The mission is to remove our community’s dependance on corporate social media.
We will do so by approaching the problem not as a technology, design or individual issue, but as a public health issue.
The key steps are:
- Measure the issue
- Awareness of the issue
- Understanding the need
- Identify initial solutions
- Create initial solutions
- Populate initial solutions
- Promote initial solutions
- Refine and iterate
Awareness of the issue: Highlighting the issues with corporate social media that are effecting our community. Right now many people have a vague unease about social media and will articulate it, but the extent and scope is often not fully grasped. Additionally, any idea that there are possible solutions, or that solutions could be effective, is far from people’s thoughts. Most of my blog posts are focused on this issue, even if I acknowledge reading dozens of blog posts isn’t going to be the best way to communicate this to most people.
Understand the needs: Lean on lean product development techniques and start with understanding the needs. Of the snapshot of islanders in our community, why are they using corporate social media within our community? What value are they getting? What would they need from a community solution? It’s also worth noting that community social media can provide solutions that corporate social media isn’t, and that we need to look beyond just “what people’s current usage is” and look deeply into what value we can create for the community.
identify initial solutions: Once the community’s needs from social media are understood, the next step is taking a look at open source solutions already there. Here’s a list of Fediverse projects that are a good starting place. It’s important to note that we’re not trying to meet all needs, just ones that we can at the beginning.
Create initial solutions: Then once you feel like you have an initial set of solutions you can implement, do so in a way that meets the greatest needs for the least amount of work. This is an important practice in lean product development as it’s easy to spend a heckuva lot of time on solutions that you think will solve needs but will have various hurdles that make it challenging and won’t do the job. So it’s important to get things out there, test and learn!
Populate initial solutions: Once you know you have a solution to meet people’s needs, then the next step for community solutions to be successful is populate the networks. Social media is only as strong as the people on it. For community social networks to succeed they have to feel and be alive. It’s not enough to “build it and they will come.”
Promote initial solutions: Once you have confidence that your initial solutions are working, and utilizing all the owrk from above, there’s a critical mass of individuals, businesses, and organizations that can help promote it because they see the problem, have their own needs, we’ve created solutions that will work for them, and they’re part of the initial population. At this point it’s a community effort to promote it.
Refine and iterate: The last step is refine, iterate, improve, and add on. That may be an easier sign up, more services, etc. Maybe a new Fediverse technology pops up that is even better. Maybe we were successful about a community calendar but not about photo sharing, etc.
A quick walk through example for these steps:
We create a survey and get a critical mass of organizations and individuals to fill it out. We see that the vast majority of people are unhappy with social media, and many only use corporate social media for events and buy/sell/trade. We then turn that into a presentation, sharing that with representatives from key groups on the island like the chamber of commerce, school admin/teachers, doctors, small business, and a few non profits. In this presentation we share the strategy and ask for their commitment to help.
From there we create a product needs map that highlights the biggest area of needs from the survey. We find that events, announcements and buy sell trade are the biggest thing keeping people who only use it locally. We also find that for those who use it beyond the community, photo sharing is their biggest use. We also learn that the two things stopping people from moving on are managing yet-another-account and worry no one will be on it.
Diving into the current Fediverse/ActivityPub solutions, we identify open source projects that we can leverage to meet all the needs. One of our biggest hurdles is making sure we have just one authentication account for anything we implement, but we figure that out. We decide to focus on events, announcements, and buy sell trade first. Since OrcasHub already exists, we work with the creator to implement activity pub, and then create a simple events and announcements feed with an app, web site, and web widget tool.
We work with the main organizations that run / use events and create a calendar page. The public school team is already stretched thin, so we get permission to post everything ourselves. The chamber agrees to organize small businesses, and the major event facilities like the movie theater, farmers market, and all commit to posting content for a year. We
We also create a webpage view at a new site OrcasCalander.com.
We ask the above to start linking to and promoting this, including getting a kiosk view to put up at physical locations, print out the weekly events with QR codes and post them around town every week, etc.
Then we see what causes friction, and iterate from there. Once we feel that’s covered, we take a look at other areas, like photo sharing.
