Welcome to Social coding commons
What is Social coding commons?
Section titled “What is Social coding commons?”is an emerging movement of people who collaborate to build the future of social networking together. There is no membership and it is enough to “feel” a social coder, to be one. Social coders include anyone who helps progress the social web.
On the basis of working in commons, which enables strategic and sustainable collaboration at scale, our commons grows organically as a chaordic organization that is tailored to the social dynamics that exist in our grassroots environments. We foster the gradual emergence of an affiliation and collaboration network between participants that is able to dedicate to responsible adoption, custodianship and continuous evolution of innovative and open social web technologies.
The method of organization is called hedonic peer production, whereby - on the basis of self-interest and other hedonic drivers - collaborative arrangements are encouraged to form, in all the places where people are most intrinsically motivated to participate together. This is a form of purposeful social networking, which is also key characteristic of the type of networks to cocreate.
The innovative organization structure of Social coding commons - on the basis of evolutionary design with emergent forces - aims at creating synergetical feedback loops that trigger flywheel effects, which makes our movement ever more efficient and productive, as we self-service (dogfood) our own solutions.
What challenges do we face?
Section titled “What challenges do we face?”The biggest challenge in any grassroots commons is sustainability, or rather the total lack thereof. Take the Free and open source software (FOSS) movement, for instance, and this Harvard study calculating that while FOSS contributes 8.8 billion US dollars to the global economy, only 4.15 billion dollars flows back to its creators. And 93% of that amount is attributable to only 3,000 developers.
In grassroots developer ecosystems, such as the fediverse - based on the W3C ActivityPub social web protocol - the sustainability crisis either sees the fediverse stay niche and small, a good place for the happy few. Or face full corporate takeover and enshittification like everywhere else on the world wide web, once the market the fediverse represents manages to raise enough unwanted corporate commercial attraction. Today fediverse is on the knife’s edge of such takeover, and there is no cavalry to stop it once it happens.
Social coding commons introduces a holistic sustainability model and the concept of working in commons as a means to improve upon “working in public”. Working in commons solves 3 major challenges:
- Tyranny of small decisions. Uncoordinated action makes it impossible to collaborate at scale.
- Herding of cats. Attempts to govern fiercely independent autonomous people doomed to fail.
- Tragedy of the commons. Unsustainable imbalance between value extraction and delivery.
Social experience design or SX was originally introduced by Toshihiko Yamakami in a 2012 IEEE paper. Social coding commons revives Social experience design as a universal solution development method that is applicable at any scale, going from , all the way up to solving wicked problems and affecting societal change.
Social experience design targets the social web and considers social networking to include any direct and indirect human interaction between people.
This is an important perspective shift, and entails that most online applications offered today, are in fact social networking applications. They just aren’t well integrated in the stovepiped Web 2.0 era of vendor lock-in, that characterizes the current Corporate Web.
Based on this definition Social coding commons envisions a peopleverse, where our online and offline worlds are seamlessly intertwined. A social web where harmonious and humane technologies are able to support all the activities that take place in a healthy commons, and facilitate a value-driven intention economy that is accessible to anyone. Social experience design adds the missing layers of the ‘social stack’, so to speak, and helps bridge the gap between our current technosphere - that does not serve us well - and the sociosphere where real people live their daily lives.
We elevate FOSS to become
Section titled “We elevate FOSS to become SOSS”Social experience design comes with a paradigm shift in how we consider software development. Where typically FOSS projects are organized around the codebase and the production of the software, SX pays full attention to the entire end-to-end - the FSDL - and the extent to which solutions satisfy stakeholder needs. This includes the needs of the developer themself, to - among others - earn a decent living from their work.
Under SX the focus is on delivery of sustainable open social solutions (SOSS), which may include many composed, choreographed, and orchestrated services on the social web, each delivered by their own software systems. The social web we envision is very much formed from the collective works of many people, who collectively maintain the grassroots open standards and technology foundations that form the robust basis of a that can support these solutions.
Through proactive participation in the emerging affiliation and cocreation network of Social coding commons, and by practicing Social experience design - simply by paying more attention to the relevant aspects of the FSDL - any free software project is able to significantly up their sustainability levels. SX offers a for any software project to increase the chances of matching the expectations of its stakeholders, and reap maximum benefit from the work of other social coders along the way.