<![CDATA[The intentional living collective

<![CDATA[The intentional living collective - Cal\'s Blog]]>Sun, 17 Nov 2024 22:28:07 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[REDEFINING ONLINE COMMUNITY part 10: world, meet eos!]]>Tue, 12 Jul 2022 23:49:57 GMThttp://theintentionallivingcollective.org/cals-blog/redefining-online-community-part-10-world-meet-eosAuthor Cal Loo is a serial social entrepreneur, the founder and executive director of a nonprofit company, a self-professed techie at heart, a 30-year tech consultant, and an ordained ceremonialist. He has been blogging about living more intentionally and navigating major life transitions since 2015. In this final piece in a ten-part series Cal summarizes the key messages of the other nine parts and brings it all together with the imminent introduction of the Eos Community Connections Portal – an online community connections portal unlike any other.

Redefining online community – sounds simple enough, right? It isn’t. Over the course of my last nine posts on this topic I’ve used over 12,500 words to introduce key elements of and platforms for online community, and explore the good and not-so-good things about them. Am I simply too verbose? Well, maybe - but I’ve tried to get straight to the point in all of the posts. If you’re interested in a concise summary of those nine posts, dear reader, then check out my synopsis at the end of of this one - but if you’d rather just jump straight to the punch line on this series then here it is:

World, meet Eos! The Eos Community Connections Portal - scheduled to launch in December of 2022 - is the culmination of over three years of work by an established non-profit company to develop and deliver a uniquely powerful community-building and community-support system that’s also integrates many compelling features that offer a fresh, safe alternative to conventional social media, event management, discussion forum, blog, and story sharing platforms. We guarantee to never sell Eos user data or allow advertisements to paid accounts on the platform, and all users agree to abide by our Good Human Code of Conduct (™) or risk losing their accounts. The primary goal is to build better community by providing a place to connect online with other people and organizations in a safer, more authentic way. If you happen to be in a city where we’ve already established a local footprint, you’ll find that our in-person spaces operate on the same principles of community orientation, safety, respect, and integrity. I’ll wrap this series up with a simple invitation: come check out Eos for yourself on the TILC website or at eosportal.org and see if it feels like a community you’d like to be part of. It isn’t perfect and we’ll be continually evolving it to best meet the needs of people and communities across all of North America. Come be part of something amazing with us!

Looking back on the previous nine posts, I’ve covered a lot of ground in this series about redefining online community. Here’s a concise summary of the earlier posts:

Post 1: on authentic online community. We collectively need safe, authentic community more than ever, and to feel truly connected to those communities using online platforms, and the platforms that are currently mainstream fall short in a number of ways. In the words of Adrienne LaFrance “…we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web … and we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now."

Post 2: social media with a heart. Research by Statista shows that social media plays a huge role in the ways we interact and relate to one another in this day and age. Today's popular social media platforms serve such an important function for many of us that about 82% of us (223 million people) in the US regularly used one or more of them, as of 2020. There are, however, major issues with the mainstream social media platforms, including privacy concerns, data leaks, and incendiary content, the monetization of our personal data, and research showing that these platforms can severely affect peoples’ mental health.
Post 3: resource-matching platforms. Major life transitions sometimes come at you in waves. When they do, you’ll have to figure out how to navigate more than one major life change at the same time – which can be overwhelming. When dealing with big life changes, emotional support is an important protective factor for dealing with life’s difficulties, and the most obvious sources of that support – family, friends, churches, and mental health professionals – sometimes fall short, leaving you isolated and confused. There are also resource-matching sites available to help you quickly and privately find what you need, but they’re limited to the resources that are currently listed in their databases, and they can also yield an overwhelming amount of information to sort through. We need a new community support system that operates with the speed and scale of the internet, while making it simpler to find exactly what you need in a safe, private, and compassionate way.
Post 4: blogs and podcasts. Blogs and podcasts offer the ability to share and shape opinions from peer to peer, but there’s so much out there that it can be a challenge to sort through everything to find what’s most relevant and helpful. Looking in the right places, knowing the right search terms to use, and effective use of filtering are all important tools to use to get to the exact information you need. In the end, it’s on each of us to use the tools available to us wisely and efficiently, and we need to choose our online information sources carefully.
Post 5: discussion forums and redefining community. Online discussion forums can be an amazing place to make connections and have real conversations with like-minded people about your shared interests. You can start to feel like you belong to a larger, online “community” of people that share an interest in a particular topic, and you can even form friendships with the people you connect with there. The downsides to discussion forums can include information overload from ineffective filters, personal safety issues due to insufficient protection policies and tools, and data security issues from having personal data shared with or sold to people you don’t know.
Post 6: online groups and event management sites. Apps that offer Groups features can make it easy to connect with specific sets of people - like teammates or coworkers – and offer dedicated spaces where you can share updates, photos, or documents and message other group members. Event management sites can be very good for managing and promoting your own events or finding events from others that look interesting. While both types are useful, the downsides to these tools are that it can be challenging to keep member information current, so a portion of what you find may be outdated, and sometimes ineffective codes of conduct for these groups and their events can allow inappropriate or uncomfortable things to be found on their sites.
Post 7: the real cost of “free” apps. Nearly all of the online community platforms and apps that are popular today come from for-profit companies, and all for-profit companies sell something with the objective to make as much money as they can doing so. Whoever is paying for that something is the real customer, so if you aren’t paying to use the platform or app, then you probably aren’t the customer – you’re the product. In these instances, platforms collect data while you’re using their product and then sell it to advertisers, sponsors, or data aggregators that use it for their own purposes. Many of us have therefore knowingly or unknowingly sacrificed our data privacy in order to access all manner of free stuff on the web – and most of us have come to accept it without question.
Post 8: balancing safety with freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Providing a consistently safe, healthy online space for people to share their experiences, thoughts, ideas, and feelings while also encouraging people to show up in their most authentic way poses a real challenge. Sometimes thoughts and feelings can be messy, and true honesty can sometimes mean saying things they don’t necessarily want to hear. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are very important concepts that we value highly, so we based our “Good Human Code of Conduct” on a few clear guiding principles: community orientation, safety, respect, and integrity. None of us wants to be told how to behave, but we believe that embracing and reinforcing these principles allows people to feel safe in our in-person and online community space while allowing people to show up in authenticity. It’s a good start, and we’ll learn and evolve it along the way.
Post 9: addressing online safety, security, and privacy. The internet is generally an amazing place, but it can also be unforgiving, hostile, and unsafe. Toxic content, rude interactions, bullying, gambling and addictions are all realities in the online spaces. A “safe online community,” like the one we’re building effectively and transparently, protects its members – in fact, safety is one of the core tenets of the community we’re building. “We are safe: We speak and act toward all members in ways that safeguard or protect them from harm or danger of all kinds - including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.” Data privacy and security is also vitally important to us, so we’ve designed and built Eos to be highly secure, meaning our members can trust that their personal, private information stays private. On top of that we promise in the Eos terms of use that we will never sell our members’ information to anyone, and we decided that we wouldn’t host advertisers on our platform at all.

