Aware Prepare: Community position, goals and strategy

Hi Campaigners,

First of all, I’d like to welcome @MaciejBud to the team, who not only has offered to participate, but may help using services of his visual communication agency explainedvisually.co. We have PM’ed a bit about creating a small explainer video to introduce potential members to our community.

In this post I want to address Maciej’s rightful request for more clarity of community position and goals:

Maciej: “Regarding the website and the whole strategy - I can also help you with that. I think that we should have a clarity before we create a video since then it can be laser-focused on communicating the things that can trigger the audience.”

In the next paragraphs I will elaborate on this, so we can refine together. Then ultimately I’ll add the outcome to the strategy document of Aware Prepare dogfooding campaign as well as post a pinned topic to the forum.

Community, mission and strategic pillars

New tech comes with (often unforeseen) Harms that need to be addressed by Solutions urgently. Tech evolution and disruptions come ever quicker and uncontrolled, and we can see that ‘tech overcomes us’.

Our community that is currently mostly a forum, must become a solution-oriented, positive-spirited, creative group of people from all walks of life, that offers ‘A place of action’, not cheap talk and complaints only.

Hence we work on the mission “To Re-align Technology to Humanity’s Best Interests”, just like the CHT. And we work along the same strategic pillars (copied from the announcement):

  1. Cultural Awakening - By raising awareness of harms of technology, and showing an alternative path
  2. Public Pressure - Aimed at political and organizational change, and better regulation and protections
  3. Engage Employees - To stimulate the proper mindset for people on the workfloor and promote adoption
  4. Apply Humane Design - By offering production-ready best-practices, design patterns and work methods

The forum organization reflects this and has further sub-categories to go into specific areas (more later).

The idea is that each strategic pillar reinforces the next, and that the solutions are developed within each pillar are fed back to the other pillars:

Awareness leads to Cultural awakening —> Political pressure leads to regulation and protection —> Engaging employees and regulation leads to adoption —> Engagement and adoption lead to Humane Design application becoming the norm.

We can’t do one without the other. There will be activity in all pillars in parallel. But ultimately the fourth pillar Applying Humane Technology is most important, because here is where the solutions are.

Humane tech harms and subject areas

Humane Tech covers a very big subject area, or areas, and in each we find different kinds of harms that need to be addressed. Also the community has a somewhat broader and different focus than the CHT (more later).

Before I mention the areas, I’d like to mention restrictions to what we cover in Humane Technology:

  • We focus on internet and information technologies, how they are built, how they are implemented, and their societal impact
  • Citizens and consumers are primary target audiences

We do NOT focus on:

  • Animal rights related to tech (some exceptions may apply)
  • Industrial tech (other than where the internet is clearly involved, and consumers are impacted)
  • Human rights in general (but digital freedom is within scope)
  • Enterprise security (only consumer security)

Currently we have the following subject areas (this will be refined further, e.g. recent addition is ‘Ethics’):

Awareness:

  • Wellbeing - Mental and physical health
  • Relationships - How we interact with each other
  • Privacy - Protecting our (digital) freedoms
  • Civics - Public discourse, democracy, culture, society
  • Children - Education by parents and schools, involvement of children

Public pressure:

  • Advocacy - Petitions, demonstrations, activism, public speaking

Engage employees:

  • [none yet] - But probably meetups hackathons, expert/professional information sources

Humane Design:

  • What is humane design - Refining our mission and subject areas continuously
  • Ethics - Ethical frameworks in all work areas involved with other HT areas
  • Exemplars - Reference applications, and work methods

Time Well Spent:

  • Your Apps & Tools - Certification, discussion of HT shortcomings, HT ‘tool shack’
  • News - What is happening in realms of Humane Technology? Being in the loop of trends
  • Recommended reading - Books, scientific papers, technical info

In the Humane Design category more subcats will be added. We need best-practices, checklists, and entire knowledge bases for how to bring HT to reality.

Positioning of CHT and HTC

As the forum header states: We are a grassroots community, working bottom-up and crowdsourced, and the CHT is a top-down non-profit organisation, taking a very strategic approach.

Because of this we focus on the strategic pillar differently, placing different emphasis:

  • CHT aims at highest levels of government and big tech companies at board level

    • Awareness is done via mass media, CNN, BBC, NYT, etc. and formulated for more expert audience
    • Advocacy to world leaders, and board members of Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.
    • Engagement targeted at higher-level managers and board members
    • Time Well Spent as a corporate policy to be introduced (and less important in the light of fake news, democracy)
  • HTC aims at common people, ‘the masses’, companies in general, with the intend to inform them, offer solutions

    • Awareness for everyone in each of the subject areas, with knowledge bases and focus on self-help
    • Advocacy in the form of petitions, activism, public discussion, etc.
    • Engagement targeted towards the regular people on the workfloor, that do the implementations of tech
    • Time Well Spent as the promotion of good alternatives to lead our digital lives in healthy ways

Community culture and branding

We still need to design a consistent community brand. It should be uniform across all our channels and community representations.

A very important aspect of the community that should be clearly stated is that:

  • Participating in the community should be fun and rewarding

And selfish motives to participate are okay in this, as long as the common good is served. Also:

  • You are free to pursue any position in the community structure. Just go for it and persevere

Your activity determines the rewards you reap.

  • The community works on a basis of full transparency, crowdsourcing, open-source and in the public domain

In this regard all the works and contributions of its members are properly attributed.

