Ad-hoc is Not Enough at Scale

There’s been a few recent conversations regarding social behavior and how to improve things within the Wikimedia movement that have caught my attention. I think these are important conversations to have, difficult and rife with misinterpretation and misunderstandings. They are, again in my opinion, the single most important thing our movement needs to figure out to succeed in increasing the diversity and representation within our movement. In both the content of our projects and those that choose to share their time in participation. We don’t need better software, we need better soft skills.

There needs to be a systemic rethinking of how we make it easier for folks to report behavioral issues – in the interface of things like WP:ANI, the handling of the case (private vs public) – but more importantly in the advocacy of “This is a place where we don’t tolerate harassment across the community – full stop. We want you to feel safe in coming forward with a report”.

We can’t continue to grow as a movement if we solely rely on individual admins and editors working in good faith in an ad-hoc manner. We can’t rely on people being strong enough in the face of adversity to have the energy to submit a report in public (with rather explicit instructions and requirements to boot).

It’s too inconsistent, fractured and obscure for mere mortals. 🙂 We need a critical rethinking of processes like ANI. We need research, design, and opportunities for admins to feel empowered to do this work.

Related: These shared experiences of a non-male community member in a male-dominated community. Like Wikimedia. Granted this is from another community outside of Wikimedia, but within the same society. There are very observable similarities.

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/8t0wpb/are_you_gonna_play_the_victim_all_life_long_my/

Link List – July 3, 2018

Here are some interesting links I’ve collected in the last few months. I want to share them. With you! So sit down, open a few tabs and enjoy. Beats spending your time doing laundry. 😉

I’m perpetually doubting my own skills and eager to improve and learn what I know; and what I don’t know. This short video and related articles on the Dunning Kruger effect is something everyone should watch. Especially those who think they’re unaffected.
https://kottke.org/18/06/the-dunning-kruger-effect-we-are-all-confident-idiots

You don’t have the right to believe whatever you want to
https://aeon.co/ideas/you-dont-have-a-right-to-believe-whatever-you-want-to

The whole family watched this fun video from PBS Eons (and Hank Green!) about how the T-Rex lost its arms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=772GiBXnWoQ

Something that might explain why some folks are on edge about race-related matters in America. Unfortunately they’re wrong, but it provides some thinking on how folks think. I always thought the US was a melting pot of multiple flavors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/opinion/america-white-extinction.html

Mr. Rogers was a big part of my childhood. Both my parents worked and I was a latchkey kid for most of my adolescence. As such, Mr. Rogers raised me and he’s a model for what kind of man I try to be like. There’s a documentary and book coming out soon about him. One of the things that has come out of this look into Rogers work is this set of rules for talking to children. I think they apply in our writing and working with communities. “Freddish” imbues writing with clarity, positivity, and simple understanding.
1
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers-neighborhood-talking-to-kids/562352/

I find these sort of introspective investigations of journalistic entities by other journalists to be a weird hyper-meta narrative of how organization and the news they produce are created. This one in particular, as Vice is a rather unorthodox and divisive group.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/inside-vice-media-shane-smith.html

I’m not a people manager, but I’d like to be one day. Like many of Rands’ past writing on the subject, this one seems incredibly apt for me. I’m not a very confrontational person. Sometimes you need to say the hard thing. That’s hard!
http://randsinrepose.com/archives/say-the-hard-thing/

As someone who works remotely (and believes everyone within a single organization should if anyone does) I found this manifesto useful. It covers tips on creating a remote-only org, how it changes the act of working, and it’s advantages.
https://www.remoteonly.org

Related to the two prior links, personal development has been on my mind as of late. Austin Kleon shares a note on figuring out what you want to learn. “the easiest way to re-invent yourself is to find something new to learn.”
https://austinkleon.com/2018/05/16/what-do-you-want-to-learn/

When seeing someone who I don’t recognize, but who obviously recognize me, I like to remind them (and myself) that sorry, my brain stopped storing that pattern and I’ll need you to help me create a new one.
https://kottke.org/18/05/mosaicism-or-dna-differences-from-cell-to-cell-not-just-person-to-person

Ok, I’m running low on time here. So more links, less talking!

Trump stuff 🤮

Other stuff

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John Roderick – XOXO Festival

A frequent guest at XOXO, John Roderick is the frontman and songwriter of The Long Winters, the receiving end of Merlin Mann’s weekly phone calls for Roderick on the Line, and one of our favorite storytellers of all time.

