If you come to the site because you are interested in a post on the map that is coming up in the future, and you plan on being there, what button do you press to confirm interest?
0 voters
Also, this is kinda just a test of a concept but kinda still a legitimate question. Please vote and then comment any thoughts on how we can reword this for better understanding and feedback!
Iām not able to edit this poll. I made some changes. Iām not totally sure this is the right question though, as we donāt want anyone to come to the map and click āgoingā then forget about it.
We want to choose a word which suggests that they want to be involved in supporting and growing the activity. That includes if they donāt actually plan to be there, but just want to help support it (although I anticipate the latter being a very low percentage).
Hereās my suggested changes:
If you come to the site because you are interested in an joining or supporting an activity nearby, which is coming up in the future, what button do you press to confirm you want to join in creating it?
0 voters
Also, this is kinda just a test of a concept but kinda still a legitimate question. Please vote and then comment any thoughts on how we can reword this for better understanding and feedback!
The poll looks great btw 
Alright this is confusing.
Letās say I want to plan a tea tasting in august at my local art museum to raise money for a program that teaches people with ptsd how to paint. I want people to attend. Here are ways that other humans can interact with my vision.
āJoin in creating itā is too ambiguous here. It could be 1. or 2. And if you want to argue even 3. thatās fine but Iām going to argue itās not worth arguing about because there just needs to be clearer wording regardless.
That would all be in Gather. Build is for global projects on a local level, otherwise itāll be extremely bloated. In Gather youād be able to create your activity, and add tasks in cards for others to help you build it. The idea of build is to focus the entire community onto just a few projects, rather than a wide ranging spread of thousands of projects. this ensures sayā¦ 30 great projects get built each year, rather than 10,000 get started, but users pretty much have to coordinate it all themselves to make sure it is delivered.
Your project also wouldnāt be a fund-raising project as we decide early on to not allow fund-raising because our community was filling up with people begging for money for causes. weāre aiming to be an alternative to the charity model, so in our model users would create a therapeutic art meeting for those with ptsd, and be rewarded directly in our token - which they can exchange for cash at an exchange.
This is an exercise: can you try to post that same thought again, but this time pretend we have banned the words ābuildā āgatherā āprojectā āactivityā and ātokenā.
I just showed it to a friend who has little context on this platform but immediately she felt like it was full of jargon. Which is interesting because itās like weāve created our own jargon.
Can you see how it might be problematic that my off the cuff, but very feasible idea of how to promote positive community engagement in my city, somehow doesnāt belong on this platform? Youāre talking about users who are hosting this event being rewarded a token of questionable and unstable value as the only way to go to an art store and buy supplies for a group of people that they want to support. Things cost money. The whole point of the event would be to supply this group with tools to live a better life, so if me and my collaborators are the ones that are awarded these tokens, what do we want those for? Our goal was to supply this group of people, not ourselves. Weāre supposed to find an actual fund raising organization to donate said tokens to, so they can buy the supplies? This is hypothetical but the fact that I so easily misunderstood that critical component should indicate an issue.
it indicates an issue because itās not something that regularly exists. we set out to change that, because the charity model is inherently inefficient. For users we just say this platform is not for fundraising, they can explore why further in our documentation and whitepaper.
if it was allowed our forum would be full of users begging each other for money, for good causesā¦ but good causes which they shouldnāt need to beg money to solve because they are benefiting their local community and economic systems were invented by humanity to reward anyone who benefits their local community.
from a user case, our forum will be filled with people begging. from a strategic case, weād be perpetuating the system which is creating the need for people to beg for money for doing things that a healthy economy should reward them fairly for.
for example- how many charities do you know who you think are ever likely to solve the issue they are focused on? they canāt because they are a band-aid put over the problems caused by the system which creates the issue. they arenāt a solution. weāre suggesting the solution is people simply coming together and solving things themselves. its far more efficient. the token is an effort to create a new economic system which incentivises that, but it doesnāt have to succeed for the mission and idea to carry on.
i was invited to a round-table meeting with the CEOās of all the major homelessness charities, hosted by a wealthy backer wanting to lobby the govāt for change. every single one of them only had one ideaā¦ the whole meeting. āgive us more moneyā. that wonāt fix the issue, only alleviate the symptom temporarily.
one asked for hundreds of thousands of pound to create a monthly free clothes market. i said weād do it for free - and we did. all the stuff they āneededā could be solved far simpler by local people just coming together and doing it themselves.
