Let's reimagine the Social web
Contents
Section titled “Contents”Social coding commons
Section titled “Social coding commons”While offering home to active practitioners with concrete services that are developed and evolved collectively, Social coding commons dedicates to finding solutions to a number of wicked problems that ail grassroots movements, particularly in innovative technology areas. Most prominently these wicked problems relate to ..
- Sustainability Inability to steer social web technology innovation towards responsible adoption and introduction in society.
- Cooperation Inability to collaborate at scale and choreograph overlapping activities so they reinforce each other synergetically.
- Participation Inability to cocreate inclusive solutions that serve the needs of all their stakeholders, and of society as a whole.
Social coding commons follows a methodical approach to commons based development, called Social experience design that combines applied research and continuous self-servicing (dogfooding) of good practices and lessons-learned. The research areas are ..
- Personal social networking Personal vantage point and inter-personal relationships are model for how we want live our lives.
- Hedonic peer production Accept the role of self-interest to incentivise collaboration to occur on a basis of intrinsic motivation.
- Sustainable open social systems Cocreate harmonious social networking solutions that are self-sustainable as they to evolve.
Chaordic organization
Section titled “Chaordic organization”A movement in the truest form of the word, Social coding commons either progresses, when proactive participants contribute value by their collaboration, or pauses in anticipation of new participants to become active in a particular area that has their interest. Based on a new organizational formula of working in commons, which is also a research area, Social coding commons grows organically as a new type of chaordic organization. Among the objectives is the gradual emergence of an affiliation network that is able to dedicate to responsible evolution and custodianship of social web technologies.
“Ask not what you can do for the commons, but what the commons can do for you.”
— First principle of Hedonic peer production.
Social experience design
Section titled “Social experience design”Social experience design or SX was originally introduced by Toshihiko Yamakami in a 2012 IEEE paper, but did not gain broad mindshare as a separate field of IT. Social coding commons revives the concept with a twist that involves a complete rethinking and paradigm shift to how software solutions are created within a commons. Instead of a fragmented landscape of individual projects, where people work past each other while having many overlapping and shared interests, SX views the commons as a living and breathing organism that can be fostered from an ‘organic soup’ to become a beautiful creature able to sustain itself.
Social experience design targets the social web and considers social networking to include any direct and indirect human interaction between people. This definition includes both our online and offline worlds, and Social coding commons envisions a peopleverse where these are seamlessly intertwined. SX broadens the design and development space beyond the existing fields of Development experience (DX) and User experience (UX). Social experience design covers the end to end lifecycle and evolution of a solution, and takes all stakeholders and their needs into account. SX helps bridge the gap between technology and people. Connecting technosphere to sociosphere, SX brings the missing ‘social layers’ to the development stack.
Personal social networking
Section titled “Personal social networking”People nowadays take the internet for granted. A global copper and glassfiber network that provides a means to connect with other people remotely. We engage our “socials” and realize insuffiently how our online communications have fundamentally different social dynamics. Online we find it normal to “follow” someone to socially interact with them. While offline this would be considered highly creepy behavior. How many people are shouting details about their private life to complete strangers, standing on a soapbox in the public square of their hometown? Yet online we do that daily, and we do it even on global public squares that record our actions of the day forever. It is no wonder that social media platforms have many unintended side effects on us as human beings and on society itself as they are used at ever larger scales.
In general we just introduce our technological innovations, dump tech into our world, with a mostly implicit and dogmatic “technology means progress” assumption. Under hypercapitalism the only consideration ever made is profitability. Today artificial intelligence is about to disrupt us as never before. Inhuman AI agents increasingly become our intermediaries that shield us ever more from having direct human connection. We become lost individuals in online space. The eroding effects of AI tears the social fabric of society even further, and serves to dehumanise and disempower us. Technology to keep humanity under control, so that hypercapitalism can fester on.
Social networking involves all direct and indirect human interaction between people. Personal social networking is a design perspective that focuses on the individual experiences of all participants in the elaboration of a solution design.
SX takes “Personal social networking” to be the starting point of solution design that can lead us towards a better future. A means to always put people first on the basis of Freedom and Humanity, which are intrinsic values to the design process. SX considers individual needs and how they relate to others, as people mingle together trying to balance work, hobby and life events, and do the things that give meaning to life. Personal social networking takes examples from the real world as the basis for solution design, and envisions a peopleverse where humane and harmonious technology is fully supportive of people’s needs, and beneficial to society at large. Social coding commons dedicates to collecting design patterns and recipes to develop solutions on this basis.
Pyramid of perspective
Section titled “Pyramid of perspective”
In order to reimagine social the question rises what that really means. Social experience design is based on the pyramid of perspective. In this model solution design begins at the level of individual people living their daily lives. From the moment a person wakes up they process social activities as they move through various social contexts. Each person thus ‘lives’ their own unique social experience. SX solutions take the personal needs of all participants into account, considering them stakeholders. This also includes the creators of the solution from the very start of the solution design. SX considers a solution to exist as soon as it can be imagined. The next step is to write it down on a sticky note with pen and paper, and then evolve it further until it is fully realized.
Where people come together, their interests collide, and individual social experiences weave together. In the second perspective of SX these inter-personal social relationships are more closely considered. The connections between people form intricate social graphs. The third perspective of SX considers the desired social impact of the solution, and the design focuses on leaving a societal imprint that aims to achieve that impact. The top of the pyramid is where society itself takes shape in the form of complex and dynamic social constructs. These can have any scale, from the socio-cultural environment in your tennis club, to entire religions and (geo)political realities.
Circles of sustainability
Section titled “Circles of sustainability”
Sustainability at any one time, and at all times. SX is based on the notion of holistic sustainability, and made sustainability a core principle for commons participation. This includes all initiatives and people who are working in commons, as well as the commons as a whole. SX uses an adapted version of the Circles of sustainability model, which is better suited to consider technology innovations and the introduction of new technology into society.
Ever since the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, mankind has always implicitly or explicitly equated availability of new technology to mean progress for society. This near dogmatic notion has led us to an age where we all wear our devices on our skin and let them be controlled by all-powerful tech giants that are ruthlessly exploiting us. The adaptation of the model used by SX drops the “Politics” circle and introduces an all-pervasive Technology circle. The technology is a given. We live increasingly in a high-tech society, a technosphere. The quest of SX is to deliver and evolve holistically sustainable solutions in the domains of Economics, Culture, and Ecology respectively. To bridge the technology gap, and weave the sociosphere that people and planet need.
Politics and power dynamics are intricate emergent forces that depend on social context and permeate our social fabric.
“How can you just eliminate the Politics circle?”, one may ask. In FOSS circles there are many who feel that “All tech is political”, or even that everything is political. Interestingly the SX Circles of sustainability model aligns to this notion, yet avoids using the (over)loaded and vague term. Politics, or rather power dynamics, are an emergent force. A very nuanced and intricate force that permeates the social fabric of society and has different names that depend on social context, participants and the kind of human activities they are involved in. “Politics” itself can be said to constitute a social construct when adopting the societal perspective of SX, albeit not a very useful one.
By eliminating the Politics circle SX encourages a focus shift that avoids the inevitable negative impact on any discussion once the word “politics” is dropped, and everyone has their own perception of what that entails. The term is too vague, too overloaded, and even weaponised. It’s use has the effect that heels go in the sand, ideologies are brushed up, and arguments prepared for the fight with ‘political opponents’ — instead of coworkers — in fierce, often heated debate. For furtile cocreation a safe and inclusive environment is a requirement. We need to be able to rise above politics to be able to analyse its power dynamics properly, and need places where people are stimulated to be creative and open-minded in the discussion of fresh ideas. There is a time and place for constructive political discussion and debate, but politics should not be the default modus operandus that sets tone and culture of commons participation. Otherwise, under Conway’s Law, we’ll be unable to design better societal systems.
Hedonic peer production
Section titled “Hedonic peer production”In our commons assumptions are often made that “people will come” to help build the solution, and that it is enough to “show, don’t tell” a codebase for them to contribute to. But why would they? Why do people involve themselves with the commons? Why are they active in communities, or contribute code to free software projects? Part of SX design philosophy is that self-interest is only natural and plays a vital role in commons participation. Based on this assumption, and inspired by existing technology adoption models, Social coding commons develops a new concept of hedonic peer production and a SX formula called “Hedonic harmony” as a concrete implementation to support its own affiliation network. The mechanism takes inspiration from the field of positive psychology and “Well-being theory” by Martin Seligman.