]]><![CDATA[Redefining online community part 9: addressing online safety, security, and privacy.]]>Wed, 11 May 2022 13:26:16 GMThttp://theintentionallivingcollective.org/cals-blog/part-9-redefining-online-community-online-safety-security-and-privacyAuthor Cal Loo is a serial social entrepreneur, the founder and executive director of a nonprofit company, a self-professed techie at heart, a 30-year tech consultant, and an ordained ceremonialist. He has been blogging about living more intentionally and navigating major life transitions since 2015. In this ninth piece in a ten-part series Cal explores the concepts of online safety, security and privacy. In the final post he’ll close the series by introducing the Eos Community Connections Portal – an online community connections portal unlike any other.

Online safety - a complex concept to define and a challenging one to deliver.
The internet is an amazing place, but it can also be an unforgiving, hostile place. While it’s great to stay connected with friends on social media, get the most recent news updates anytime/anywhere, and use your smartphone to find virtually anything you want, there are many downsides. Toxic content, rude interactions, bullying, gambling and addictions are all realities in the online space, and in extreme cases they can lead to threats of physical danger and violence that end up in the headlines - as in the example mentioned in this 2018 Washington Post article by Rachel Hatzipanagos. The reality of these experiences can be harmful to the mental health and emotional well-being of participants, and as I mentioned in part 2 of this series, many people are ditching their social media accounts because of it. If you’re going to be online - and most people are in some shape or form - then you need to take steps to protect yourself from the bad stuff. Esmée Telman’s April 2022 Mashable article gives five practical tips for staying safe online and it’s worth a quick read. There’s a lot more to it of course, but this is at least a place to start.

The fact that all this online yuck exists means that a “safe online community” like the one we’re building at The Intentional Living Collective needs to effectively and transparently protect its members from it. Actually, the very concept of safety - online and in person - is a challenging one to define, but it’s so vitally important that one of our core values at The Intentional Living Collective directly addresses it. Regarding safety we say “We are safe: We speak and act toward all members in ways that safeguard or protect them from harm or danger of all kinds - including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.” Saying it isn’t enough though - we also have policies and procedures in place to back it up. Our approach starts with the fact that only registered members that have accepted our Good Human Code of Conduct can either post content in our platform or reply to posts by members. Our code of conduct is pretty simple and clearly defines eight shared-community values that add up to just being, well, good human beings towards each other. Our transparent and fair content flagging and moderation policy and processes are explicitly designed to safeguard and protect members from experiencing unfriendly words and unsafe actions from anyone on our platform, and people that don’t live up to their agreement will lose their accounts. Importantly, our processes begin with facilitated member to member conflict resolution, and then adds layers of escalation support that ultimately ends up at a “Member Escalations Team,” made up of respected community members, for a final decision.

The difference between feeling safe and feeling comfortable.
When it comes to online safety there’s an important difference between feeling unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. While it’s important to help people feel safe, it’s also important to not take things so far as to disallow or even discourage content or interactions that have good intentions but might push someone’s comfort zone a bit. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff do a great job of explaining that many in today’s society mistake feelings of discomfort for being unsafe, and how this can lead them to calling for the canceling of anything or anyone that pushes their boundaries. Sadly this can also result in an artificially sterile - but “safe” - interpersonal environment, and the loss of meaningful opportunities for important learning and growth.

I witnessed this first-hand in a men’s group meeting over a decade ago, and it’s something I keep in mind even now. I was active in the Mankind Project at the time and we were in a closed-circle, safe-space discussion about some challenging personal things that we were all working on at the time. One of the members was talking about the work he was doing to overcome toxic-male programming passed down through his father, describing how his father had called him a “pussy” for the way he handled a situation and told him that he needed to “man up!” One of the newer members was listening to the story and raised his hand, calling “safety” - which is a way of saying that he didn’t feel safe in the situation. One of the more senior members recognized that hearing the story had triggered something inside the newer member, and calmly asked him what about hearing the story was an actual threat to his physical, mental, or emotional safety. Upon thinking it through, the newer member realized that there was nothing in the room, in that moment, that could actually hurt him and so he could “safely” continue to be part of the conversation. Similarly, in online community space it takes some work sometimes to recognize which elements are truly unsafe and which ones are merely uncomfortable - and then to know how to deal with them appropriately.

Online security and privacy considerations
According to Wikipedia, data security means protecting digital data, such as those in a database, from destructive forces and from the unwanted actions of unauthorized users,[1] such as a cyberattack or a data breach. I could list endless examples of recent data breaches; it seems I’m constantly either reading stories about data getting stolen from a social media site, or hearing from my credit card company that my data had been stolen and I need to replace my card. Because I don’t trust that my data is secure, I’m reasonably careful about how much of my data I put into my online profiles. With that in mind, we’re designing the Eos Community Connections Portal to be highly secure, so our members can trust that their personal, private information stays private. To ensure privacy, we started by committing that we would never sell our members’ information to anyone, and we decided that we wouldn’t host advertisers on our platform at all. To minimize security risks, we chose a platform host that offers sophisticated security features, and implemented them across our site. We have also developed solid data management practices to lock things down as much as possible. While it isn’t possible to absolutely guarantee that data privacy or security incursions won’t happen, we can feel pretty good that we’re doing everything we can to prevent them and keep our members’ data safe.

Coming up next: Bringing it all together with the Eos Community Connections Portal.

]]><![CDATA[Redefining online community Part 8: freedom of expression in online communities]]>Fri, 15 Apr 2022 00:54:54 GMThttp://theintentionallivingcollective.org/cals-blog/redefining-online-community-part-8-freedom-of-expression-in-online-communitiesFinding and holding a very delicate balance …
To be honest I’ve been looking forward to writing about this particular topic since I first envisioned this ten-part blog series. I’ve known from the very beginning of the Eos project that we’d be challenged to strike a delicate balance between providing an assuredly safe, healthy space for people to share their experiences, thoughts, ideas, and feelings while also encouraging people to show up in their most authentic way. Sometimes thoughts and feelings can be messy, and being real with people can sometimes mean saying things they don’t necessarily want to hear.

Creating such a space to me ultimately comes down to a few clear guiding principles: community orientation, safety, respect, and integrity. Not coincidentally, those happen to be part of the core value set of The Intentional Living Collective, and they’re four of the core tenets of the Good Human Code of Conduct upon which the Eos content curation and member dispute processes are based. More on that later - but for now I’ll summarize this to say that all members agree to a.) value all member voices and strive for productive and healthy collaborations between all, b.) behave toward all members in ways that help them feel safe in all situations, c.) let their actions and words reflect our values and strive to meet our commitments, and d.) treat all members with respect at all times and use language that reflects appreciation of their wisdom and perspective. Further, all members agree to hold themselves and each other accountable for following these principles and we’ve built fair and transparent processes to help enforce them when needed.

So about that first amendment …
Freedom of speech is the right to express opinions without government restraint, and in the United States the First Amendment guarantees free speech - though it also places limits on this freedom. I thought the SCOTUS decision in Texas v. Johnson was particularly interesting. The First Amendment applies only to state actors, and there is a common misconception that it prohibits anyone from limiting free speech, including private, non-governmental entities. A private organization can and in some cases should place limits on speech in the interest of protecting its members - if it’s done in fairness and with respect to all involved.