What this all means for community culture and brand perception:

  • Fresh and modern
  • Positive, solutions-oriented
  • Vibrant, creative, exciting
  • Relevant, moral and right
  • Active and innovative
  • Human, people-focussed,
  • ‘Cozy’, together,
  • Sensitive, understanding
  • Easy-going, informal
  • Stength in numbers

So that was a quick overview of what the community is all about. Feel free to shoot at it and provide additional ideas and stuff that is missing. This is about brainstorming, so don’t be afraid to say crazy things :slight_smile:

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I will think about it, for now just a typo: in the positioning of CHT and HTC, you repeated two times CHT in the bullet points…

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Some crazy initial responses:

  1. If the forum is to act as a body and not just a few individuals, we will need training.
  2. There needs to be some sort of translation of long and complex plans such as this for (a) members for whom English is a second language, (b) members who want to participate but don’t have much experience with applications or group projects, and © new members. I’m happy to serve as translator-interpreter.
  3. With the development of GitHub projects and the creation of social media accounts, we’ve begun to step outside the forum. Perhaps we need some sort of schedule to govern such development?

Good input, @patm.

  1. I don’t think we’ll need training. But we need good, comprehensive documentation that is easy to find. Right now - in the early stages of community organization - information is still all over the place. Everyone can help centralizing the good stuff in the appropriate locations.

  2. This hauls back to 1). While this is a brainstorming thread for a small team that is ‘in-the-loop’, it is not for consumption by a broad audience. Now, I am posting in various places about direction and positioning, but these are also evolving insights. Once we have a comprehensive story, I’ll unpin these topics and they will shift out of direct sight (and into the ‘archive’ that the forum represents).

1) and 2) are very important, otherwise we’ll keep repeating ourselves over and over again.

  1. We are already working on such a schedule. Note that the whole community building is part of the Dogfooding theme, and its ongoing Aware Prepare campaign. Both have strategy sections / docs that outline the schedule. And here we are discussing, before updating those.
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In relation with Patm suggestions I think that if not training we need some keys to easy access
It’s very respectful that all the material is in then forum and I celebrate that.
But in the other hand and eventhough the forum seems now very polished I think it is complex for new people.
To act not only as individual members , I think there is material and ideas that grew up. I think we may have some representstive material of each pillar. So for a first glance a newcomer would have a clear point of view of CHT Forum. The people can go into deep topic and posts.
In the same path I think we avoid repetions that probably are not strengthen pillars
I mean that a community have periods and steps and we have walked together and grew up concepts.
So , I think it is the rigth moment to arrive to a more structured message that flows from the forum
Specially in this moment we are in a decided position of expanding CHT message, I believe it would be useful as contents to go all over the world

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Yes, I see what you mean. The purpose of this elaboration of our strategy is to shine a light on who we are, and what we want, so that we can produce materials, like an intro video and infographics that convey such message in a way that offers a crystal clear path to newcomers.

Also note that currently this forum is the main entry point for the community. But this will change once the community website is in production. The website will then be the place where newcomers consumer their first insights in all things Humane Tech and decide they want to participate in the discussion going on here. See also the community website discussion.

Yes , Arnold I want to highlight these concepts you wrote

Shine a ligth
Produce materials
Crystal clear
Strategy

Hi Arnold
I offer me to colaborate on this subject

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Thanks Alfredo, feel free to comment if you think things are missing or can be improved in my description above.

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At one time we had talked about creating a Patreon account for fund raising. I’m not sure that’s still a goal. In case it is, I wanted to share this page as it might serve as model for us.

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For everyone, the forum moderators including @patm and I have discussed crowdfunding and we see that as a topic for a future date (we have set a preliminary planning to address it in Q3 2019). First and foremost we will focus on setting up the foundations of the community properly and community building (growth hacking).

@MaciejBud, I am curious if my starting comment of this topic provides the proper handholds to elaborate further on creating good introductory materials for the community?

Attention

A prior staff discussion on restricting community scope, and @micheleminno’s comment (and those of others before) in this topic: Reflections on the community's Mission Statement and 'brand image' have set in motion a brainstorm for a different Mission Statement (preferably as mission+vision combined in a slogan, which is now: “Re-aligning Technology to Humanity’s Best Interests”).

You are most welcome to make your thoughts known.

With the risk of sounding a little annoying… The question is… “what is humanity’s best interest?” I guess this is the digital rights? Long term health consequences we haven’t discovered yet will surface. In our tunnel led world of seeking what we want through our phones it will be hard to ethically define this. Is this humanity in its original form? That humanity be allowed to develop and grow in its own way? This is another topic now- but it all blends together.

Not annoying for sure, but the reason why we are trying out other forms. You are correct. I is very hard to scope that to what we are about. Would need additional explainer story. See the above thread for some other options we are inventing.

Hi @Campaigners,

Just a short note to inform you that exciting things are going on at the HTC. We adopted a revised Vision, Mission, Philosophy… together named Community Principles, and are working on a methodology and framework called ‘The Pyramids of Humane Technology’

You can read more on that here: Be a Builder ❤ Help Improve Wellbeing, Freedom and Society ! and it would be great if you campaigners all helped share the message.

Furthermore I am coordinating with Tristan Harris, Randy Fernando and David Jay of the CHT Team and some great things are on the agenda for 2019! This is our year.

Also our Community Team has been selected for Mozilla Open Leaders program and we are strategizing and preparing a community organization / forum overhaul. More information soon.

I hope you will all join the fray again, and we can stir things up a bit and have some fun together!
:wink::smiley:

Cheers,

Arnold
Facilitator, Community Team.

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