Iām trying to work on a card-sort for our content and I just noticed this which confuses me
Also, thatās cool about intentionally being a completely different approach to problem-solving, I did make a note of it for myself because I think we need to be better about communicating that specific sentiment from the outset or constantly reinforcing that as a crucial part of the mission because I feel like itās important to get across since (maybe this is just my cultural bubble but otherās might have similar bubbles) most people think about the cost of exacting large change in the world, to the point where we might not even be used to questioning how might we solve X without a bazingalillion dollars
Also Iām coining that term itās mine now
bazingalillion is a made-up word for the cost of a made-up magnitude of global change
It does stand out against our philosophy as itās the only time weāve done, or allowed donation based activities in the community Costs were rising and I couldnāt support it myself anymore at the time, and donating half to other local groups made it more justifiable.
It is difficult to keep the differentiation. The last thing I want is our forum filled with people begging for money to do sky dives for charity, etc - which is exactly what happened in our FB group before we brought in that rule. Itās how people normally raise money for causes and it feels like perpetuating the system we set up to provide an alternative to. Begging based solutions to societal issues and charities operating with constant financial pressures taking up most of their resources and energy.
My thoughts are that it would be good to allow that and then use the funds to create a pool of funds members can vote on how to use best to achieve our mission, and so long as that stays an undercurrent, rather than a focus, thatās advancing our mission without damaging the ideology.
I agree that defining a clear barrier between the two is very difficult though. Why isnāt a charity bake sale allowed, when a local auction selling cakes is.
If we open the door fully then our site will be flooded with it and lose its direction though. As this is what happened back at the beginning. Any thoughts on how to define a line?
I think it would make sense to first communicate the goal that youāve outlined here, and have that be the ideal state.
The culture can be structured to facilitate the optimal method for taking action, but still, allow for others who believe that is what they must do to be able to fundraise if they choose to after understanding your philosophy.
I think this would make it less of a ādo what I sayā to āIād rather you do this, but ultimately it is your choiceā
And just make community rules that prevent spamming threads with requests for donations, or have a very contained space where that is allowed.
just make community rules that prevent spamming threads with requests for donations,
I like this.
What about placing the line at: fund raising is only allowed if the funds go into that Central pot, which users can vote on how best to use to achieve our mission - after the essential costs to keep the community running are taken out (right now just servers)
I would recommend staying away from the central pot for now, tbh.
If someone is fundraising for a local initiative (this is an actual example, my friend maria is just setup a gofundme because she really wants to make bags filled with toothbrushes and toothpaste/ snacks to give out to homeless people that she sees and she doesnāt have enough money to buy those things), they will not want that money for their project to go into a community pot, they intend for it to go in their account so they can purchase whatever they said they would when they raised that money.
They will just take their āhomebaseā elsewhere, like facebook or reddit or whatever else lets them do what they want.
Weād want their homebase to be somewhere else for projects seeking donations like that. Go fund me already exists, and FB optimise towards that direction. Allowing that would water down what makes us different, and I donāt really want to compete.
We could allow that only for the central pot because itās still a unique offering. Raise money for the community pot where users will vote on how to use it.
That might be an ad campaign to give an extra boost to a project, or the community itself. Maybe one team is short and they want to hire experts to improve an area of the platform which is holding things back. Or maybe thereās an emergency somewhere and they want to donate and support them. No idea, itāll be up to everyone
I guess there would be some sort of āGet Involvedā link onto discourse where the organizers could post topics on what kind of help they need/people could post topics on what ideas they have to help?
Personally I still think it might be helpful to have some sort of attend/RSVP/remind button perhaps to set up a calendar reminder? I know I navigate a lot of events online via places like eventbright which Iād be interested in going to but which are quite far out when I donāt know yet if Iāll be available.
Yes, we need this. @syl was going to look at having users auto follow posts, so if a user creates a post on the map, they are autofollowing it, which is a minimal functional requirement. Right now if I create something I have no idea if a user has commented.
A similar feature can be used to autopost and follow in the discussion thread if a user clicks the going button.
We did have a calendar view on the old site, the current thinking is that the calendar view would live on the users profile page ( the home page for logged in users), and users would set the radius, or categories they want to exclude. Do you want to make a card for that build?
Just to clarify:
