Beyond Facebook: A Web of Action
I have to tell you, I am deeply excited. Why? I am excited because for years, I have followed conversations regarding a new era of digital tools that we need, to be able to take collective action more effectively to face the tremendous challenges of today. Today, I am here to tell you about just a few of those tools that have actually been emerging, and make you remember that the web is here to help us, and there is so much more than facebook in development.
When I say, in development, I really mean, in development. I personally participate in the development of two of the three software platforms that I am about to mention, and I’m close to the people that develop the other, which is why I have an intimate knowledge of them, and why I know where they’re headed, and why I’m excited to share that with you.
First of all, we have to completely abandon our vision of the web that we’ve come to know. The twitter and facebook dominated web. Those websites are part of what I call “the trivial web”. They are built by behemoths who, at the end of the day, can’t have the best interests of the people and the planet in mind. They are designed to get you to spend as much time on them as possible, wasting time.
Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that as a species, we don’t have a lot of time to waste. We need to take conversations to action.
In the circles I engage with online, we’ve known this for years. But it was one thing to know, and another thing to set out building it. In different ways, that is what the various software projects that I’m about to outline have all done, tackling different pieces of the “collective action” puzzle.
Let’s start with Hylo. (https://hylo.com)
Hylo is the place where we envision people discovering one another’s ideas and intentions, and rallying around projects to collaborate on. It will use network effects to connect people looking for help, with people with the right skills. The Hylo team is mostly based in San Francisco, with me working remotely from Toronto. They have been working at it for a few years. With an incredibly significant update to the user interface that’s just recently happened, Hylo is poised to find way bigger adoption by people everywhere.
Next up is Loomio. (https://loomio.org)
Loomio helps groups do collaborative decision making. Having come together around a project in Hylo, they need Loomio to move forward. When I traveled to New Zealand earlier this year, I met the super awesome Loomio team and was radically inspired. I contributed some code to the project around that time to help move it along on an area that needed a boost. They have been trailblazing the way forward on how to be a startup, be open source, adhere to your values, and still raise funds to scale the business! https://www.loomio.org/about
The thoughtfulness, professionalism and accessibility of the user interface and of the code that powers the website make it an incredibly high potential project to watch over the next few years.
I will be totally transparent about this third one, Metamaps. (https://metamaps.cc) It is my passion of 4 years now. Though Metamaps has many functions, in the context of our global challenges, we think that Metamaps can help the people to make sense of the complex issues that we face. When we have not one, but one hundred wicked problems that we face, how can we start to get people on the same page about them. Getting people on the same page is a crucial first step to collaborative action. Metamaps uses network visualizations to help represent the radically complex webs that we weave, of people and ideas and relationships. From a development perspective, Metamaps has been fairly quiet for about one year, as we’ve had to take on other focuses as well, but Metamaps is coming back into focus now. Expect some huge updates in the coming months. Also, we are looking for any additional help we can find. The team, six of us distributed around the world, have found a renewed energy to push the project forward, because we feel it’s important, and increasingly relevant with each passing day. Do you expect the political system to produce the change you want to see?
For me, the answer is no. Modern politics is absolutely ill-equipped to be adequately responsive to the challenges of our time. The change needs to come from the bottom up, from the people, and the people need to be equipped with the tools. Look what people managed to do with twitter in the Arab Spring, when it wasn’t even designed with that use case in mind at all!
So what would happen if the people had access to digital tools that supported them to do more than glaze over as another auto-playing muted video started showing them captions that they didn’t want to read? What if they could not only make use of this new era of tools, but build relationships with the people who work on them, and even contribute to their development. What if they could make changes to the very source code as they needed to, and then submit innovations they make on it forward to everyone else using the tool?
This is our vision for the collaborative technology ecosystem of the coming years. This is the beginning of a new era of online tools that are built by the people for the people, that actually finds mass adoption. This is where we begin to find the purpose driven, the meaningful, web.
As a final note of inspiration, I want to share again a slice of a vision that has been floating for years, but is quickly becoming more and more possible, if we want it. The image below is a screenshot of a tool we call Junto. I hacked some existing code to make a prototype of it in one weekend last year. Junto can be a modern lobby for the purpose driven web. It is a virtual environment with 1000 different “rooms” which can be fluidly navigated between, and video conversations conducted with 10 people in each one. Each room has a topic under discussion. So with this, we could see 10000 people simultaneously in conversation about pressing issues that we face as a species. Combine Junto and this high bandwidth face to face collaborative experience, with the other asynchronous tools and we begin to see an extremely powerful mechanism for scalable coordinated collective action.
If this is a vision for what the web can be that inspires you, consider making use of these tools, sharing this post, or contributing to their development (or just contact me http://twitter.com/Connoropolous). This eleventh hour is calling for all hands on deck.
Disclaimer: there are a lot of other tools that I know about that are out there too which I love and am so excited about but chose not to feature in this article, which I can write out in a comment for anyone who’s interested.
