Re: [Social-discuss] Looking how to help

[Zachary Krebs]

Sure thing. I have been giving this some thought for awhile and I feel as though:

A social network should not come in place of real human interaction (in real life, in the outside world, or however you want to define this). So, to me, a social network is a tool that extends my minds ability to interact  - it facilitates and extends real world interactions. I believe the "cloud based computing" phenomena of centralization of data to be kind of how our food distribution system in America evolved (and perhaps elsewhere), that we gave up our own ability to grow food in favor of bigger, more systematized ways. These ways have not turned out to be better, its always good to know how to grow our own food and make things ourselves. So, this to me is the spirit of what free, open source software and GNU Social could be about - creating know-how in a community, and creating your own community. 

I don't like the idea of Social Networks being about blogging or tweeting about personal egotistical traits - like "oh I just brushed my teeth", or "hey I have 500 friends I don't even know!". However, some personal information is useful, but when it comes down to it reading about someone and knowing them are two different things - a social network should encourage the latter. My perspective is its a useful tool to create community - so features like...

• Facebook Groups - ability to schedule events and invite/message everyone who attends. Ability to inform people of what is going on. This is great, except the data is owned by Facebook and its extremely limited. I would like iCal feeds and RSS feeds and the ability to extend my group to do extra things (a more Drupal CMS approach - which, by the way is what I am well versed in and have a high opinion of).
• Ning Networks - the ability to spontaneously create a whole social network around a topic or a community. One where I live is extremely successful (www.ashlandresourcecenter.com), however all the data is on Ning. They want to become "the community calendar", but have no way to integrate with other networks. If GNU Social could be a "hub of community interactions/events" that would be great.
• Single Sign On (like Facebook Connect, Google, OpenID) - its very useful to have a social network login be used as the login for other sites. In my community I've built many Drupal sites with OpenID capability, would be nice to let people login and post and contribute there without having to create a separate login.
• Data Portability / Integration - would be nice to have a social network that allowed me to control what was seen/not seen and could allow me to import/export data whenever I saw fit.
  

Perhaps some of this is outside of the scope of what you are trying to accomplish or is completely irrelevant, but I hope that it will be useful in your creation of GNU Social. If its about facilitating human consciousness, choice, and getting people to connect in real life, then I would love to promote it and use it in many places. I don't have the answers as to how we could accomplish these features on a technical level, but its easy to lose sight of technology just being a tool, and its easy to get feature driven. What will make GNU Social a success is if human beings use it to create useful, meaningful life experiences. Such as "I used GNU Social to plan my wedding, it was awesome". Or, "I used GNU Social to facilitate to a community rally supporting a cause and got 500 people to show up". 


Sincerely,

Zachary Krebs

Voice:(541) 708-1163
Skype: ZacharyKrebs

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Hellekin O. Wolf <address@hidden> wrote:

On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 10:13:22AM -0700, Zachary Krebs wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I'm a complete noob to mailing lists, GNU projects, and programming in
> general. However, I find this project very interesting and have subscribed
> to the list. I have been an end-user of the various social networks for many
> years, and would be willing to add an end-user perspective, as well as do
> some work on the website for this project if needed or necessary.
>
> Thanks,
> Zachary
>

*** Hello and welcome Zachary!

I'm interested in your vision of what the ideal social networking
application should do: can you write down what functionalities you
use, what you like and dislike about current services, what you expect
from a free social networking application?

Having a non-technical view at this point cannot hurt and can indeed
help the hackers to take some distance from the code and the (complex)
technical aspects.

Cheers,

==
hk