Hedonic peer production works on the basis of anticipating people’s needs as they are participating in the commons. Knowing the needs of individual participants, the methodology of working in commons allows people to provide maximum incentives to collaborate in particular areas and reap value and synergies that help satisfy these needs. This way intrinsic motivation serves as the attractor, engine and binding factor for people to get things done together. Technology support for such peer production systems helps to do all this at scale. Social web technologies can be a tremendous help to orchestrate and choreograph collaborative cocreation workflows.
“The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.”
— E.F. Schumacher, Small is beautiful
A good analogy of hedonic peer production as the Hedonic harmony SX formula envisions it, are the cells in a human body that are involved in protein exchange and help keep a much larger organism alive and healthy. Each cell is autonomous, yet receives timely all the nourishment it needs to thrive, grow and multiply. Social coding commons takes inspiration from Nature at many levels. The affiliation network that is shaping up by hedonic peer production functions on the basis of ongoing service development and service exchange, forming a commons based service economy of sorts. This is tuned to lead to continuous value aggregation that helps empower the commons as a whole. Hedonic peer production involves stimulating emergent natural forces and setting flywheel effects in motion, then foster them for more spontaneous emergence to occur in areas where it is needed most.
Hedonic drivers
Section titled “Hedonic drivers”Hedonic peer production works on the basis of a set of hedonic drivers that help steer and nourish the emergent forces throughout the lifecycle of a solution, to give direction to its organic growth and evolution. These drivers and the collaboration incentives they provide to people — on the basis of intrinsic motivation — are the ways to foster spontaneous emergence within the commons, of the right solutions, and based on real needs.
Hedonic harmony focuses on allowing people to pursue their dreams in relation to those of others.
The Hedonic harmony SX formula that Social coding commons develops for its own affiliation network, defines a set of ten incitements for proactive participation that are fundamental building blocks of our growth formula and approach to solution design. The incitements provide three pathways towards rich social experience ..
| incitement | impetus | hedonic driver characteristics | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | center | ”Dare to dream” | self-reflection, self-discovery, meaning |
| 2. | think | ”Dare to act” | deliberation, knowledge, strategy, planning |
| 3. | act | ”Dare to feel” | doing, realization, collaboration, progression |
| 4. | feel | ”Dare to experience” | humanity, freedom, social experience |
| 5. | tease | ”Dare to nudge” | awareness, perspective, insight, attraction |
| 6. | nudge | ”Dare to play” | connection, affiliation, activation |
| 7. | play | ”Dare to experience” | exploration, invention, cocreation |
| 8. | dream | ”Dare to be” | imagination, vision, course, direction |
| 9. | be | ”Dare to experience” | safety, belonging, inclusion, acceptance |
| ∞ | experience | ”Dare to live” | fate, luck, chance, opportunity, life |
Hedonic harmony aims to stimulate people to follow ones dreams towards realization, based on realistic life goals, expectations, and awareness of other people’s essential roles in fulfilling them. Social coding commons uses these incitements to formulate strategies and model work processes. The three most prominent ones are ..
- “Think, act, feel” Methodical approaches for collaborative design and cocreation.
- “Tease, nudge, play” Outreach, attraction, activation, emergence, growth trajectory.
- “Center, be, experience” Sustainable solutions, focused evolution, joy of creation.
Self benefit center
Section titled “Self benefit center”
Self-servicing, the terminology that SX uses instead of the unappetizing term of dogfooding, is an integral part of Social experience design. The recursive nature of this concept may take time to wrap ones head around. Social coding commons constitutes a self benefit center where participants in the commons can tap into a network of value-added services that have been created and aggregated over time. Social coding commons thus offers solutions that help make grassroots environments more productive and sustainable, able to cocreate at scale. These solutions all evolve as SX designs and result in social experiences that reinforce each other through synergetic flywheel effects. This includes Social coding commons itself, and as it evolves its own SX design and its particular SX methodology implementation, it will start to exhibit dynamics of self-organisation or autopoiesis to occur within the commons. Emergent forces to be studied and wielded in order to improve hedonic peer production processes.