Freedom of expression is considered by the United Nations (UNESCO) to be the cornerstone of democracy. International human rights laws protect freedom of expression, and one of the most fundamental documents is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) drafted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948. In Article 19 of the UDHR, it states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Even though there are fundamental laws protecting freedom of expression, there are multiple international laws that expand on the UDHR and pose limitations and restrictions, specifically concerning the safety and protection of individuals. For example, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) addresses hate speech through the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and monitors its implementation by State parties. Also article 20(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) prohibits national, religious, or racial hatred that incites violence, discrimination, or hostility.

So who decides what content or speech is and isn’t acceptable?
Oh man, there’s a lot to explore here. If you want to explore this topic in more depth than I can possibly cover in a single blog post, please feel free to dive into this wiki on freedom of speech and expression. For now I’ll just touch on a couple of specific subtopics - obscenity and hate speech.

Obscenity. In a 1964 case about pornography, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in Jacobellis v. Ohio, famously said that, although he could not precisely define pornography, "I know it when I see it". Later, the Court decided Miller v. California (1973) and said that a work is obscene if: (a) 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find the work, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest ... (b) ... the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) ... the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Interestingly, “Community" standards—not national standards—are applied to determine whether allegedly obscene material appeals to the prurient interest and is patently offensive. The standards of the Eos community, then, are the ones that will guide us as to what’s offensive and what isn’t.

Hate speech. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation". Laws against hate speech can generally be divided into two types: those intended to preserve public order and those intended to protect human dignity. The line between free speech and hate speech is a tricky one, as evidenced when the ACLU defended a neo-nazi group over freedom of speech. In the case of Eos, our content guidelines will serve both of those purposes - and not just in cases of obscenity or hate speech.

Community standards and content curation
The concept of “Community standards” seems like a pretty reasonable place to start, right? Except … someone has to define what those standards are. In defining the Eos “Good Human Code of Conduct” (GHCOC) we start with the understanding that we’re all unique individuals and that none of us want to be unnecessarily controlled or told how to behave. To that end, we knew it was important to give “clear enough” guidance on what is and isn’t okay while providing enough room for individuals to express themselves in their most authentic way. We based the GHCOC on the eight core values of The Intentional Living Collective: community, safety, integrity, respect, fairness, supportiveness, constructiveness, and organicness (yes, that’s really a word) and we put it right into the membership agreement that everyone signs before they can post any content on Eos. To reiterate - anyone can view the non-private content that’s posted in Eos, but only members that agree to behave according to the GHCOC can post content. While that may sound prescriptive on face value, I believe that this is the most fair and enforceable way to create a safe space for all members.

So if all members agree to follow the GHCOC when posting content or interacting with other members, who is responsible for enforcing the GHCOC and how will they do it? Simply put, the community is. The Eos content curation system, also clearly spelled out in the membership agreement, is based on three key principles: transparency, fairness, and community determination and enforcement. To summarize the process, members first hold themselves accountable to follow the GHCOC, then they gently hold each other accountable, then they can ask for moderator intervention if needed, and unresolved conflicts between members are ultimately decided by an escalation team run by actual community members. In the event that a member is an unrepentant jerk and keeps breaking the GHCOC with their content or posts, they will simply lose their account privileges.

I’ll end this post with the same honesty I started it with - I can’t even pretend to know how well this is going to work at first. I do know that it isn’t going to be perfect, and I fully expect that it’ll be tested quite fully as more and more members join and then start posting content and interacting with each other. I think we’re based on solid principles and processes, and I know we’re going to learn and adjust as we go. It’s a New Earth, and I’m super excited to be part of it!

Coming up next: Online security, privacy and safety

]]><![CDATA[Redefining online community Part 7: Seriously, most free apps aren’t really free.]]>Sun, 03 Apr 2022 18:05:34 GMThttp://theintentionallivingcollective.org/cals-blog/redefining-online-community-part-7-seriously-most-free-apps-arent-really-freeApril 2022
Author Cal Loo is a serial social entrepreneur, the founder and executive director of a nonprofit company, a self-professed techie at heart, a 30-year tech consultant, and an ordained ceremonialist. He has been blogging about living more intentionally and navigating major life transitions since 2015. In this seventh piece in a ten-part series Cal explores hidden costs of “free” app. In future posts he’ll address online security, online safety, and freedom of speech/information. He’ll close this series by introducing the Eos Community Connections Portal – an online community connections portal unlike any of the others.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”People have been throwing around this popular adage since the 1930s, basically saying that nothing is ever really free. Sometimes, you’ll just hear the acronyms TNSTAAFL, TINSTAAFL, and TANSTAAFL. It’s hard to say who actually originated it, but free-market economist, nobel laureate and author Milton Friedman popularized it with his book There’s No Such Thing As a Free Lunch. In the context of this blog, TNSTAAFL suggests that things that appear to be free will always have some hidden or implicit cost to someone, even if it is not the individual receiving the benefit.

In the software industry, we also say: “If you aren’t paying for a product, you are the product.” All-for-profit companies sell something, and their underlying objective is normally to make as much money as they can doing so. Whoever is paying for that something is the real customer. When it comes to social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram, and most search engines like Google or Bing, the platform owners make a ton of money somewhere, and it isn’t always obvious how they’re doing it. If you are using a service you don't pay for, it's because they may be selling the data they collect about you while you’re using their product, or selling ad space to sponsors that take advantage of the fact that the platform has your attention. Facebook, for example, has spent an embarrassing amount of time and energy defending their data usage and management practices. In the end, it’s become very clear that they’re engaging in business practices of which many users are unaware and may not approve. The 2020 primetime Emmy Awards winning film The Social Dilemma takes you pretty deep down this rabbit hole and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you do. I just watched it again and honestly, it was a big reason why I recently completely deleted all of my personal social media accounts.

What’s the real price of free apps?
For the purpose of this post, I’ll boil it down to three words: privacy, data, and ads.

Most people have used Google to search the internet at some time, and probably have never wondered why they don’t have to pay anything to use it. In this June 2021 Bloomberg article, authors Nico Grant, Mark Bergen, and Naomi Nix report how the US Department of Justice were accelerating their probe into Google’s digital ad market practices, and this isn’t the first time Google’s been in trouble over this. This 2012 BBC article describes how Google had at that time “started to operate under a new privacy policy that enables the Internet giant to dig even deeper into the lives of more than one billion users,” claiming that “the changes make it easier for consumers to understand how it collects personal information, while allowing it to provide more helpful and compelling services.” Most of America’s state attorney generals disagreed, along with a leading regulator in France, believing “that Google is stepping too much on our right to privacy in its continuous mission to sell more advertising.”

In the case of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook had harvested the personal data of 87 million users, which Cambridge Analytica then used to provide analytical assistance to the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

Wondering what else these companies might be doing with your personal data? In his September 2021 article in the Markup, author Alfred Ng writes “Even though companies like Facebook and Google aren’t directly selling your data, they are using it for targeted advertising, which creates plenty of opportunities for advertisers to pay and get your personal information in return. The simplest way is through an ad that links to a website with its own trackers embedded, which can gather information on visitors including their IP address and their device IDs.“ Companies pay Facebook and Google massive amounts of money to be able to more effectively market their products to you while you’re using their platforms.

