Introduce Yourself

Hi All! My name is Emilio Freire, I am a graduate student in physical education and involved in football coaching. I have no tech background but have been studying the link between football and the onlife manifesto as a research project for the last two years and came by HTC at the start of 2020.

At the moment I am developing an online course for the general public to think about what it means to be human in a hyperconnected era. My main sources of inspiration are Luciano Floridi, Yuval Harari, Humane Tech, mindfulness (Kabat-zin) and autopoiesis (Humberto Maturana).

As I live in Brasil, the course will be offerred in Portuguese but would love to speak more about make humane tech and thoughts on living onlife acessible to all.

Emilio

Ps: I love to speak about football (soccer) and the relations to technology and cybernetics

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Olá Emilio!

Welcome to the community! It’s good to know that you’re developing an online program for the general public. When you have more info feel free to post it in the community so we could know more about it.

Best,

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Hello Everyone, I’m David and i’m a programmer, i found Humane Technology surfing the web for alternative phone OS and then kind of got stuck with it for a while, i’ve almost finished a small app that could help having a more health relationship with the phone, once i finish it i might post it on the forum to take some feedback

Thanks all for this great form and source of tips about tech, and obviously for all the great people that are here

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Hello Everybody,

I’m Dominic, a long time lurker here. I recently finished a PhD in computational psychology, looking at models of learning from recurring decisions and evaluating how they cope with individual differences.

Coming from a physics background I have always been interested in the emergence of formal and informal social conventions, from greeting customs all the way to formalised legislative decision-making systems. I am keen to help develop discourse systems that result in more constructive social conventions.

I believe recent technologies give us an opportunity to rethink how we structure ourselves, allowing for more decentralised decision-making and feedback systems.

I have a lot to learn from you all and I hope I will be able to support you.

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Hello @djhunt,

Welcome to the community!

Social conventions are fascinating because of the ramifications of its impacts to society as an integrated complex system.

It’s good to have you in the discussions.

Welcome @djhunt! Don’t hesitate to post, like in the Best Practices / Humane Design categories. You intro inspired me to post about Argument Maps, which you may find interesting :slight_smile:

Hi, I am Rio. A web-app developer! :wave:
One thing I have to say and speak on is about how I found this place. I actually wanted to do what the CHT does. I didn’t even know there was something like CHT. I searched a lot and Github is what brought me here. I wanted to build a different kind of app. And I wanted to meet and network with the open-source community. So ever since I found this community I can’t fully express what I am finding. I am overwhelmed by CHT.
Anyway I am going to be an active member of this community. Helping this movement in what ever I can. I’m building my developer skill at the same time too. So a win-win for all. You could follow me on Twitter or Linkedin! :smile_cat:


And here’s my first contribution for the CHT community. :innocent:

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Welcome to the community, Rio, and thank you for writing the article :smiley:

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Hi, my name is Camila James and I’m a WordPress Expert. A WordPress fanatic by day and a reader by night, I Enjoy exploring the ever-changing world of Technology, Development, and eCommerce. Being a Tech Savvy and Enthusiast I usually enjoys giving Reviews on Technology ideas and topic. I decade an experience to my current role where I am dedicated and inspiring the Tech world.

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Hi! I’m Mehret Biruk, and I’m a digital wellness coach with a passion to teach, inspire and empower individuals to discover the pleasures of the offline world.

A long time critic of the attention economy, I began my journey towards digital wellness seven years ago when I deleted my Instagram account to take back control of her time and attention (that was back in 2013– oh, how time flies!). That decision jumpstarted my interest in learning about how social media, our digital devices, and the Internet in general impacts our social, psychological, and physical well-being, and what we can do about it.

For years now, I have been learning about the attention economy and the psychological consequences of the digital world in our lives. I’ve been sharing the knowledge I’ve gained on my personal blog, and is the host of Toronto’s Digital Wellness Meetup group.

As a digital wellness coach, my main goal is to TEACH, INSPIRE, and EMPOWER individuals to began their journey towards a healthier digital life and experience the Joy(s) of Missing Out.

I have my MA in Sociology, and my background includes, research, mental health, peer counselling, program coordination, and community leadership.

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It’s nice to have you in our midst. Welcome to the community, Mehret!

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Hi I’m Will, an autistic dad to a 12 year old boy and 15 year old girl.
Always fascinated in technology from an early age.

Have to admit this increased my awareness to the footprint I leave, and what I am sharing.
backed up my data from instagram, pinterest and twitter platforms and deleted my accounts.

Still working on Facebook.

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Much welcome to our community, Will!

I’m Julie, I was a software engineer in the 90s and 00s in UK, Silicon Valley and Asia. Around 2010 I started to become truly concerned about the changes I was seeing with humanity. Over the years I became more and more concerned for numerous reasons and considered if workplace expectations had limited our ability to design for extreme edge cases and discover unintended metaeffects.