Sustainable open social systems
Section titled “Sustainable open social systems”A recent Harvard study indicates that Free and open source software (FOSS) has truly eaten the world. It also makes painfully clear that the rewards do not flow towards the creators of FOSS. Is FOSS a great success or inherently unsustainable then? That is not always easy to tell, and depends on the people involved in a particular project. Are they pure hobbyists and in it for the fun, or are they people seeking sustainable income from their free software development efforts? This makes a great difference to the nature of the collaborations that take place, and the expectations that each participant has.
Reasoned from ones who want to earn a decent living with FOSS, or even just see their often ambitious expectations with regards to their FOSS projects fulfilled, FOSS is a failure. Those who argue against this and point out successful large-scale FOSS projects, display severe survivorship bias, as these are the exceptions to the rule. The majority of those who want to sustain themselves from FOSS, find themselves on a road of disillusionment and burnout.
Social coding commons embraces FOSS, the software, while it focuses on improving sustainability of FOSS, the movement.
Furthermore, zooming out, the value of FOSS lands in the hands of hypercapitalist corporations. New approaches and open minds are needed to improve the track record of the free software movement, and make it more sustainable as a whole. It does not help that highly principled people in FOSS and social impact movements often outright refuse to learn from the best-practices that work in the business world, and often shoot themselves in the foot by their principles and values. An important part of SX is to adopt what works, and adapt it to the dynamics of grassroots environments, such that these principles and values are properly accounted for.
Successful companies are much more aware of what solutions they want to build, what needs must be served, and for which stakeholders. They do product and service development that involve numerous parties and supply lines, recognize that needs change and solutions have a lifecycle. They involve all their company deparments and employees in intricate business processes to timely anticipate these changes. While in FOSS there’s oftentimes only a codebase, a release, a project website, and a basic and implicit issue-driven design-by-consensus workflow on Github or Codeberg that allows tech-savvy people to request features to be added on top of what was already built. App-centric, the project a siloed concept. The deliverables loose fragments that do not connect well with others.
SOSS initiatives become inherently sustainable by addressing relevant aspects of the free software development lifecycle..
Social coding commons speaks of SOSS, Sustainable open social systems, and reserves the term “FOSS” exclusively to refer to software artifacts that comply to the four essential freedoms of Free software. SOSS initiatives are solution-oriented, delivered in the form of services, and focus on the sustainability of these solutions throughout their entire lifecycle.
Open social stack
Section titled “Open social stack”
The Free software movement attracts nearly primarily technical people and fosters a culture that is deeply tech-oriented. It is a very vibrant environment where people dare to experiment, do research and create prototypes, and inspire others to follow along. The FOSS commons is a cauldron of innovation. Yet because of the deep tech focus, the value that is being created this way, the rewards, does not flow in the proper direction: in the hands of creators and their clients. Most of the value ends up in the hands of hypercapitalists who contribute little to our society.
SX focuses on adding the missing social layers to the technology stack, and design solutions that help bridge the gap between technosphere and sociosphere, where they address people’s needs. Doing this at scale within a commons, weaving social experiences together, poses both a big opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is in how an empowered commons is able to outcompete exploitative corporate rivals by the ‘completeness of services’ such ignited commons is able to offer. Company business generally restricts itself to product and service development within their own walls, at UX scope. While a united commons can choreograph social experiences cocreated by many parties, thus able to rise above this level to address SX scope and make deeper, even societal, impact. The challenge is in breaking the indvidualism in FOSS and activate people to follow common trajectories, to diversify the development process and make it more inclusive to people in less-technical roles. With the ultimate objective to develop experiences that are loved and embraced by clients.
In order to make the paradigm and mindset shift, SX conceptualises three social layers to exist on top of the technology stack. First, based on the notion that the social web is service-oriented, SX discerns a Service layer, where discoverable autonomous services compose, orchestrate and choreograph with each other. Specifically they compose into evolvable solutions in the Solution layer. Solutions under SX are self-contained and include their own design blueprint that can be introspected to various extent. Finally the upper Experience layer is where the social experiences of all these solutions intertwine with the social graph and become part of the social fabric.
