šŸ‘‹ Introduce yourself or check-in for 2022!

  • If youā€™ve recently discovered this community or never posted, introduce yourself!
  • If you joined some time ago, you may check-in again to re-introduce yourself and tell us what you are up to!
  • Either way, let us know what you are up to in the humane tech space in 2022! What are you currently learning / playing with / working on / concerned or excited about?
  • Please donā€™t by shy! Even if humane tech is just a vague interest to you and you donā€™t feel you have much to share, itā€™s still really interesting for us all to hear how your journey brought you here! :slightly_smiling_face:

This replaces the old introductions thread which dates back almost four years since the beginning of this community and has over 500 posts. This new thread will remain in place through to the end of 2022.

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Iā€™ll start! Iā€™ve been interested in Humane Tech for a few years and currentlyā€¦

  • Volunteering to help facilitate here in the Humane Tech Community (hence this thread).
  • Writing about humane tech on mindful.technology, as well as related topics such as digital wellness habits and meditation apps (a use of tech which both helps improve our wellbeing and helps us be less reactive to distracting tech). Always looking for others whoā€™d enjoy contributing articles for the site - send me a message if interested.
  • Gradually working through the free Foundations of Humane Technology course that was launched by Center for Humane Technology last year.
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Welcome in the community team, Justin :hugs: Iā€™ll follow upā€¦

I joined the forum at the very start, and later organized the Humane Tech Community (HTC) as an independent grassroots group working bottom-up to address the harms of technology, whereas the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) was working strategically, top-down, like a thinktank. Initially we had the same objective of ā€œTriggering a Cultural Awakeningā€ but later repositioned more ā€˜modestlyā€™ (but still very large in scope) and primarily solution-oriented to ā€œBuild the Pyramids of Humane Technologyā€.

Initially extremely worried (still am) about the tech trends in our society, my interaction with this community was the start of a journey that opened whole new realms for me. By opening up to positive developments and actionable solutions I became aware of a world of opportunity.

I gave up an upwards career path in IT, having worked in many different roles, and for the past couple of years I have dedicated doing community work, humane tech and free software advocacy and exploring decentralized (non-blockchain) technologies. I became passionate for FOSS and found a home on the Fediverse: a decentralized social network based on open standards, and a veritable field lab and playground for humane technology. Where Mark Zuckerberg dedicates to building some technocratic Metaverse, ā€˜fedizensā€™ dedicate to creating a PeopleVerse with a unique and diverse culture.

Nowadays you can find me all across the web and in many communities, such as SocialHub, Solid Project, Fediverse Town, Lemmy and Forgefriends.

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Iā€™ve been here a while, not that active. Iā€™m co-founder of Snowdrift.coop which is still working to get going, progressing but way too slow. (We need help, What Snowdrift.coop needs to launch )

I engage in related issues in most of my life from my own tech involvement to the way I deal with people in different facets of my life. My personal and music-teaching-focused website is at wolftune.com and it needs attention and to be redone sometime.

Iā€™ve gotten especially into the deeper aspects of mindful/conscious living, and I think about democratic structures, good communication and so on. I have an aspiration to put together all the notes and framings Iā€™ve found most useful and publish it all under Free/Libre/Open termsā€¦

Iā€™m currently reading the wonderful (if excessively long) book The Dawn of Everything by the late (tragically) David Graeber and Devid Wengrow. It brings together the most thorough understanding of anthropology and archaeology to make the core claim that for human pre-history was basically people making all sorts of conscious decisions about how to live. There was no agricultural revolution (thousands of years went by with people making varied decisions about how much farming/herding/gardening to do and intentionally avoiding limiting themselves to it), and cities existed without rulers or temples or administrators, and basically the whole story that society just had to end up where we now find ourselves, thatā€™s nonsense, and we could very well choose to live in a lot of other arrangements.

Iā€™ve been recently focusing on the next level of clarifying the FLO values and economic issues around which Snowdrift.coop is working. Specifically: our economy only knows how to work with scarcity and exclusion. Therefore, we force that into everything with paywalls and ads and so on. We need new models of coordination (economic and otherwise) that are designed to work with abundance and sharing. I aspire to write more on this soon.

I have a lot of room to improve in terms of keeping my check-ins concise.