In his 2012 article in Forbes, Scott Goodson closes with “... in this digital age we have sacrificed our privacy in order to access all manner of free stuff on the web. It’s a movement that most of us have come to accept. Or have we? I’ll borrow a quote I read on MetaFilter recently: ‘If you’re not paying for it; you are the product.’ I’m not sure how many people are fully aware of this sentiment yet or whether they even care. But the next time you’re browsing the web or enjoying a video on YouTube, remember that Google is watching your every move; because that’s the price you pay.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Getting to the root of the issue.
In a word, it comes down to capitalism. For-profit companies are exactly that - they’re out for profit, and to make as much money as they can from your use of their software platforms. Beyond government regulators trying to rein these companies in, I see two really good alternatives for people like us to get off this profit-crazy train: 1.) stop using their products, which is easier said than done, and 2.) find alternative platforms from companies that are transparently coming at this from a whole new perspective. Why would a non-profit company create and offer an alternative platform and forego the billions of dollars that could be made harvesting your data? Simple. To make the online community a better, healthier, and safer place.

When we started designing the Eos Community Connections Portal three years ago we decided to base it on the concept that everyone should be able to use it for free to find the resources they need and feel like part of an authentic community during challenging times. When we say free, we mean it - our privacy policy ensures that users’ personal data will never be sold and that we won’t sell aggregated user data; and we also won’t allow advertising in Eos. Developing a platform as complex and elegant as Eos and then delivering it to the world hasn’t been easy or inexpensive, and it’ll also take significant resources to manage it and develop future versions, so we’re going to offer inexpensive annual memberships in which users can post their own content on the platform and also access additional powerful features by paying a small and fair annual membership fee. Everyone will be able to use Eos for free, but if you want to post content, you’ll need to create an account and sign our user agreement. We’re on a mission to prove that authentic, healthy, and supportive online community is possible without greedily taking advantage of its members, and we believe that fair and transparent membership fees should be the actual cost of using the primary features of the platform. Eos is the Greek goddess of the dawn, and the initial release of Eos will usher in the dawn of a new kind of online community.

Coming up next: Key concept: online communities and freedom of information.

]]><![CDATA[Redefining online community Part 6: Online groups and event management sites]]>Thu, 24 Mar 2022 20:35:15 GMThttp://theintentionallivingcollective.org/cals-blog/redefining-online-community-part-6-online-groups-and-event-management-sitesFinding your people through online groups
I ended part 5 of this series by proposing this definition of community: a group of people sharing physical or virtual space that a.) have a particular characteristic or interest in common, b.) create a fellowship with others by investing time and energy into the group, and c.) have a genuine interest in the well-being of the other members. In a time when a lot of people I know - including myself - are feeling isolated, stir-crazy, and sometimes even downright lonely, it helps a ton to have websites and apps that make it easy to find different communities to explore!

Facebook Groups makes it easy to connect with specific sets of people - like teammates or coworkers - offering dedicated spaces where you can share updates, photos, or documents and message other group members. If you have a Facebook account you can easily create groups of your own: just choose its name, decide if it’s public or private, visible or hidden, and then invite other members to join. I have to admit, they make it really easy to start and manage groups of your own, and if you’re looking for groups to join I find that Facebook is eerily good at recommending groups for you - offering at a glance groups that are Suggested for You, Friends’ groups, and groups that are Popular near you. Honestly, it’s a little scary at times to realize how much Facebook knows about you, even if they do use the info to connect you to things you’re interested in. Conveniently, Facebook Events is also a good companion to Groups, making it easier to get other members’ attention and keep it. With Facebook’s calendar connection, most people have their Facebook events connected to their smartphones.

Another good example is Meetup.com, “… a platform for finding and building local communities.” People use Meetup to meet new people, learn new things, find support, get out of their comfort zones, and pursue their passions. Among a collection of almost 80,000 personal and professional groups from 45,000 different cities, virtually every interest and hobby is covered, ranging from food-related brunch and dinner groups, movie and book clubs, gardening groups, stitching groups, business networking groups, outdoor activities groups, and more. As a self-described community builder, their “Find your people!” tagline resonates with me for sure, and Meetup makes it easy to find events hosted by local groups where you can meet new people, try something new, or just do more of what you love. Once you create your account, just type in a keyword and a location and a list of related groups and events in your area pops up. It’s that easy. Like most of you, I’m ready to get back to doing things with real people in a way that doesn’t include a screen, and as the Michigan winter gives way to spring I’m really, really, REALLY ready to get outside and do something active! Turns out there’s a local group called the Ann Arbor Adventure Club that’s pretty active and it has 6,002 members - and I’m sure some of them are as ready as I am to get out safely and do something fun.

Finding and hosting fun and interesting events
When it comes to setting up and managing events or finding events that look interesting, Eventbrite has been a go-to for me both personally and professionally. Eventbrite “enables anyone to create, promote, and sell tickets to any event imaginable, while also helping people discover and share events that match their passions.” I’ve used Eventbrite for years to manage the annual Rising Phoenix Awards event when tickets are being sold, and I really like how easy it is to create events, invite people to them, promote them beyond my immediate circle, accept registrations and payments, and communicate with people that register before, during, and after the event. It’s also super easy to find interesting events to attend personally - in fact, as I was doing my research for this article, I did a quick search on fly fishing events in my area, and immediately found a weekend retreat that I want to go to this fall. And there ya go!

You should also check out Mighty Networks, who says “It’s time to give your community the platform it deserves. Mighty Networks unlocks a new era of independent communities creating and mastering something interesting or important together.” I have an account and am currently a member of one private group, and I do like how easy it is to communicate with the host and other members about what’s going on in our little community. That same host also offers a “premium” group in which they offer a paid event series, providing a simple and powerful way to offer and manage community offerings. With more of a business approach to communities, Mighty Community “is where creators and brands can build businesses they are proud of.” They offer a Community Design Accelerator Course for $349 that shows how to take your brand, course, ideas, or goals and translate them into a thriving community.

Downsides aside, these are really useful sites and apps.
It’s not all great – there are downsides to these tools for managing groups and events. First, in online community groups, it can be challenging to keep member information current. In a quick scroll through a list of other members in the Ann Arbor Adventure Club Meetups group, I found several people I already know - which is great - but I saw that the list included one that I know moved away from the area nearly a decade ago and one that passed away about five years ago. While there are certainly a good number of members that are still active, I can’t know for sure how many of the 6,002 people are really still there and engaged.

Second, there is the issue of codes of conduct for these groups and their events. It’s appropriately up to the group and event managers to establish and clearly communicate their expectations about member and/or participant behavior, but I find that often there isn’t anything to be found. As a community builder myself, I worry that this leaves the door open for inappropriate behavior that feels emotionally or physically unsafe for some participants. Check out this Sept. 2017 Medium.com article by Mike Roberts for some good thoughts and suggestions about establishing a code of conduct for groups and events that you’re part of. What does a solid code of conduct look like? Here’s a good example of Sketch.com’s code of conduct for meetups:

Of all the online community websites and apps I’ve explored in this series so far, these tools for managing groups and events are the ones that I may continue to use even after we launch the Eos Community Connections Portal. While we do plan to offer integrated tools for creating and managing both groups and events, these existing apps offer ease of use and advanced features that are compelling enough that we’ll connect to them and complement them rather than try to supplant them for our users. What we’ll do differently is offer these tools, along with all the other great features in Eos, with consistent use of our Good Human Code of Conduct - which guides members’ behavior across all elements of the platform.