Free software development lifecycle
Section titled “Free software development lifecycle”
SOSS initiatives in their approach focus on the end-to-end solution development lifecycle, ranging from the first inception of an idea to the end-of-life stage where a solution is phased out and its aggregated value disperses again. The Free software development lifecycle, or FSDL, is inspired by the Rational unified process and follows five stages of Evolution. Consecutively these are Inception, Ideation, Realization, Delivery and Dispersal. Services are delivered throughout the entire lifecycle, even when a solution is in state of value dispersal (for example when submitting its documentation to the Internet Archive for long-term preservation). Free software projects typically only address the Ideation and Realization stages, or even just Realization in code-only projects.
As a solution design progresses through the lifecycle, following parallel social activity tracks that may fan out to timely cover those areas that need most attention, whether that be coding, testing, service development, or public relations. Each SOSS initiative requires their own development approach, and the FSDL must be tailored to support that. The various patterns and practices of SX are organized into instrument sets and recipes that drive collaboration workflows between commons participants. The FSDL is applicable to single SOSS initiatives while taking their position within the larger commons and technology ecosystem into account.
Social activity tracks
Section titled “Social activity tracks”
Under SX the design process is considered an integral part of the solution itself, and not a separate preparatory stage that leads to a solution deliverable, as is the usual way we consider ourselves to be “involved with a project”. In an ultimate form of dogfooding SX solutions self-service themself. Starting with that first sticky note, participants — regardless whether they are people in creator or client stakeholder roles — will come and dedicate some of their work, hobby, life balance to contribute and add value to the solution, so that it evolves over time. As they mingle with other people, weaving social experiences together, the collaborative development process leads them along a number of social activity tracks (SAT’s) that are relevant to the particular solution design and help drive it towards further realization and maturity.
How to get involved?
Section titled “How to get involved?”This is not as straightforward as it usually is when people ask how to join a community. Social coding commons is a movement, not a top-down traditional organisation, and there is no membership. It is enough to feel yourself to be a social coder to participate. When the concepts outlined above piqued your interest, you are encouraged to join the discussions in our channels. When it comes to deeper involvement however, it depends what your ambitions, passions and aspirations are and in which fields you are interested in to engage in proactive participation with others. Collaborations that emerge depends which initiatives you represent and how they are value aligned to those of others working in commons. That should happen in a natural fashion, and gradually by mingling and doing things together. Social coding commons is a timeless movement. Collaborations form spontaneously as time progresses and growth of our commons happens organically and along natural pathways. As a movement we are aware of our value, open to more value creation, and only progress — no matter how small its increments — is what matters.
Commons participation
Section titled “Commons participation”SX by focusing on the needs of all participants as they work in commons, provides natural pathways to safeguard and promote diversity and inclusion. In addition to how autonomous participants organise the governance of their independent initiatives, Social coding commons provides a set of commmons participation guidelines as handholds to the establishment of healthy collaborative arrangements within the commons. They are based on two intrinsic values of Humanity and Freedom and their relationship to each other, that are the lifeblood of the commons and the value it creates. Three core principles of Sustainability, Mindfulness, and Playfulness are the pillars upon which commons builds, and are staring points to how we think, act, and feel about organising our collaborative activities.
Intrinsic values
Section titled “Intrinsic values”Core principles
Section titled “Core principles”Participation tools
Section titled “Participation tools”About this commons
Section titled “About this commons”Social coding commons was initiated in 2025 by Arnold Schrijver and came forth from “Social coding movement” that preceded it. Years of experience in facilitating communities and doing technology evangelism via “weaving in public” in difficult and broad-scoped grassroots environments preceded this inception, whereby Arnold deliberatedly acquired new skills and studied the social dynamics as an insider active in the field. In 2018 he founded Humane Tech Community (which is now dormant) and from 2019 spent five years as community facilitator of SocialHub and the FEP Process, the developer community for the W3C ActivityPub social web protocol and the fediverse. Dealing with all the frustrations of ‘trying to herd cats’ and ‘commons janitoring’, doing the boring chores for others, he learned that the major challenges of the fediverse to overcome are mostly social in nature. Social coding commons constitutes an ongoing experiment to finally address them in a collective effort, with many people working in unison together.
Arnold Schrijver now acts in a custodianship role, since Social coding commons is leaderless. He is available for inquiries on the fediverse at @smallcircles@social.coop, on Social coding forum as @aschrijver, and as @circlebuilder:matrix.org on Matrix chat.