I gave this talk at CCCamp, a gathering of 5000 hackers and nerds outside of Berlin. Camp was amazing, by the way, and you should go next time it comes around. It was professionally recorded, so I can share it with you in high definition with crisp reverberating sound.
It’s about a set of design principles we’ve developed over while designing tools for the Borderland to maximize participant activation and co-creation as we have scaled from a gathering of 700 to 3200 people in only four years. In short, it’s a method in with steps: increase collision rate between participants by creating venues for interaction and co-creation when they access shared resources, provide good infrastructure to reinforce the relationships that are gained from these collisions and finally map the paths to help the community understand itself better and provide entry points for new participants.
In this talk, I spin a narrative yarn around the Silk Road networks of the Central Asian highlands as an analogy for community networks. I borrow this narrative and some slides and pictures, from the amazing Long Now talk by professor Michael Frachetti that @nadia and I had the pleasure to see in San Francisco early last year. He graciously gave me permission to use a couple of his slides for my talk, and I highly recommend that you watch his seminar, which is absolutely fascinating.
Pinging @martin, @sander, and @Jan who asked me a lot of questions on this topic when we last met in Brussels. Credit also to @brooks for philosophy development and to @erikfrisk for much of the development of the Realities tool showcased at the end of the talk. Thanks also to @Forestblessing for picking up Dreams once upon a time (see the end of the video for Doocrate!), and to @robguthrie and @richdecibels for building Loomio.
An alternate version of this talk also includes a part on SSNA, but since this talk was supposed to be in the context of the Borderland I had to spend much more time explaining what that event is all about, which unfortunately meant that I had to cut something out. I will probably tie up the knot on day by writing a long-form blog post that includes the content of all versions of this talk, as well as more details on the data.