Coming up next: What’s the real cost of “Free” apps?

]]><![CDATA[Redefining online community part 5: Discussion forums and redefining "community"]]>Mon, 07 Mar 2022 21:39:37 GMThttp://theintentionallivingcollective.org/cals-blog/march-07th-2022Making connections with previously-unknown speed and scale.
If you’re looking to make connections and have real conversations with like-minded people about your shared interests, then online discussion forums can be an amazing place! You can find and engage people that share an interest in virtually any subject with just a few clicks. Impressive as that is, the sheer scale of the engagements you can create may be even more impressive than the speed! Within seconds of signing into my Reddit or Quora accounts, I can literally start or join conversations with other interested users from anywhere in the world. Not familiar? Reddit is an online network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies, and passions. Reddit is broken up into more than a million communities known as “subreddits” each of which covers a different topic. It’s easy to get started by creating your own account, and Jake Widman of Digital Trends offers a decent primer for getting started using Reddit. Quora defines itself as an online place to gain and share knowledge; a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers, empowering people to learn from each other and to better understand the world. Deepak Mehta offers a good guide for getting started on Quora in this blogpost.

Want some examples of the impressive scale of these kinds of platforms? I’ve been fly fishing for almost 30 years, and I love learning about beautiful new places to fly fish and hearing about others’ experiences catching species that I haven’t. With my Reddit account I can hit the r/flyfishing subreddit and immediately join in conversations with the 135,000 members around the world. Think that’s a lot? The r/interestingasfuck subreddit has 9.3 million members - seriously - and browsing there will take me to interesting places I never would’ve imagined on my own. On Quora, I can choose the topic addiction & mental health and get immediate access to posts by or Q&A threads involving 8 contributors and 17,900 followers. I can also just dial up the topic of mental health and jump in with 108 contributors and 46,000 followers. The internet has enabled us to connect with other people in ways never before possible, enabling us to share data, information, opinions, and feelings with speed and scale never possible before.

Getting help, finding help, and seeking a diversity of opinions.
So what do you DO with all these connections? Sure, you can gain and share knowledge from reading others’ posts and even participating in chats with them - these ARE discussion forums, after all! At a high level you can start to feel like you belong to a larger, online “community” of people that share an interest in a particular topic, and you can even form friendships with the people you connect with there. These platforms can also make it easy to get help from other members of that “community,” allowing you to gain information you didn’t already have, hear perspectives and opinions that are different from yours, and even get personal references to other helpful people or organizations that aren’t already directly involved in the conversation.

I’ll use Stack Overflow - an online community for app developers that lets them learn, share their programming knowledge, and build their careers - as an example. In a former role as the third-party app developer program manager for a company in Sweden, I had to build a community of app developers all interested in creating mobile apps using our software and hardware technologies to transform smartphones into legit thermal cameras. We created an in-house website that included a dedicated discussion forum, but I also realized that we needed to meet the developer community in a more public place to make it easy for them to communicate with us and with each other, so I created an account on Stack Overflow. I found that the developers I worked with tended to use the in-house discussion forum to communicate directly with my colleagues and our technical support team, while using Stack Overflow more often to interact more freely with each other where they felt more open to share opinions, things they learned, and information about other helpful resources. They learned from, supported, and complained to each other; they formed connections beyond what they were working on for my program, and they helped each other build their experiences and career paths.

The dark side of all these online connections and discussions.
To be honest I’m not spending much time at all on these discussion forums outside of work right now, for a number of reasons. First, as I mentioned in an earlier post, information overload is a real thing, and I found myself getting overwhelmed with posts and responses in the discussion forums that I found to be irrelevant, un-interesting, or “off-key” for my tastes. Everyone is welcome to their own opinions of course, but I don’t need to hear all of them and I definitely don’t want to hear them from people that are being rude or disrespectful. On the other side of that issue, I don’t personally find satisfaction or a sense of connection from the many impersonal, shallow responses I encountered.

Second, personal safety is a real concern on multiple levels. Most discussion forum platforms offer engagement rules that instruct people to be good to each other (like Reddit’s “Be Civil” policy and Quora’s “BNBR” (Be nice, be respectful) policy), but realistically online platforms often give people a sense of anonymity, so they’ll say things in ways they normally wouldn’t. If the platform’s rules and enforcement policies and processes don’t have enough teeth, then there is no true accountability for the things users say online. It can feel mentally and emotionally unsafe to put your authentic thoughts, feelings, and opinions into that space. Further, there are documented cases where some users have threatened other users’ physical safety - and really, who has time or energy for that?

Third, data security issues are also a real thing. This 2019 Digital Trends article about a security breach at Quora that affected about 100 million users is downright scary. A clear commitment to protect users’ data is a good place to start, and an explicit commitment to never sell users’ data is even better. More on that in a future post.

(Photo credit Douglas County Sheriff)

In the first post in this series I explored what exactly a “community” is, and these two definitions served as a starting point: Community (noun): a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common. Also: a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.

Closing out this post about discussion forums I’d like to suggest a better definition: Community (noun): a group of people sharing physical or virtual space that a.) have a particular characteristic or interest in common, b.) create a fellowship with others by investing time and energy into the group, and c.) have a genuine interest in the well-being of the other members.

That’s the kind of online community I’d like to be part of, and I’m honored to be part of the team creating it in the Eos Community Connections portal.

Coming up next: Event management platforms.

]]><![CDATA[Redefining online community Part 4: The wide and deep world of blogs and podcasts]]>Tue, 01 Mar 2022 02:19:07 GMThttp://theintentionallivingcollective.org/cals-blog/part-4-the-wide-and-deep-world-of-blogs-and-podcastsIt’s a big, big world and there’s something for everyone.
We live in the information age, which the Cambridge dictionary defines as “the present time, in which large amounts of information are available because of developments in computer technology.” In this age, the ability to shape opinions from peer to peer has grown vital. Two popular and powerful vehicles for the flow of that information that I personally tune into are blogs and podcasts, and in this post I’m going to explore how we might be affected by both.

Chances are pretty good that somebody’s doing a blog or podcast about everything and anything you might be interested in, and services like Spotify and Podbean make it really easy to find a plethora of information anytime. Looking for some solid ideas about how to handle home and family issues in today’s chaotic world? Check out Becky Mansfield’s Your Modern Family blog site. Want to learn about how the actions of humans could inadvertently lead to the end of civilization and what we can each do to prevent it? Explore it with Josh in The End of The World with Josh Clark. Maybe you’re pondering what it means to be human and who we will be to each other in community as things evolve – in which case you might enjoy checking out the Peabody-award winning On Being podcast by Krista Tippett or the excellent Sam Harris podcast Making Sense. In the big, big online world I honestly find that the challenge isn’t to FIND information about virtually anything – it’s to sort through everything that’s out there to get to the stuff that’s most relevant and helpful to what I’m exploring.

Breadth and depth.
Looking to explore a really broad set of related topics? Pick your subject and go! With a quick online search you’ll find blogs and podcasts that take you to the most remote corners of whatever you’re interested in. A good example is the earlier-mentioned Your Modern Family blog site, where Becky Mansfield – a mother, a wife, an elementary-school teacher, and a child-development therapist - covers family-related topics ranging from marriage, parenting and kids activities to saving money and preparing healthy meals for your family. On sites like hers, you benefit from the knowledge, experience, opinions, and resource-base of a real person who has personally walked a path similar to your own – and who isn’t trying to convince you to buy something while you’re there.

