Meeting point

This is an experiment to coordinate efforts in the collective task of finding alternatives to our current relationship with digital information.

The focus of the experiment is to connect people and initiatives that work, think or simply have something to add to the conversation, understanding that each individual or collective behind an initiative has their own point of view and that the more perspectives we can gather, the richer the final result will be.

Table of contents

• The meta problem
• The need
  • Is it possible to meet this need in GitHub?
• The proposal
  • How does it respond to needs?
  • How can I participate?
  • How can I navigate the conversations?
• Links

The meta problem

How do we collect and organize the information about how we collect and organize information when we do not have the tools we need to collect and organize information?

The question can be posed both from an individual and a collective perspective, and the result can naturally prioritize one over the other.

The need

In this quest, how can we find a balance between individual and collective needs, using existing tools, respecting one's own space while adding value to the group, sharing a common space?

Individual need

• Giving people control and freedom in creating their own list, collection or directory, in how they view it and organize it according to their needs, can facilitate the development of their own perspective.

Collective need

• Having access to a meeting space where we can discuss and work together can allow us not only to move forward faster, but in a more pluralistic way, useful and of value to more people.

How can we keep individual and collective workspaces connected?

Is it possible to meet this need in GitHub?

• You can collaborate on the other's perspective (fork + pull request), but the resulting perspective ends up being under the control of the other.
• Starting from an existing perspective (clone), you can continue to develop it independently, keeping reference to the initial project, but this does not imply that
  • the initial project links to your perspective.
  • other independent perspectives derived from the same project link to your perspective.

"GitHub brings teams together to work through problems, move ideas forward, and learn from each other along the way" ^{[from GitHub homepage]}, but its design does not directly address the described needs. This doesn't necessarily mean we can't use GitHub for our purpose, but we'll have to explore other ways of using its features to find it out for ourselves, as in this case.

The proposal

Assign an issue per person or initiative (project, product, service, app, foundation...), so that we can create conversations around the particular perspective behind it.

How does it respond to needs?

Individual need

• You can create your own directory, list, or any structure you want in your preferred repository or even outside of GitHub, and link it to the conversation (or to a specific comment) taking place in the meeting point.

Collective need

• Not only do we have a shared space where anyone with a GitHub account can participate in the conversation, we are creating in a collective way, easily and with few restrictions, a directory where we can discover and connect with other people and initiatives that are part of the same ecosystem.
• In the conversation, simply add the link to your personal space for others to find it.

How can I participate?

Create an issue

1. Check if there is already an issue associated with the person or initiative to avoid duplication
2. Create the issue taking into account the following:
   • Title: Name of the person or initiative + super brief description to provide context. One line max, be succint to keep a clean issues list.
   • Content: Consider how others can benefit from the introduction you are making. Ask yourself questions like, "what do you find relevant or significat about this person/initiative?" or "how it is contributing to the global conversation?".

Comment on issues

• If you don't see your perspective represented in an issue, share it. Every perspective adds up.
• If you are already part of the conversation and have not been created an issue with your name yet, feel free to create it and introduce yourself. We are here to connect with others. Tell us what brings you here, not your CV.

How can I navigate the conversations?

I can imagine two scenarios, useful for me, but the particular case for each one may be different. Search filters are powerful but not perfect. They have not been designed with the proposed use case in mind.

I want to see what's new

Those issues that I haven't created or participated in yet.

• Use this search filter is:issue -involves:@me or click this link.

I want to see an issue that I have already seen before, excluding those that do not interest me

To mark those I have seen, I leave a comment. To mark those I have seen and are interested in, I mention myself (even being the author), this way I can apply filters in the search later.

• Use this search filter is:issue involves:@me mentions:@me or click this link.

You can also play with the notification settings for each issue.

Links

What do you think about the proposal? Do you think it addresses your needs and the needs of the collective? Would you like to add or change something? We can talk about it in this issue.

Maybe it's practical to have all the personal workspaces collected in one issue.

For those worried about the collected data, issues can be exported in different ways ^[example].

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Photo by @enchongraboy.

Meeting point is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 License.