The First Informal, Incomplete, Social.coop census.
Katanova
Public
Seen by 238
Context
A couple weeks ago, I posted asking members if they'd be interested in a project to connect together members of social.coop for meatspace gatherings. The response was very positive, so I undertook the first social.coop census, in order to learn where the members of social.coop are located, and then reached out to each social.coop member which I had recorded, and asked permission from them to share their name and general location with other people who are nearby to them geographically.
I did this work completely manually, from gathering location info from members' bios, and surveying members. I think that the most important aspect of any work worth doing is that it's people doing it. I think that a large part of what is continually making the internet and consequently the world worse, is that the work of connecting people together is being done with computers by companies interested primarily in extracting money, and so have very little personal stake in actually fostering good or healthy interpersonal connections.
Members who responded will be counted as members of a region, if those members have consented to participate.
A week ago, I started the process by looking through the home timeline, and recording the handles of social.coop members who posted to the local timeline, going back several days. This means that some members who were not active in that time were not counted and thus not surveyed. For each member I recorded the name of, I checked their bio for a location, and then checked their recent posts to get a rough estimate of the region where they live. Unless someone posted things like "here in Portland" or "A classic London day" or something like that, I would just record my best guess as to their region, which would help me in the next steps. If you were not contacted and would like to participate, message me on social.coop @katanova and you will be added.
In total, I recorded and noted down the names and rough geographic areas of 109 members of social.coop.
I then sent out the following message to every member of social.coop whose name I had recorded:
Hi, I'm a member of the Community Working Group, and I'd like to know if you're interested in being put in contact with other members of social.coop in your region, or who may be traveling. If you share any information, it will not be openly published, only shared with other members of social.coop who also agree to this.
In accordance with this, I will share this data with no names attached, with the next stage of the project after this being to reach out to all members who expressed interest in participating, and share the group member lists for members in their particular area.
Data
By the time of posting, 79 members have responded to my initial inquiry. 71 members agreed to participate. 6 members declined to participate. 1 member responded but did not agree or disagree to participate, and 1 member responded, however their conditions for participating were outside the scope of my role as a member of the community working group, and so they will not be included in the detailed data or included in the outreach project.
13 social.coop members (so far) have reached out after this was initially posted to have their names added to the roster and data.
Of the members who consented to participate:
13 are in the Pacific Northwest or Inland Northwest, comprising Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia. Most of these are around portland.
11 are in California, Mostly around San Francisco
16 are in the US Northeast/New England, from New Jersey to Maine, Mostly in Massachusetts
4 are in the US Southwest, comprising Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico
6 are in the US Midwest, including but not limited to Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebrasks, and Wisconsin
3 are in the DC metro area, which includes Maryland
4 are in the US South, comprising the states from Texas to the Carolinas
12 are in the British Isles, mostly around London
10 are spread out in Continental Europe
The remaining 5 are spread over the rest of the world
1 in Australia
1 in Brazil
1 in India
1 in Argentina
and finally, 1 who's usually in Japan.
This is by no means a complete census. Only people who consented to participate are counted in the regional breakdown.
Anyone who recognizes their own data point and doesn't want to be counted can contact me, and I'll redact their data point.
Anyone who wasn't counted and would like to participate can reach out to me and I will amend the data and roster to include them. Again, this survey was conducted very informally, so any gaps in the survey are entirely the result of my outreach and counting methods, and not an intentional exclusion.
This data was collected and organized intermittently between several days, totaling around 12 hours of work (although I didn't keep a precise accounting of time because I was having fun)
After sharing group lists between members in an area, I intend to reach out to the more geographically isolated members of social.coop (as in members who aren't very close to any other members of social.coop) and nomadic members, and invite them to a social group specifically for nomads and dispersed members, which I intend to host on an IRC server that is bridged to Matrix and XMPP.
Amended data:
+2 Midwest, +1 British Isles
+1 British Isles, +1 US Northeast
+1 Argentina
+1 California
+2 Europe, +1 DC Metro
+1 Europe
+1 Midwest
+1 PNW (miscounted original respondent)
+1 US Northeast
Katanova Fri 15 Mar 2024 8:11PM
@Eduardo Mercovich That is in fact a part of my plan for how to manage this data, and the community interconnection project long-term.
My intention is to find members of regions who want to undertake the responsibility of local/regional community organizing, and for them to manage the data and community of their region in particular.
The end goal is then to distribute and localize the data, so that the local/regional communities are coordinated at the lowest level possible, thus reversing the trend of modern western society, to manage local resources and connections at higher-than-necessary levels, which worsens organizational overhead, and centralizes authority.
To summarize: I don't want to be the one organizing all of this data and connecting everyone on social.coop together forever, I'm just the one starting the process so that I can hand off the bits and pieces to other members
I don't like the idea of making a complete public index easily searchable from one place. Data privacy is important to me, and the precise location data of the members of social.coop is data that I think would be very valuable to a hostile person or organization, or could be used to manipulate the members of social.coop
Rest assured that I have a plan to distribute and pass on the stewardship of this data and project, and I'm well aware that holding sole responsibility for this data and project is not sustainable long-term.