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Hey everyone! I have been looking for an online community to discuss humane technology and find resources and projects to be a part of. It seems to me that the public at large knows that the current ways in which we use tech/social media is problematic and causing a lot of the problems in the world now(or if anything, tech isnā€™t doing anything to make them any better) but not enough energy is being put into trying to find a solution. The heart of spaces like this one and HCT is a focus on whatā€™s best for us as humans.

A little background:
I taught public education for 11 years as a ā€œtechnologyā€ teacher for K-8 students. Mostly general tech skills: keyboarding, multimedia, office tools. But I would always dedicate a quarter out the year to discuss internet safety/digital citizenship with all my classes. Interacting with resources sites like commonsensemedia.org is where my interest on how the impact of technology is effecting present and future generations and how tech is not always a safe space when it really should be (and could be!)

I stopped teaching and now am in the early stages of my career as a software engineer and hope to bring some of the humane tech principles to the projects that I work on and share what I learn here with other developers.

Iā€™m currently reading Kevin Rooses book Futureproof which explains what to expect with the incoming age of automation/ AI and some steps we can take toā€¦ prepare ourselves.

Iā€™m also trying to finish all the episodes of the Your Undivided Attention podcast with Tristan and Aza.

Anywho, Iā€™m excited to be a part of this community in any aspect even if itā€™s just discussion and sharing resources but Iā€™m hoping that we can really get to the point that we can start affecting change

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Hey everyone :wave:

After circling the web for a community approaching the problems of bringing humanity to tech, Iā€™ve finally landedā€¦ what a journey. My name is Graham and Iā€™ve recently left being a product lead at Headspace to start a mindful living platform that encourages community members to discover their true selves among other on their own journeys. The whole point is to structure interactions to incentivize acting like a real person on and offline. Itā€™d be a new modality foundationally different from current social platforms that would enable it ensure values-alignment for all parties. Happy to chat through more details if youā€™re interested :smiley:

Soooo I think the Humane Tech Community is where I need to be to discuss how we can all make this happen!

My general interests are having earnest conversations about related topics, helping other builders, and working together to bring humanity to our lives in the current day. Please reach out here to connect if youā€™d like to chat.

//Graham

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Hello,
Sivani still here :slightly_smiling_face:! I am an independent multidisciplinary researcher from India. My interests range from the biological impacts of radiofrequency electromagnetic field (RF-EMF) radiation to the behavioural impacts of digital technology, especially on children. I greatly appreciate all work done by Humane Tech and follow it closely, right from 2018. Everything I do is here: WordPress.com / CONTACT | Project Plain Talk

Thanks!
Once again, great job Humane Tech!

-Sivani Saravanamuttu

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Hello all,

Youā€™re all amazing, incredibly grateful for the work you do to divert the course of technology towards a more humane end. Iā€™m part-worker, part-student.

I work at ADDVERT. ADDVERT is the only humane digital marketing agency that I know of. We help brands divest from Facebook, IG or if they insist on paid social campaigns help them to be more transparent in the practices. We put together a weekly newsletter which is a really quick skim and compiles the best content of the week in the humane tech space.

You can sign up for that or read prior issues, here.

With the rest of my time, I am a student at the Oxford Internet Institute, studying for an MSc in Social Science of the Internet with a research focus on alternative revenue models that can facilitate outcomes better for the world. I may sporadically upload research to my website.

Nice to meet you all,
Harv

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Hello!

Juan Soto from Spain. My english itĀ“s not the best but like to view a place to discuss all things regarding the intersection between tech and humanity.

I am an independent electrical enginner working from Basque Country but in my spare times working in small digital proyects. Now working with other two friends in small digital community called MierdaVida.

My interests range from the 5g technology to the builds wireless networks to connect low-power objects.

Nice to meet all comminity. :sweat_smile:

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Hi all, Jeremy Bonney from London, UK here. 38 years old and worked in tech startups for the last ten years.

Currently figuring out what I want to do! Very passionate about bringing out the best of humanity, the best in all of us, so that we can solve our toughest problems together.

Not quite sure how I want to tackle that yet, but Iā€™m working on it :pray:

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Hi everyone,

I was introduced to this community by a wonderful friend of mine who researches the impact of technology on adolescents. I develop resources to support schools better understand how to encourage positive online use with their pupils, and I also work on the development of guides for parents about keeping their children safe online. Great to meet you all.

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Helloo guys! Iā€™m from Spain. I like to looking some discuss all things regarding the intersection between tech and humanity.
Nice to meet all comminity.

