The First Informal, Incomplete, Social.coop census.

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