- Sustainability (in terms of organisation, people's time)
- Documenting what we tried and learned, even if we don't go ahead with anything, to help others. Documenting things in a way that others can adopt
- Functional social network
- Scale. Become a household name within certain groups.
- Doesn't further isolate people in the way that social media can do
- Check in that it's having a physical impact on people's lives
- Use nodes to connect people with locals and create resilience
- Tackle accessibility challenges
- I'd like to see a system that can support distributed organising with multiple groups/aspects.
What questions & challenges can we identify for this project to address?
- How would we make this accessibile to as many people as possible
- How might we use this to support action in person and reduce isolation
- How might we keep data live, archive unneeded things
- How might we work well together, run meetings, etc
- Fears
- Late stage capitalism quickly turning into techno feudalism
- Timescale on this before the law makes it impossible
- Ethical concerns of using these platforms
- How do we ensure that we're serving a just society and not perpetuating the tech industry's problems
- How do we engage with councils and local community groups
- How might we leverage our existing expertise
- How do we understand what existing local community organisations want
- How far can we push people away from the slick, corporate digital experiences that they have come to expect
- What are the mental models that people have for these systems
- What are the activities that people will want to perform with this software and how can we make this smooth and easy
- How do we acknowledge, recognise the priviledge that we may hold
- How do we share the values driven underpinnings and solidarity
- How do we position radical goals wihtin a broadly appealing project
- Where would we put servers if we had themMeet
Tentative answers to those Qs based on current knowledge/ assumptions
- We could have small information sessions about our existing expertise
How we might get better answers?
- How we engage other community groups and get more knowledge from them
- Can we explore both problems and solutions at the same time
- “Eating our own dogfood” - trialling a platform ourselves
Next actions, interested roles, and how the group will stay connected.
- Create a throw-away instance of something
- Mastodon
- Lemmy
- Bonfire
- Do something to engage with people
## What questions do we want to answer by doing that
- We should define a set of research questions
- Specific case-by-case questions
- How does sign up work
- What is my experience of logging on
- Do I get lost
- What are the privacy implications
- Broader qualitative questions
- Create Instances: (Jade), Wade, G
- Compile research questions for our internal evaluation: Sarah, Jax
- Short list of organisations that me might want to work with: Sarah, Jax
- Digital platforms and documentation: Jade
- Next meeting: Organise (Jade), Facilitate (Jax) (next time Albury)