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Hi everyone!

Iā€™m Carissa and Iā€™m coming to you from Prague!

Iā€™m highly interested in the crossover between technology and humanity, and would love to connect with like-minded individuals who are empowered to change technology to be more ethical.

Iā€™m currently a student and looking for opportunities to get involved in this field, so if anyone would like to connect about humane technology, please reach out to me! You can find me on LinkedIn here if youā€™d like to connect and I look forward to interacting with some of you! :smiling_face:

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Iā€™m from USA and interested in privacy, freedom, addiction (itā€™s relevant to the way we use technology), gps tracking, exploits used in the wild, civil liberties (relevant to technology the violates them like face scan replacing passport).

I donā€™t do sjw or social media. I deleted Facebook / LinkedIn after their third or so breach. I donā€™t want the chinese social score being used in USA but we are moving to that and digital ID and ai based policing.

I was an early crypto adopter and favor decentralization and donā€™t believe the proof of stake being superior or the lame ponzi analogy of buffet, gates etc. They are invested in the current system.

There has to be a happy medium between caveman and dystopia.

I donā€™t want to be catfished and I know everyone online is though but please donā€™t come look for me Iā€™ll see you coming :slight_smile:

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Hello!
I deal with privacy, data protection and cybersecurity.
I am an Italian Lawyer, but you can find more information about me here: About me | NicFab Notes.
I am highly interested in innovation, privacy, IoT, blockchain, and so on.

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I am Biswa Aryal. My background of study is computer engineering. I am founder of an non profit organization in Nepal (Living Around Technology). Through LAT our team run awareness campaign all around Nepal among youths in different places in Nepal.
Our program is based on the impact of common tech products like Social Media and gadgets.
We can see cyber bullying and cyber crime activities causing declining mental health in youth due to these tech products . Through our campaign and workshops we show youths ways to get protected from these problems. We inspire youths to use tech products in better ways for example use tech products to improve their skills, using product for easy learning career development etc.
We have even helped lots of youth to escape the cyber crime targeted to them.
We are trying our best to make use of tech in hygienic way.

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Hi all! Iā€™m a student currently residing in Boston, US. Iā€™m interested in alternative prospects for technology centered around functional, mindful use and deep, human user experience, and how unseating the need for maximum convenience can result in truly beautiful and fascinating personal tech. Iā€™m not particularly interested in offering solutions for the entirety of humankind, but mostly for myself and whoever thinks alike.

Iā€™m presently especially intrigued by retro tech. Iā€™m working on a small RasPi-based music player (which should be able to stream Spotify) to separate my music from my phone, in an effort to remove one of the biggest barriers to my dumbphone transition. I intend to equip it with pager-like capabilities to inform me of important notifications, which I can then act on through my computer.

Iā€™ve also been interested in making the smartphone experience more interesting and mindful through inconvenience. I want to experiment with launchers. An idea Iā€™m particularly interested in is a launcher in the style of a text-based open-world game map, where one starts off in their literal ā€œhomeā€ and has to physically travel to their apps. This is an attempt to create a cognitive-spatial separation between the real and the digital worlds, and also align the digital experience with realistic spatial characteristics of human life. For instance, Iā€™d like to travel to browse Reddit just as Iā€™d visit a library in my town, or Instagram as Iā€™d go to a social gathering. Iā€™d also like to ā€œstumble uponā€ interesting articles, photos, and music, such that each feels like a unique discovery to make the most of.

In short, by removing the need for maximum convenience, I hope to find a new common ground with personal tech. These ideas may seem silly, but that is what they are intended to be - a playful exploration of my relationship with technology. If these seem interesting to you, feel free to reach out :slight_smile:

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Very cool, @alexamirejibi welcome to this community. I am afraid that this forum isnā€™t as active as it used to be. But given your interests I can advise you to start exploring the Fediverse. Youā€™ll find a big community of retro tech folks there, for instance, and many tech-oriented folks who are exploring very innovative and cool ideas. My own account is on Mastodon that has many servers to choose from (which serve as communities), and many other federated apps.

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I just found this forum and my [unfunded] humane tech company is looking for a UI/UX design lead to join our team of 4 talented and experienced founders disrupting social media outside the standard VC track.

If anyone sees this and is intrigued please find us on PublicSpaces.io or Plug.events

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