Network of shared purpose

[erlend-sh]

The Network is effectively a global jobs board, but for mutual collaborations rather than work-for-hire.

Easiest way to prototype this might be with GitHub issues/discussion. I could list my collab projects there.

On my linkspage, I want a ‘Collab’ tab. Clicking it will reveal a list of the 1, 3, 10 (max) topics/projects I’m open to collaborate on.

Mine would look something like:

• Spicy Lobster
  • Fish Folk
  • Shotcaller
• CommunityOS
  • Linksapp
  • Commune
  • Teachersapp

It might need to be split in two:

1. Working on: ..
2. Open to work on: ..

Or (1) need help and (2) offering help.

My ‘offering help’ section is the topics-based one. It goes something like:

• Open game production (talk to me if you’re trying to make and sell an open source game)
• Open comms software production (ttmi you’re making open source communications software)
• Open source strategy (ttmi you’re trying to create a sustainable open source product)

Special interests:

• Open source
• Coops
• Indie gamedev
• Rust
• Godot
• Community

GitHub profiles support topics already, so I’ve added the above to my profile repo.

Related:

• Teams and Projects #20

[erlend-sh]

Vouching

GitHub’s social features are largely useless to me. I’ve yet to be interested in any of its feeds, and they have a weird overlap with LinkedIn that prevents them (GitHub) from doing more mainstream ‘social network app’ features.

I wanna have a simple list of the 500-1000 people (developers) I’ve interacted with over the years, and publicly vouch for them. Like the people in our community here. This is a subset of teams & projects, because I'm gonna vouch for people in the context of a project, and that vouch-signal implies a team, that may exist implicitly or explicitly.

I’ll happily vouch for anyone I ‘did a project with’. That’s the core of the vouch, and it goes public once it’s mutually agreed upon.

From @hnb-ku :

A very rough prototype of this would work based on the https://api.github.com/users/{username}/events endpoint.

You can try it with your username in a new browser tab.

The events are by definition things you interacted with and each event has stuff that can be used (after filtering and sorting) to return a list of users.

This covers the "find the users" part.

The other part is the relation between voucher/vouchee and that part can also be super simple at first. Something like a table for vouches whith a voucher and vouchee pointing to interal user ids in weird.

This allows for "here's a list of people I vouche for" and "here's a list of people that vouche" for me to be shown on user profiles without a lot of complicated stuff needed.

[erlend-sh]

Discord transcript:

The purpose of NoSP is to build up a record of collaborative connections. Who worked with who.

> Erlend is collaborating with Garrin: 1. December 2022 - ongoing.

Lots more meta-data can be added from there, but that’s the essential starting point. PersonX and PersonY did a thing together, collaboratively.

Maybe the best way to put it out is as a two-step process. Whoever puts out the statement-of-collab will need their listed collaborator to sign off on it before it goes public.

[erlend-sh]

Project dating app

Here’s a ‘manual crawl’ I did a while back, which could have been done more easily in our app:

Job to be done: Find a Tauri dev collaborator

First I search GitHub for ‘Tauri sycamore’ and ‘Tauri perseus’. 1-2 results each, and we’re already in contact with these devs. We’re looking for new connections, so gotta expand the search.

I then try https://github.com/search?q=tauri+yew
..because the setup requires the same general skillset and interest.

40+ results. Bingo!
After looking through around 10 repos, I have found someone I wanna reach out to:

https://github.com/thelinuxpoint

✅ Solid record of work.
✅ Student
✅ Contact info (doesn’t use the standard form for it though

This guy fell trough: https://github.com/siabard

✅ Solid record of work
⛔️ Full-time employed
✅ Contact info

This one too: https://github.com/usagrada

✅ Solid record of work
✅ Student
⛔️ Contact info

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AI Search

For complex queries, AI might actually be useful the form of something a bit like this: https://github.com/Dataherald/dataherald

[erlend-sh]

Some similar ideas to Weird's NoSP here, namely “interest-based social networking”.
https://twitter.com/kenneth0stanley/status/1747674920933585220

We’ve created a new kind of social network - a serendipity network - that’s directly inspired by insights from open-endedness and Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned.

On Maven, you follow interests instead of following people. The result is it’s no longer a popularity contest because you don’t need followers and we don’t count likes. The open-ended approach in effect provides an alternative to objective popularity-driven social media. And the resultant change in incentives means genuine, curiosity-driven conversations are more likely because getting attention stops being the primary concern.

If you’re familiar with ideas from open-endedness and quality diversity within AI and ML, Maven draws from these research areas to bring you a far broader diversity of views and serendipitous opportunities for engagement.

Everyone on Maven has an equal chance of engagement on day one because of the fact that you don’t need to gain followers. Maven effectively exposes everyone to posts that match their interests. So you’ll see more deep discussion and less click-bait and brand-building, because those things don’t accomplish anything on Maven.

It’s basically a large-scale experiment on open-endedness with humans in the loop, applied in the social domain.

I don’t think it’ll work the way they’re doing it though, because people are tired of closed networks. We’re just not doing that again (right now). They should be building it as an extension on top of either apub or atproto.

This also feels dubious to me:

Everyone on Maven has an equal chance of engagement on day one

So in other words, we're still gonna be playing the engagement game? Not interested.

I'm not looking for a chance to 'go big'. I just wanna connect with the people who are building similar things in a similar way as me.
I do vibe with "follow similar interests". But the more narrowly pointed pursuit of Weird is "discover similar projects".

I don't think we ever should go back to feeds completely unassisted by algorithms. We just need algorithms that tell us exactly how they work: https://blog.erlend.sh/let-me-talk-to-my-algorithms

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update: https://social.wake.st/@liaizon/112603447990005434
https://fossacademic.tech/2024/06/12/Maven.html