Want to go really deep on something and learn from experts in the field? The information age blesses us with access to the most amazing people from almost any discipline you can think of. As a social entrepreneur building something vastly different from anything I’ve seen out there, I’m learning a ton from the How I Built This podcast by Guy Raz. He does in-depth, insightful interviews with other builders who created something amazing, and then chose to share their amazing stories for the benefit of people just like me. I particularly got into his January 2022 interview with Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson, in which a Buddhist monk and a man burnt out from a high-powered job at a London ad agency tell how they collaborated to create Headspace - a guided meditation app that now has users in 190 countries and annual revenue over $100 million. Another really good interview with a thought leader that got me thinking in a whole different way is Krista Tippett’s February 2022 interview with visionary Trabian Shorters about the concept of asset framing. As a community builder, the idea of defining and engaging the people I’m trying to serve in terms of the assets they bring to the table rather than their deficiencies is so important - and yet so simple. Seriously, how else would I possibly get insights from people like Andy, Rich, and Trabian?

Swimming in the wide, deep ocean.
In my mind, the idea of navigating the near-infinite breadth and seemingly limitless depth of the world of blog sites and podcasts conjures a vision of getting dropped into the middle of a vast ocean. Can it be invigorating and exciting? For sure! Is it easy and completely safe? Ehhhh … maybe not so much.

It’s certainly easy to find general information in this wide and deep ocean, but finding the specific, useful, high-quality info you seek can be a challenge. Whether you’re using Google, Bing, Safari, or DuckDuckGo, the results of any basic search will return more information than you can possibly use and much of it won’t be useful at all. Information overload is a real thing! Looking in the right places, knowing the right search terms to use, and effective use of filtering are all important tools to use to most easily get to the exact information you need.

While there aren’t any literal sharks swimming around in this ocean of information, there are certainly metaphorical predators to keep an eye out for. While you’re busily searching and surfing the internet, there are often dark shadows emerging from the depths to check you out as possible prey as well. For one, nefarious characters like phishers, scammers, or hackers will try to capture personal information about you and use it in ways you don’t want them to. My father was the victim of identity theft from online activity and it literally took him years to recover. Another facet of online safety is risk to your personal mental and emotional health from harmful or even toxic responses to anything you post about yourself. The online world allows for a level of anonymity that lets some people behave without fear of accountability, and as such, people will say rude, offensive, and hurtful things online that they’d never say in person. On a less-obvious level, many of the big tech companies that provide these online tools and applications are tracking all of your online actions and using that data to make money off of you – whether they sell you something or simply sell your personal data to someone else to be used in any way they wish.

Yes, the information age has presented a glorious amount of information to us all – and it’s on each of us to protect ourselves in this figurative ocean and use the tools available to us wisely and efficiently. I close today with a suggestion to choose your online information source carefully. (You’ll want to check out the soon-to-be-released Eos Community Connections Portal, brought to you by an established non-profit company that guarantees it won’t sell your data or allow advertisers to prey on you. The information you’ll find in it is on topic and easy to filter. Only members that have accepted the Good Human Code Of Conduct(™) can post information in Eos, and Eos’ fair and transparent content moderation processes will shield you from mistreatment at the hands of other members.

Coming up next: Online discussion forums.

]]><![CDATA[Redefining online community Part 3: Resource matching platforms – your “go-to” when you need to find help]]>Wed, 16 Feb 2022 19:30:26 GMThttp://theintentionallivingcollective.org/cals-blog/part-3-resource-matching-platforms-your-go-to-when-you-need-to-find-helpWe all need help sometimes!
The singularly toughest period of my life, in which I faced one major life transition after another, felt like a series of waves crashing over me so quickly that I could barely catch my breath. A painful divorce. The birth of my son the same week the divorce went final. Leaving a job. Starting a new job. Selling a home. Buying a home. The death of a loved one. Seven of the most challenging things I’d ever faced, all hitting within a few months of each other. I wasn’t prepared for all of this – I mean, who gets taught how to navigate this kind of thing? Not knowing where to turn I reached out to family, friends, church, therapists … and in the end, I found that all of them wanted to help, but none of them could truly understand me, much less help me. And so I felt alone; like I needed to figure it all out on my own. And I did, and I learned and I healed and I grew … and I resolved to one day create a “safe port in the storm” to help people understand that they aren’t alone even in those dark times and to help them find the resources they need. Major life transitions sometimes do come at you in waves, and when they do you’ll have to figure out how to navigate more than one major life change at the same time like I did. If you find yourself in that position here are two things I learned that may help: the first is that we’re actually a lot stronger than we know. Our true strength doesn’t reveal itself until we’re tested. The second is that with hope, inspiration, belief in ourselves, and access to resources, we can get through just about anything.

I’ll put it right out there that I brought most of these big changes – and the massive stresses that came with them - on myself. I could’ve made different, safer decisions and chosen an easier, more comfortable path, but doing so would’ve meant taking another big hit of Novocaine for the soul, and accepting a life in which I could never truly be myself. The decisions I made – starting with the gut-wrenching decision to end a marriage that looked idyllic to most – weren’t popular or easy to understand. That first decision set in motion a domino effect that ended up costing me nearly everything that was important to me at the time, but in the long run allowed me to reclaim my soul and become someone I’m proud of today.

Sometimes it’s really hard to find the help you need, when you need it.
When shit hit the fan, my first instinct was to turn to family and friends. I’m blessed with a loving and supporting nuclear family that loves me and wanted to help, so I went to them first. But we lived across the country from them, so they didn’t see the day-to-day things that wore away at what started as a lovely relationship. I found that my decisions and direction were outside of what was considered normal or acceptable in the eyes of my family and church, and so it was hard for me to really open up to them and to not feel judged in some ways. While my ex and I were also blessed with large group of friends, most of them didn’t understand my decisions and vilified me to the extent that I came out with only two friendships intact. In an October 2019 American Psychological Association article titled “Manage stress: Strengthen your support network”, authors Mary Alvord, PhD, Bert Uchino, PhD, and Vaile Wright, PhD, write “Emotional support is an important protective factor for dealing with life’s difficulties. The 2015 survey found the average stress level for those with emotional support was 5.0 out of 10, compared to 6.3 for those without such support.” My experience taught me that family and friends can be an amazing source of support and love during challenging times, but I probably needed to invest more in strengthening those relationships much earlier - and even then, they can’t always see things through your eyes and may not be able to give you the support you need.

I also turned to professionals for help for the first time ever, and admittedly I found it really hard at first. I felt like asking for that kind of help was a weakness and it took some work to overcome the stigma of “working with a shrink.” I’m really glad I did though; there are huge potential benefits of therapy as explained by Sara Lindberg in her October 2020 Healthline.com article. My (ex) wife and I worked with marriage counselors trying to get things back on track, and even though it didn’t work well for us, I learned a lot about myself in the process. When that failed, I sought out another therapist for individual counseling. Once I found someone that I was comfortable with, I did a significant amount of work on my own and again learned a lot about myself in the process. In the end, however, it felt to me like he wanted to figure me out, put a label on my “condition,” and write a prescription to fix it. I disagreed with his course of action and decided to follow my own heart, much to his disapproval, and again felt judged harshly by someone I had turned to for help. I learned from this that therapists and other mental health professionals can teach us a lot about ourselves and give us new tools that can be a huge help in times of need, but also that therapy isn’t for everybody, every therapist isn’t a great fit, and that sometimes the professionals don’t have all the right answers.