So I left my VP job, sacrificed £250k to go do a masters in psychology - done with distinction and now seeking a tribe to make a meaningful difference to in my industry - to get more people on the ground thinking deeper and wider.

My passion, and my reason for being thought of as a bit weird - is about technology and it’s effect on humans and humanity. I think computer science is missing key knowledge of systems, ethics, psychology, physiology, neurology and sociology.

What truly concerns me is the dearth of unbiased human centred scientific research. It is all focussed on putting tech in the centre, humans becoming a product. No matter the industry our default thought for needs now is “can tech do it” - it needs to change to "must we do it?

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You hit the nail on the head, @juliehendry, welcome to the community!

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Hi All :slight_smile: My name is Mandla, and I’m based in Cape Town, South Africa.

I am a Senior Consultant at Deloitte Australia working in the Digital Transformation and Change Management space, where we help large organisations in Health Care, Mining, Education and the Public Sector create and adopt new digital products, tools and systems. I predominantly work in the Employee Experience (as a UX designer) side of things, so mainly around how we can prepare employees for the future of work?; how can we teach them the necessary skills they will require in the future?; and what does the future of learning look like?

I’m deeply passionate about creating innovative value-sensitive products with a user-centred, holistic approach. In the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about Ethical Design, and I believe that the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology and toolset can help designers create more ethical products/designs. For this reason, I am using VSD to explore how we can make social interaction in multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs) more human and ethical. Hopefully, this research will add to the discussion about how we can build ethical VEs for VR.

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Hello all. I am new to the tech field. I got great inspiration from watching the recent documentary and wanted to connect with the Humane Tech world!! Glad to be here. Thanks!

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Hi everyone,

My name is Alexandre Faucher, I’m 43, I’m working in tech for 20 years now : 7 years as PM at Microsoft (if you are more than 35, MSN portal and MSN Messenger may ring you a bell ;)). In 2009 I created a Digital Agency in Paris, we were designing and developping websites. In 2016, I co-created GENIUS OBJECTS, a smart textile company which develops IOT solutions leveraging a textile sensor (with applications in Ambiant computing and no screen UX).

Why I’m here ? I’m concerned with screens omnipresence and worried for my kids.
I’m dad of a son of 10 who wakes up in the morning asking where the iPad is and who begs for having his own Smartphone every week, he constantly asks for screen time and I have to admit the climate at home is often rough when it’s about to manage screens time limits. My wife and I tried to explain, to hide, to deprive, we also tried Parental Controls… nothing worked. Speaking with other parents, reading articles, I realized that this was a huge societal problem.

During COVID lockdown, having more time to think and having the chance to work with a team of product designers and devs, we tried to find a solution…

We came up with the idea of a smart pouch to encourage screen breaks. Kids (and adults!) put their Smartphone into the pouch, then any hour without screen is encouraged with gamification. In addition, we ensure kids’Smartphone stays inaccessible during the night.

Our concept is somehow similar to the cookie box we can see in The Social Dilemma, except it is textile and it is not a strongbox (you can open it at anytime but you will loose your points). The purpose is to generate a discussion about screeens at home, to educate, to lead towards independence.

We have a small community of parents involved in product design, have a proto, a name… Next step is to launch our crowfunding campaing in a couple of weeks. I’ll be happy to share more infos and keep you posted (after having checked this is compatible with this place and audience which is not a promotion place).

In any case, I’m waiting to engage with you and to contribute to limit screen addiction and it impact on society.

We have to do something…
Alexandre.

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Hi, I’m Paulo, a software developer from Portugal.

I signed up for this forum a couple of years ago (shortly after listening to Tristan Harris on Sam Harris’ podcast), but something recently happened that motivated me to become more active.

A few years ago, I started to worry that my attention kept being drawn to social media, memes, and youtube in detriment to things that I cared about, despite using less than many people I knew.

Fast forward to 2020, and I started to see things that were kind of common in the US or the UK but not in Portugal: people I knew for many years began to become much angrier than before, constantly outraged. They seemed to assume that the rest of the world was somehow similar to what they kept seeing in their individually curated feeds, which drove them to become radicalized. Some became obsessed with conspiracy theories. Others would spend their time insulting people they disagreed with online.

Anyway, it feels this can get much worse, so I’ve been trying to help any way I can. I’ve been trying to inform people about some of these problems. It’s great that The Social Dilemma was released since it works as a great introduction to recommend to people new to this. Recently I also started writing about these things as well: AI the Ever-Increasing Distortion of Reality
(by the way, feel free to give some feedback if you feel I missed something or if my tone might’ve not been ideal to convince people who aren’t yet aware of this problem.)

My background as a software engineer who worked on implementing Facebook and Google code on a known e-commerce website for ad and tracking purposes only made me feel somewhat part of the problem.

Anyway, thanks for the work you’re all doing.
It’s great to get closer to the conversation,
Paulo

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Welcome @Alexandre and @PauloEsteves! You have interesting stories to tell. Don’t be shy and create a discussion topic, or comment to an existing thread :blush:

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