Welcome! Please introduce yourself

Hi guys, I don't know how much time I'll find for discussion here, but this group's objectives are fully resonant with my main objectives. Here's my standard mini bio/ "About Me":

Greg Cassel has a diverse background in human services, philosophy and media arts. After becoming a political activist in 2014, he experienced startling dysfunctions and corruptions in nonprofit groups. He focused on the deep problems of traditional (industrial) organization, and evolved into a multi-agent systems theorist and engineer. Greg works with p2p innovators in Value Flows, Enspiral and elsewhere, and administers varied online groups. His work focuses on social technologies such as networking protocols, structured conversation, peer feedback systems, collaborative metadata, complementary currencies, and the distributed governance of media networks. Greg would love to return to a focus on collaborative, interactive multimedia arts.

My main work right now is in the creation of free open source specifications and protocols, such as Agreement-Based Organization and Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking.

Hi folks,
I ended up here by invitation, and I'm not yet quite sure what our objective is, but I'm glad to help! My own personal objective is to promote my idea, the Wikipedia for debates, which I've been holding on to for 5 years in the hopes someone else would do it. I've decided I can't wait any more.
I'm a software developer by trade, and not in any way an academic, so you may see that my language is a little more plain, less precise, and less technical than some of you.
I actually built my idea once 5 years ago before realizing that the problem is not just software. So this time, I'm starting with the ideas and building a community before jumping to the code.
I'll do what I can to help all of you, but I'm afraid I have to apologize in advance that I have a one track mind about this. I'm totally open to suggestions and improvements, but to me, the problem looks like a nail, and I'm trying to build a hammer.

Thanks for intro'ing yourself; I think I may have neglected to give you @craigambrose 's kick-off Medium article, which may shed some additional light on the intentions of this space.

Also—@gregorycassel has built some protocols for debate, or in his words, "Asynchronous Analytical Discussion". You two may be interested in each others' work :)

Ah, thanks for that! I see I've already even read and recommended your article :) I didn't realize the connection to this group.

Thanks for your personal intro @timothyryanhigh and for the connection you've suggested @coopchange. The communications tools and techniques I'm prototyping aren't focused on debates per se, but they can naturally include all types of intentional deliberation and decision process. For a brief overview of my main goals, please refer to this introductory essay for the previously-linked Peer-to-Peer Digital Networking. The most relevant aspect is Community Markup Language, but I haven't comprehensively summarized that yet in a reader-friendly form.

I'm not sure how a Wikipedia for debates would work, although I could guess at possibilities. Generally speaking, I think that the wiki model for collaborative authorship is extremely effective and efficient, but that it has limited potential for creating precise and stable group decision processes. One could well argue, of course, that debates rarely need to create precise and stable results. (Indeed, much of my time goes into inclusive discussion spaces which are not oriented to deliberation or decision.)

Indeed, the idea is not to arrive at a stasis, but a summary of what we know so far, as things evolve. As for how to maintain that constructively, I'm working on the first articles describing those ideas: https://medium.com/@bigokro/should-we-dump-the-electoral-college-anatomy-of-a-debate-b48b4aa5e3

Thanks for the link to your essay - I'll go read it now.

What’s your role or approach to participation in this group? What should people know about you to understand where you’re coming from?

Hi, I'm the executive director of Bloom Network (http://bloomnetwork.org), an international network of creative leaders who build community related to regenerative culture, through events and media. We initially formed as Evolver, back when it was a social networking website to connect people exploring things like alternative currency and governance, dreams and entheogenic experiences, spirituality, urban farming and other solutions related to healthier systems for people and planet. We split off from the parent company which pivoted, to do our own thing. There are about 80,000 people connected globally through our 7 years of relationship and coalition building. At this point in time we are just beginning to build out our website to have some social networking functionality. I've been tracking everything I can in that development space, and I'm convinced at some point we are going to need decentralized solutions that can work across multiple websites, rather than corralling people onto any one platform of brand.

Oh, Bloom is functionally an international cooperative, tho legally a u.s.-based nonprofit. We're setting up a membership model that will help make it user-owned and governed, but that's a whole whitepaper I'll write next year as we get that piece up and running. Grateful for this opportunity to get to know Loomio better!

My approach to participation in this group is to understand what is being developed as solutions to the filter bubble problems. I would suggest that facilitation is going to be a key piece of it. I.e. convening dialogues where people discuss across oppositional viewpoints to truly understand where they're each coming from ("dynamic facilitation" is one way to do this, which I learned about via Tom Atlee's book, Empowering Public Wisdom). Tom and other advisors worked with a couple of us at Bloom to develop a webcast and mobilization series where we bring people together to agree on solutions to big problems, from multiple opposing forces or industry interests. That's one way to address the bubbles, short of internet coding.

I've also been working on monkeywrenching how people use marketing analytics to target content at people. I've also been researching marketing and demographics and psychographics tech in general, to understand why attention and resources are being moved around where and for what/whom. One result of this has been positioning Bloom Network's "branding" to parse as not in any one radical subculture bubble, both so we can connect people across the fragmented left, but also so sensible practices that support regenerative culture (healthier for people and planet, triple bottom line, trauma healing, etc etc etc) can be accessible to people on the right, religious folks, etc.

I also studied empirical aesthetics, which is why different cultures make art and what it's about, which helps me look at visual and text signaling and what turns people on or off to engaging with it. And I've studied AI enough to understand how that development industry, which is largely being used for commercial purposes, is affecting access to and implementation of information resources. I'm involved in a few groups of folks from multiple organizations, movements and networks who are working on mapping our communities to better connect our resources and assets. Also have started tracking blockchain and identity / user permissions development projects, like "VRM" (vendor relations management, as opposed to customer relations management).

I'd like to convene a panel discussion on filter bubbles via Bloom Network's webcasts soon. I know one big data person who used to work for Wikipedia who seems to have a good grasp on the technological and social problems they create / reinforce. If you know other folks I should bring into that dialogue, let me know. Maybe spring 2017.

I think mobilizing people around real world local actions, vs marketing or hooking people into circuitous engagement with the online platform (how facebook does, i know less about twitter).... will help with the filter bubbles. Facilitation tech. Also, engineer media sites, wikis, and search engines to be focused on collaborative action. Doing stuff together builds trust, and especially if you're physically doing it together, you literally synch up heartbeats and have a felt experience of constructive union and achievement. City Repair has examples of urban filter bubble popping - breaking down backyard fences and making neighborhood gathering places, neighborhood childcare, garden sharing etc. Basics. What are the things that people can do together or be inspired by that don't make their walls go up and reject the other. And engineering marketplaces (including information marketplaces) based around local self-sufficiency, not market growth.

Here's a fun visualization of the tunnel vision created by the current tech.
https://vimeo.com/34750078

Stoked to be here and listening and learning. <3

Good to see you here @magentaceiba - feel free to poke around and poke (tag) people if you want to stir up a conversation on any of the great points you bring up. This Loomio's not been super active in recent weeks, but there's a lot of great minds here already and I'm imagining the right topic at the right time—posted as a new thread—could jumpstart a dialogue.

+1 to City Repair as a quality example. Makes me ask, what's the equivalent of garden-sharing in the blogosphere?

First thought is Medium "channels", where you can easily create a blog stewarded by multiple people.

I use to be a web developer until this year. I still help with websites on and off but with small things.

Now, I am a community organizer and want to see a better web for all which includes the diversity of all people.

I'm part of Mikorizal. We develop software for groups that we think might help to grow a better economic system. I just ran into an article that I thought was relevant to this conversation, which I have been lurking on, so thought I better introduce myself before posting a link to the article.