Eduardo Mercovich Mon 18 Mar 2024 10:20PM
Dear @Katanova
Why anyone has to manage anything of this? Let's each one post it's place with the accuracy it understands as logical, and then let's auto-organize. :)
Regarding privacy, I totally agree. I was thinking about a map that it is only accessible to people that logs in with our social coop account.
Sadly, I'm not knowledgeable about how to do this exactly. Maybe in a specific namespace in the wiki (which requires an account) that it is only visible to coop members?
Best... :)
Katanova Tue 19 Mar 2024 12:46AM
@Eduardo Mercovich That's a good question.
How could that be accomplished?
I feel like there's certainly a space for enabling people to connect to each other through something like an automated map.
I'm striving to center people-to-people interaction in the work that I'm doing. I understand that involving people introduces risk, that people in positions of influence can use their position to influence and exploit other people.
I feel like, in the process of shaping society to prevent people from exploiting other people, we have also shaped society in a way that prevents people from helping other people. (speaking specifically as someone living in the US, and suffering the very direct and severe consequences of interpersonal alienation caused by technology acting as a placeholder for interpersonal collaboration)
Trust is integral to this, and I think the place to start with trust isn't in making more tech tools to quantify and categorize trust, but rather to build systems that help people trust each other.
Eduardo Mercovich Tue 19 Mar 2024 3:46PM
@Katanova Completely agreed. While it looks that in my culture those tech based alienation processes have not progressed so much, I feel you.
I think that if we make it voluntary, as approximately as each person desires, accessible for social coop members only, and we use sovereign tech (like OpenStreet Map instead of Google or other map providers), we could see where we are and based on that, look for geo based groups without dangers for anyone.
That was my only idea, so nor you nor anyone has to pass through other people's info and put it in a map (because that implies that if someone posted their city, wants to be mapped, and it could be that in certain cases it may not be true).
There is no critic to your endeavor, I find it valuable (just knowing where we are is interesting and may open possibilities) and simply want to make it better and easier for everyone.
And I'm grateful for what you already did. :D
Warm regards...
Randy Hall Fri 15 Mar 2024 8:26PM
I'm sorry to have missed the census. I know I joined social.coop based on the direct (meatspace) recommendation of another member of social.coop, so I'm another one in the wider SF Bay area. Not that I'm trying to beat out the PNW headcount, but maybe just a little bit.
Katanova Fri 15 Mar 2024 8:29PM
@Randy Hall Is @randy your social.coop handle?
edit: checked and confirmed. I have you added to the roster and the data set
Dynamic Fri 15 Mar 2024 10:18PM
Wow, that sounds like a huge amount of work. Thank you for taking that on.
Did you get my information? I remember expressing interest, but I don't remember any follow-up. Maybe you used my profile info?
I also wonder if it might be more inclusive if we had a questionnaire for members to fill out that could be used to generate a community spreadsheet. I've done this kind of thing before using Quick Survey on the Sandstorm instance on my household's homeserver...
Katanova Sat 16 Mar 2024 8:59PM
@Dynamic Yeah, I have you down as part of the project.
(tone context: explaining my perspective and reason for why I prefer doing things the hard way, even when there's an easier way)
My plan is to hand off the project to members of the community who can serve as local organizers, and let them handle collecting and coordinating the data and communities. I think for some communities, a survey form to fill out would be fine, and for others, having the process be more individually tailored would be more suitable.
Something that I've learned from my experience as part of different communities, is that it's important to serve the social needs of the community as a primary focus, and automation makes sense only when accomplishing the thing that is being automated is the primary focus of the work.
This is the work of connecting community members together, and data collection is secondary. I've actually enjoyed doing all of this manually because it's let me engage directly with the members of social.coop, and that's more important to me than doing it fast or easy.
I want to help ensure that we don't fall back into the trap of automating social connections. What we have, as part of the fediverse, and members of this community, is a social experience that is personal, and not automated, and automating the work of building those social connections somewhat defeats the purpose of us being here.
It's something I've thought a lot about, in trying to understand why we, in the west and the US in particular, are trending towards being more isolated, lonely, and disconnected, and I feel like a big part of it is that as the social processes of building and maintaining connections to other people have become automated, our lives are increasingly reduced to data points, and that's miserable.
If this project was just me collecting the demographic data and stopping there, it would probably suck in the same way that the US census sucks for people. I think making it people-focused and doing it in a very individual manner makes it feel like something that members are participating in, rather than being subjected to.
Giacomo Sat 16 Mar 2024 12:27AM
Italy here! I don't know if I had already responded
Eduardo Mercovich · Fri 15 Mar 2024 8:02PM
Dear @Katanova , I didn't received your mail, but I'm in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Maybe if we create a may where each person (that wants) adds it's locate we could unburden you and distribute the load? I would gladly put my pin on a social coop map. :)
Warm regards...