Depending on what you’re facing, I think you’ll find there are a plethora of other resources and programs that can help, many of which you can access online. One example is United Way 211, a free and confidential service that helps people across North America find the local resources they need 24/7. Most of the yearly 20 million 211 calls, web chats, and text messages are from people looking for help meeting basic needs like housing, food, transportation, and health care. Another good example is The Life Transition Zone, an online resource-matching service that offers you hope & inspiration through the power of personal story as well as access to local and national resources to help on your journey. Their resources are organized by major life transition, so finding what you need in your area is as simple as choosing the transition you’re facing and then setting filters to narrow down the search results. I find that current resource-matching sites like these can be excellent ways to quickly and privately find what you need, but they’re limited to the resources that are currently listed in their databases and they can also yield an overwhelming amount of information to sort through to find what might work best for you.

A better way!
If you have an existing network of trusted family and friends, that’s a good place to start when looking for help and support. Working with a therapist can also be extremely helpful, if you can connect with one that you’re comfortable with and whose style and skills get you the results you need. Using tools like United Way 211 and The Life Transition Zone may also help you find helpful programs and resources, though they have limitations as well. Recognizing that there should be a better way led me to create a nonprofit company called The Intentional Living Collective years later, and we envision a better tool that anyone can use to find the resources they need, anytime they need them. That tool is being built as a multi-sided platform that will make it very fast and easy to find a breadth of relevant services and programs and then filter through the results to narrow it down to your best options. We’ve prioritized keeping your information secure, our privacy policy ensures your data will never be sold or misused, and our member code of conduct ensures that you can safely share what you want without experiencing rude or hostile responses from other members. There’s a unique “Community Support” feature that makes it easy for like-minded individuals in the community to give help to or get help from each other, and a transparent member-rating system based on feedback from other community members helps you figure out who you want to trust. This resource-matching tool is one of the really cool features you’ll find in our Eos Community Connections Portal when it’s released – stay tuned!

Coming up next: The big world of blogs and podcasts.

]]><![CDATA[Redefining online community Part 2: Social media with a soul? Yes, please!]]>Fri, 04 Feb 2022 18:04:08 GMThttp://theintentionallivingcollective.org/cals-blog/part-2-social-media-with-a-soul-yes-pleaseI’ll just say it - sometimes I really struggle with social media.
Today's popular social media platforms serve such an important function for many of us that about 82% of us (223 million people) in the US regularly used one or more of them in 2020, according to Statista. Datareportal reports that in the third quarter of 2019 there were 3.5 billion social media users across the globe. Despite the societal ills and perils wrought by the most widely used platforms (more on that later), these numbers suggest that social media plays a huge role in the ways we interact and relate to one another in this day and age.

Why are so many people using today’s popular social media platforms even knowing that they may be bad for them? Truthfully there is no universal answer, as the reasons we flock to these platforms vary as widely as the individual identities we bring to them. Many feel isolated and lonely as the pandemic persists, and social media is an easy way to connect with friends and loved ones, no matter how inferior that connection might be as a substitute for IRL interaction. Some fear missing out on the latest pop culture news, social event or meme – a phenomenon commonly known as FOMO. And because developers design these products to draw us in with likes and comments, playing on our dopamine receptors and need for social validation, many are simply addicted.

As both a techie and a skeptic, I know what these platforms are doing to me, and that I probably should have said goodbye to them long ago. And yet I remain plugged in, despite my reservations - what am I so afraid of leaving behind? In her December 2019 Psychology Today article “Can’t Delete: Why We Stay on Social Media,” Bree McEwan Ph.D. writes “Using these platforms can feel like mindless scrolling, but in fact, social media’s ability to make us more aware of our friendships and relationships may keep us tied to our accounts. Further, the author states that for her personally, quitting Facebook and Twitter “… would mean resigning a meaningful volunteer position, losing an avenue for connecting with my scout troop moms, and cutting myself off from a wise and caring network of academic mothers. I would lose connections I have made throughout my nomadic life.” It would also mean “… leaving behind not only the influencers and misinformation memes, but also community group pages, updates from cousins, news of friends over the years, memorial pages of deceased loved ones, and networks of industry colleagues.”
With this in mind, let’s take a look at those who have managed to permanently retire from their newsfeeds, and what alternatives remain for those of us who aren’t quite ready to entirely let go.

So, why are so many people ditching social media?
According to their own data, Facebook’s user base in North America shrunk from 198 million users to 196 million in just one quarter. In an article entitled “This Might Be What Finally Makes Me Quit Facebook in 2021,” journalist Jason Atken hypothesizes why two million people migrated away from the platform in such a short period of time: "There are privacy concerns, data leaks, and incendiary content, not to mention the monetization of your personal data.” Furthermore, Facebook is “… designing its product solely to make it better and more profitable for Facebook, even when that results in a worse user experience.” In general, many are coming to an understanding that the major tech companies play on human psychology and brain chemistry to keep users scrolling and maximize profits. Tristan Harris’ article “How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind – From a Magician and Google Design Ethicist,” gives an in-depth explanation of what they’re doing and how - and if you need convincing that some of these companies are acting in bad faith, you should read it. More and more people are leaving, and as recently as February 2nd, 2022 it was announced that Meta (formerly Facebook) lost over $200B (yes, Billion) in market value.

On top of privacy and psychological concerns, data in “Suicide Risk in Emerging Adulthood: Associations with Screen Time Over 10 Years” by Sarah M. Coyne, et. al, suggests that the negativity and incendiary content that plague these platforms can severely affect peoples’ mental health. In the United States, we are in the midst of a mental health crisis of epic proportions, undoubtedly exacerbated by the negativity we encounter on social media in addition to the isolation wrought by the COVID-19 crisis. People are re-evaluating what and who are important to them, where they want to work and live, what they want to do with their time, and what being in community really means to them. How many times have you seen a friend announce that they're "taking a break" from social media? It happens a lot, and often the user is back on the platform shortly after the announcement. In the words of earlier-mentioned author Bree McEwan Ph.D, “People aren’t making a choice about whether or not to leave a social media platform, they are making a choice about whether to leave their personal social network. Leaving Facebook isn’t about leaving Mark Zuckerberg, it’s about leaving Aunt Rose.” Personally I’d leave Zuckerberg in a hot minute if there was a better alternative, and I think “leaving Aunt Rose” is better than staying connected in an unhealthy, unsatisfying way.

