Whiteboard Session: Community-Centered Design
On Jan 31, SonicRim held a Whiteboard Session at our office exploring the idea of community-centered design as a provocation for thinking about social tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which center the needs of the individual.
Henry Holtzman, CEO of Secret Party, told us about how Secret Party was developed as just such a platform. Other ticketing and event management platforms assume a direct and transactional relationship between the ticket seller and each individual who buys a ticket, but this model does not support communities who want to grow slowly but organically, from many hubs instead of only through the ticket seller, while still maintaining accountability for those who invite new attendees. Secret Party’s platform baked in the ability for returning participants to invite limited numbers of new people without central approval, but with traceability, so that these people feel responsible for enculturating their invitees. Henry believes that this is how the world changes: giving people the ability to have strong communities with diverse values that often are not yet accepted in mainstream culture.
This prompted a lively discussion. Someone quickly asked about the potential for these tools to be used by “bad communities,” with the example of white supremacist groups. We discussed our responsibility to mind how our tools are used vs. our capacity to be judge, jury, and executioner on whether someone else’s community is acceptable or not. We discussed the tensions around secrecy or slow-growth communities and the need to increase the diversity of those communities. The point was made that the completely open platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow so much unlimited growth that “communities” are often overrun by throngs of individuals — thus empowering not community, but a kind of mob rule.
We came up with an initial hypothesis about what defines community, including: it serves as a place where you can safely be weird and/or gather with people with shared values; communities have people with reputation and social capital; it has practices; it has roles (formal and/or informal); it has norms and values and purpose; it has mechanisms of connecting and bonding; it is made up of people who have mutual interests. Based on this discussion, we believe that a truly community centered social tech platform would have to explicitly support these experiences.
