ProSocial World and Hylo: Co-creating tools for cultural evolution
Terran Collective is partnering with ProSocial World — the creators of the ProSocial framework — to embed their practices and principles directly into Hylo in service to more equitable, productive, and collaborative groups. We’ve recently completed our first co-development work on Hylo and we’re excited to share the new updates today!
After reading the ProSocial book and connecting with the authors in 2020, Terran Collective stewards Aaron, Tibet, Clare, and Tom took the ProSocial Facilitator training to learn the framework and how to lead groups in following the practices. ProSocial World (PW) in turn chose to adopt Hylo after a careful review of community platforms, and began bringing their groups to Hylo in 2021. PW currently has two active groups on Hylo: ProSocial Facilitators, for those who have completed the training, and ProSocial Commons, an action learning group that promotes ProSocial values and practice.
“Hylo shares a strong values alignment with ProSocial, and offers unique tools to meet our community needs such as nested groups and cross-group conversations,” said PW Co-Founder, Paul Atkins. “Like ProSocial, Hylo helps foster collaboration within and between groups at multiple scales–emulating the cooperation of a multicellular super-organism. Because Hylo uses ProSocial in their product development and the platform itself, working with them is an extraordinary opportunity to reach and benefit a large number of groups, and a unique research opportunity to observe what makes groups successful in participatory action.”
Hylo updates brought to you by ProSocial World
After using Hylo for a year, the PW team had a lot of ideas both for how Hylo could more effectively foster cooperative group cultures, and for ways they could use Hylo to achieve their research goals. We went pretty deep on all the possibilities — more on that in a minute.
To begin, we settled on a co-development scope to deliver key features for content curation and notifications enhancements that bring an improved user experience to Hylo. “These features are all about helping ProSocial groups get things done together on Hylo,” shared PW IT Manager and Research Lead, Sage Gibbons. “It’s critical that we are able to reduce friction for our community in their daily working, especially since they are forming and developing groups directly on Hylo. Our group stewards are critical co-creators–and they needed smoother information management and access. Although we have big dreams for our partnership with Hylo, these kinds of nut and bolts quality of life improvements are essential first steps to building trust and commitment in our community.“
My Home
Your new home on Hylo for all the content that relates to you, personally, so you can find the most critical interactions fast. Access My Home in the Nav Drawer, and you’ll find four new views:
- My Posts to see all posts you have created
- Interactions to see all posts you have commented on or reacted to
- Mentions to see all posts where your name has come up
- Announcements to see all announcements made across all groups you are a member of
Stream Aggregation — Child Posts
One unique aspect of Hylo is that the group Stream displays posts both from the group you are looking at, AND from direct child groups that you are also a member of. This means the Stream you see is unique to you, aggregating content that is specifically relevant to your experience.
However, it was important to make this aggregation more clear to Hylo members and provide the opportunity to toggle on or off this feature. Now, an icon appears in the top right of the Stream that allows you to show/hide content from child groups. If posts from child groups do appear in your stream, they now have a visual indicator that marks them as such.
Notification Links
Lastly, we adjusted notifications to make sure they are as helpful as possible. If you are mentioned in a comment, the email link or push notification you receive will direct you precisely to the location of the mention, and show your name with an eye-catching yellow highlight. We also completed a design overhaul on the personal Notifications settings page, making it easier to view and quickly adjust your settings for each group.
Our shared vision for ProSocial technology
Our two organizations share these inquiries in common:
What is the relationship between cultural evolution and the evolution of technology?
How might a technology tool (such as Hylo) support and guide cultural evolution, and how would we measure that?
How might we observe and guide collective sensemaking?
How might we encourage and observe participatory action in collaborative groups?
As we hold these inquiries and envision the possibilities for co-creating a truly prosocial community platform, these are some of the ideas we’ve found coherence on:
Sensing: Hylo as an organ for embodied sensemaking
Hylo is calibrated to grow trust and collaboration. By incorporating key pieces of ProSocial like enhancing self-awareness and the Core Design Principles (CDPs), we can further support the expression of emotion on Hylo, creating a platform that embodies connection and nurtures our shared humanity. This looks like:
- Creating tools for groups to implement the CDPs well, starting with establishing a shared purpose and robust agreements for behavior in the group
- Collective Moderation tools that are fair, distributed, and create a culture of conflict transformation
- Survey Tool / Pulse Checks to gather and analyze sentiment. For example, a “ProSocial Widget” could ask group members to give examples of how they are embodying the CDPs in their group and rate how well the group is living up to them.
- Sentiment Analysis: Keywords based on a range of positive, neutral, and negative emotions could be aggregated for groups and displayed as colors to indicate the overall feeling of the group in snapshots and over time.
- Trust Graph: A reputation layer that allows group members to share who they trust in the group to fulfill specific roles or hold certain skill sets, so that assigning responsibilities can be based on aggregated group sentiments about who should fill leadership roles.
Responding: Hylo as the place to coordinate action
Responding and Sensing go hand in hand. With the collective wisdom and shared field setting that arise from the “Sensing” features, groups are well positioned to respond with participatory action to achieve their goals. This looks like:
- The Stewardship Toolkit: tools for distributed decision-making, participatory budgeting, and place-based organizing
- Project directory and upgraded Projects functionality to help surface opportunities for members to give their gifts in service to their communities.
- Training a cohort of ProSocial Community Stewards who can support communities on Hylo in becoming more productive, equitable, and collaborative through our Community Stewardship Support Program
Evaluating: Hylo as infrastructure for cultural evolution
Both ProSocial and Hylo see community groups as the space where cultural evolution happens. This means there is a huge opportunity for authentic partnership between researchers and “improvement communities” who want to self-evaluate their own cultural change in action.
“Awareness of how we behave together is the critical asset to evolving culture with intention.” Sage Gibbons, PW IT Manager and Research Lead
Hylo can play an important role in this evolution by providing user-friendly infrastructure for both the group collaboration and its observation. This looks like:
- Community Analytics Dashboards: We envision a customizable dashboard that visualizes live metrics for collaboration in each group, highlighting both interactions on Hylo and significant group accomplishments on the ground. These analytics will provide quantitative insights on cooperation over time. Groups would have the sovereignty to choose whether to make metrics public to external audiences or private (within the group only), and to choose whether to share data with researchers under a clear research agreement.
- Measuring Self-Awareness and CDPs Over Time: The survey tool from “Sensing” can be used to send periodic prompts to members asking them to rate how and how well their group embodies the CDPs. These can then be leveraged by community members to calibrate their group behaviors, address issues as they arise, and celebrate what is working well.
- Trust Graph: Changes in reputation over time, paired with the community analytics, will give us ample information to study the relationship of trust and cooperation in successful participatory action.
Let’s work together
Together with ProSocial World, we are gathering the funding to implement these features, so if any organizations are interested in partnering on these, please reach out!
We look forward to our next phase of collaboration with ProSocial World where we build out these tools and begin to put them into practice for the purpose-driven groups using Hylo. Our future holds a lot of learning, experimentation, iteration, and evolution.