A fresh alternative
So we know that social media platforms are actively harmful to our mental health, but so is social isolation. Where do we go from here? How can we connect in a more mindful, healthy way? In her December 2020 Atlantic article, Adrienne Lafrance wrote that “We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now."
Who are these people and where are they now? Knowing that profit and greed drive the many things wrong with today’s popular social media platforms, how can we trust that an alternative wouldn’t eventually lead us down a similar path? One possible answer is that an established non-profit company or benevolent social enterprise could step up and deliver a fresh, alternative social media platform that doesn’t depend on making money from selling user data or selling advertisements to those users. Their primary goal could be to provide a better way for us to build community, and to give us all a place to connect with other people and organizations in a safer, more authentic way. They’d likely offer up a privacy policy that guarantees they would never sell users’ personal data, and transparently give users the ability to determine which other users could and couldn’t see their personal data. They would not allow annoying advertisements or in-system direct marketing at users. They would commit to not using self-serving algorithms to determine who sees what content and when. They may also create an emotionally safe environment by establishing and enforcing a set of basic, shared community values that all users would have to agree to before posting any viewable content. They’d create a fair and transparent system to ensure that people are held accountable for their words and actions toward other users, and that system would include actual community members to make sure the will of the greater community is heard and enforced.
Hmm, that sounds like an interesting platform, and it would be an ambitious undertaking to say the least! A platform like that wouldn’t be for everyone, but a sizable portion of the crowd currently using social media platforms might welcome the change.

Personally, I’ve had Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and other social media accounts for years. Admittedly, they often feel like an addiction.. For me, online dating apps were even more addictive - I had accounts on three different dating sites/apps until very recently, and I found myself searching sites for possible matches, responding to messages from people I don’t know and likely never will, or swiping one way or the other way too much. I’ve been feeling pretty turned off by it all for months. I’m aware that the time and mental energy I put into it almost every day could be used for much better things. Working on this post inspired me, so I finally decided to pull the plug yesterday. I deleted the dating apps from my phone, and permanently deleted my accounts on all three dating sites. It felt so good to cut those cords that I decided to take it a step further and delete the social media apps from my phone as well. I would like to ultimately delete my personal social media accounts permanently as well, but my business pages are attached to them so I have to figure out how to get them to stand alone before I do. But I will. I’m encouraged by the February 2021 Guardian article “I get better sleep: the people who quit social media,” in which author Soo Youn shares first-hand stories of five people that ditched social media and found that their lives were better for it. I’m betting I’ll feel a lot of the same things these five did and I’ll be happy I did it. For me it isn’t about straight-up ditching social media, it’s about choosing to invest my time and energy in ways that are good for my soul. Plus, I happen to know that an alternative community platform like what Adrienne LaFrance called for - one with a soul - is coming, and its name is Eos. More about that in upcoming posts.

Coming up next: “Resource matching platforms – your “go-to” when you need to find help”.

]]><![CDATA[Redefining online community Part 1: On authentic online community.]]>Fri, 28 Jan 2022 17:31:49 GMThttp://theintentionallivingcollective.org/cals-blog/on-authentic-online-communityCommunity: perhaps one of the most overused word in today’s lexicon, but what does it really mean? Here’s one definition: Community (noun): a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common. Also: a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals. At face value both of those definitions of community kinda make sense, don’t they? As I apply them to my own life, however, they don’t quite fit and I suspect I’m not alone in this. In many ways I’m the proverbial “lone wolf,” in the sense that I never felt like I really belonged to any one group, and my current core attitudes, interests, goals and values have been overly influenced by any one particular fellowship, and I’ve moved around so much that until recently it’s been hard to associate very deeply with any one group or place. My “community” is a delightfully complex set of connections to a diverse set of groups and individuals that collectively make me feel like I’ve found my home, and I find that each of those connections teaches me something new. As a result, I am learning, growing, and changing in ways I’d never have imagined.

Isolation and disintegrating personal relationships. As I write this, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to persist, and after almost three years people all over the world are coping with feelings of separation and isolation. Across the US, a mental health crisis wildfire smolders, further fanned by an addiction crisis like one we’ve never seen, passionate and sometimes explosive social injustice issues, a toxic and divisive political environment, and a vicious news cycle that stokes our fears and insecurities by constantly throwing these issues in our faces. On a deeper level, how many people do you know that have ended relationships with friends, family, or partners in the last couple of years? In a December 2020 BBC Worklife article, Maddy Savage describes the pandemic "… as 'the perfect storm' for couples, with lockdowns and social distancing causing them to spend increased amounts of time together. This has, in many cases, acted as a catalyst for break-ups that may already have been in the cards, especially if previous separate routines had served to mask problems. ‘I don't think that the reasons that people are divorcing have necessarily changed. You've always had the underlying current of ‘I'm unhappy with this or that at home’. But I think it has just brought the focus on domestic arrangements really into much more sharp focus than they would ordinarily be.’” Collectively, we are approaching a breaking point in terms of the social ties that bind us, which in turn leaves many feeling even more isolated, which leads to a whole lot of people looking for a better way to connect in community. I can personally relate to this, having a three-year relationship end recently and knowing that changes related to pandemic living were big contributors.

Online community. For these reasons and more, we collectively need safe, authentic community more than ever, and to feel truly connected to those communities using online platforms.. Personally, the ways I connect with a diverse and complex set of communities has changed forever thanks to smartphones, tablets, social media sites, discussion forums, story sharing sites, and texting - and I think it's a really good thing. Oddly, however, I am often left with a feeling that I am even less connected using these platforms. Isn't it interesting how these tools that can connect us instantly with others can leave us feeling even more disconnected at our core, which craves for a more meaningful and tangible community?

Many of us have gotten caught up in the always-on, oversubscribed, information-overloaded, constantly-interrupted, "do-do-do" lifestyle that leaves us feeling stretched thin and stressed out. Adding to the stress, we’re frequently exposed to negativity and incendiary content on today’s online community platforms, which has been shown to harm mental health. I want more and better connections, but I also feel the need to unplug in equal measure.

On a deeper level, the way online community platforms have exploited us in the interest of profits for themselves and advertisers has evoked a tidal wave of distrust in their user bases. Have you seen The Social Dilemma? It's a good place to start, but be warned - the rabbit hole can go really deep, really fast! It's no wonder so many of my friends have announced that they're "taking a break" from social media.

Authentic online community. If being connected to community online is so important, and today’s popular social media platforms are indeed bad for us individually and collectively, where do we go from here? In her December 2020 article in The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance calls Facebook a "Doomsday Machine" and writes "Anyone who is serious about mitigating the damage done to humankind by the social web should, of course, consider quitting Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and any other algorithmically distorted informational environments that manipulate people. But we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather. If megascale is what gives Facebook its power, and what makes it dangerous, collective action against the web as it is today is necessary for change. The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case. We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now." I believe that a truly safe alternative community platform would need to come from someone whose primary objective isn't monetary. They would need to state up front that they'll never sell your data, allow others to use it to make money, or sell advertisements to you. They would need to require that people treat other users with civility, even when they disagree, so it's mentally and emotionally safe to show up in authenticity. They would need to have a fair and transparent process for holding people accountable for adhering to a shared community code of conduct, and that process should ultimately be enforced by representatives from the community itself. Sounds like a tall order, doesn't it? If that kind of community platform existed, would you use it?

Do you remember the old 7-Up commercials from the '70s starring Geoffrey Holder? If not, Google it. I personally think that the time is now for the “Un-cola” of online community platforms. That's what this blog series is all about, and it's why you should keep your eyes and ears open for a brand new alternative online community platform called the Eos Community Connections Portal.

Coming up next: What's wrong and right with today's social media platforms.

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Coming up next: The big world of blogs and podcasts.​

Coming up next: The big world of blogs and podcasts.