(New readers that jump in here, be sure to at least read this post about CHT vs HTC history)
No, not really. More accurate to say is that CHT could not and would not be involved with its community in a way to build it up to anything more than ‘just a forum’. We did not have access to plans and strategies of the CHT on which we could base community planning, nor did we have access to their social media channels and website for publishing.
Since we adopted the CHT’s strategic pillar of creating a ‘Cultural awakening’ we had to set up our own community website (and register a domain for it) and social media channels.
Even though CHT has recently launched a new website and presented a new agenda for Tech the organization still remains largely a black box to us. There is an important reason why this is so, and why this community is positioned differently: CHT operates on very high political and enterprise board levels. They are involved with lobbying and have the media scrutiny upon them. The community on the other hand strives to be as open as possible, for everyone, and operating at grassroots level.
In whatever organizational form there is strategic value if HTC works from the bottom up, and CHT top-down, both coming together and bridge the gap between humans and tech. Dividing tasks like in the diagram above, which I’ll repeat here:
You are right about the urgency, and HTC is trying to become the movement you describe. We are not an organization, but an all-volunteer group of people.
Over the past year we have struggled with scaling up as a movement and we have tried a lot of things and various organization forms. Scaling our humane tech community is a really tricky issue. We suffer from what I call the engagement problem:
- Humane tech is a vast, vast, largely not-well-understood field that encompasses many technical and non-technical areas of expertise. The problems with tech are complex and often abstract and many of the consequences of not acting aren’t clear or hypothetical.
- The people that reach this forum come from all walks of life, from all around the world. There is no clear audience to target to, but still we are trying to facilitate everyone.
- From every 100 people who say “I want to help” only 5 actually do so when offered the opportunity, and fewer still are willing and able to selflessly takethe initiative and erect some project from the ground up, plus also do the boring chores that are required then.
This “doing the chores” to facilitate other members in the community easily amounts to a full-time job. I have been full-time engaged, volunteering for a long time, to facilitate other members. It is an unthankful task too, as it is never ‘good enough’ and efforts go to waste when facilitated members become inactive again. In the end this is unsustainable.
This last issue made us think about incorporating HTC as a non-profit, allowing us to do crowdfunding and have compensation for certain tasks. But we never made a decision about that. The bottom line is that if there is no solution to ‘the engagement problem’ without funding, i.e. we find the success formula for the HTC, then there is no business case for incorporation.
TL;DR
We are still the community of the Center for Humane Technology, and not a fully independent entity. The community admins see merit in realigning with CHT to communicate that positioning more clearly, and to forge closer cooperations between Center and community. To discuss that we will contact @davidgljay when he returns from his vacation.
With regards with all I’ve said in this large post… all your feedback is more than welcome 