Convener: Johanna B (@johannab@" in several places)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Notes

Websites/References:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_In_Systems%3A_A_Primer
• https://www.multisolving.org/
• https://www.thegoodtrade.com/features/third-place-community-spaces/

Thesis:

• Our online activities are often distilled in our perceptions to transactions, products, or results. In some contexts this may be a natural and necessary view but it is reductive and fundamentally anti-social.
• Moderators in fediverse spaces have broad ranges of domain expertise, but have fallen into moderation/Trust&Safety roles in almost as an afterthought, and end up behaving in a very reactive way that is neither healthy for them, nor does it maximize the benefits they might bring to the local or broader community.
• Can we build tools and systems to truly view what we are creating and convening as virtual “third spaces”, where design and intention put human connectivity first and fit structures to needs?

(Lots of enthusiasm for “virtual third place” as a framing)

• a motivating moment for me was at a conference last December where a speaker stated: “Social media does not want us to exist in third places”. A very striking statement. Is it categorically true? Or is that statement about the purpose, motivation and leadership of certain implementations of social media? Can we design and steward, rather than exploit/corrupt, third places in virtual space?

Stories! What narratives work to get us here, and to build? Storytelling also huge in urban planning & urban systems.

Industrial-scale “trust&safety” discards a lot. It’s not a tools problem, it’s a role/definition problem.

How to equip moderators as “community manager” skills?

Inherently political. Capitalism opposes this, fedi creates possibilities to counter that but if you try to scale …

https://runyourown.social/

wandering.shop as a long-lived fairly successful (although not without it’s problem) community. But mastodon won’t list wandering.shop because it’s not open-registration.

Moderation tooling as an afterthought is a problem, lack of human factors in the design

You can build your own garden fence and build across it

I’ve often characterized my tech support work and it’s the same in community management as the person who makes your products work the way your users need them to, whether you knew it or not. I’ve also considered that TS/support/community design in tech is janitorial, or maybe filling in potholes on the info highway. Could we not build better paths, networks, and places by bringing in those thinkers and observers at the planning stage, whether that is a product or an instance or a tool.

Systems thinking and systems design is often not how technology developers work, even in the best of intentions, seeing the viable output of their system only as the commodifiable product, rather than the human need met.

Can we offer workshops, or 3D-world “unconference” sessions in technical-focused venues? Notable that this was a very small session with the few participants largely already aligned. Could Fedicon, for example, fit something like this in, and make it part of the builders’ and maintainers’ agenda?