One of the most consistently funny talks from XOXO 2016 1 , John Roderick laid on the line the myth of no effort. 2 The idea that trying to be cool, to avoid being considered uncool, is unhealthy. Being cool is not more important than admitting to yourself and others that something required hard work. Because, as my dad likes to say, “If it wasn’t hard, they wouldn’t call it work”.

I wonder if some of this comes from the fallacy of youth. That as young people we’re not well-educated on how to take a compliment. Maybe it’s partial social anxiety at being “found out” (like imposter syndrome) so it’s easier to minimize and brush off the effort it truly took to do something. I was raised in the midwest, so part of how I was raised was to remain earnest and modest. Maybe that shortens the impact of our work and our growth as people?

In the second half of the talk Roderick got into why he kept finding himself doing things that came to him easily.

Speaking for myself (and many other people I know), some people keep doing the easy thing, or find another easy thing thinking it’s harder, but never get the courage to do the truly hard thing. Doing the truly hard thing is, unsurprisingly, hard.

So, my encouragement to you: Don’t be contented with being contented.

As Jackie put it while watching this with me, “There is always more to be done. Be ok with the ambiguity of that.”

Early 2018 Programming Note

I’m not feeling well. Stressful things have been getting to me as of late. Some are small, some are large. The short-and-long of it is that I think I need to do something different to improve my health. So, a new year is as good as an excuse as any (and the timing just works). So I’m trying a few things. Friends, bear with me.

Continue reading Early 2018 Programming Note

Internet Health Advisory

I’m the “computer guy” in my family. Which means I’m often asked about what to buy or use, if an offer online is legit or a scam, and what to do when something breaks – always the guy when something breaks. 🙂 Most of my advice is reacting to someone’s inquiry. Yet this time friends, I have an Internet health advisory to share with you all. You didn’t ask for it, it’s my opinion, but I love you and think you should consider it.

Over the last year I’ve examined how I use the Internet and am trying to to better. Social media, a never-ending stream of terrible news 1, and always more things I could be reading/doing than there is time for, have motivated me to consider how I approach my consumption and participation on the web.

First bit of advice, get off social media. Bookmark a few sites to check. Sign up for an RSS service and throw a few URLs in. Foster Kramer writes 2 in a “An open memo, to all marginally-smart people/consumers of internet “content””

“By going to websites as a deliberate reader, you’re making a conscious choice about what you want a media outlet to be—as opposed to letting an algorithm choose the thing you’re most likely to click on. Or! As opposed to encouraging a world in which everyone is suckered into reading something with a headline optimized by a social media strategist armed with nothing more than “best practices” for conning you into a click.”

Get off of the services that try to tell you what to read and find the things that you want to read.

Second, make and find smaller communities. Either by pruning your friend list (do you need to know what someone you went to high school with – who you haven’t talked to in 20 years – had for lunch?)3, following a more selective group of people (and never brands), and turning off notifications for every bloop and beep these services try to innodate you with.

This article on “tiny, weird online communities” resonated with me and I hope it encourages you as well.

“The mainstream social internet is so big; everyone is connected to everyone, over a billion on Facebook alone. The consequences of connection — fake news, radicalization, massive targeted harassment campaigns, algorithmically-generated psychological torment, inane bullshit — were not part of what we were sold. We don’t really have the option of moving our lives off of the internet, and coordinated boycotts of our monstrous platforms have been brief and mostly fruitless. But many of us found ways to renegotiate the terms of how we spent our time online. Rather than the enormous platforms that couldn’t decide if, let alone how they had contributed to the election of a deranged narcissist or the rise of the virulently racist alt-right or a pending nuclear holocaust, why not something smaller, safer, more immediately useful?”

In the XOXO Slack the excellent Andy McMillan commented on this article with, “That’s a point I reflected on quite a lot in 2017. We’re really not built to handle this kind of ongoing awareness of every way every person on the planet is suffering.

Andy’s right. It’s good to be aware of what is going on in the world. It’s good to try to push yourself to be a better, more emphatic person, but at some point too much is too much for any one person. Don’t do that to yourself.

I spent more time in Slack than Facebook or Twitter this past year. I spoke up more in the communities I’m involved in online. 4 Sure, I’ll still post a few things to social media to let folks know what my family is up to. But most of my positive interaction with folks has been through smaller, tighter-knit, communities than sprawling Mega Malls of Madness. I don’t need marketing folks spewing “How do you do fellow kids?” stuff at me on Instagram and Facebook. I’d rather join a small community and listen and talk to folks interested in the same thing.

Third, pick up a phone, invite some friends over, go outside. A few years ago a good friend would organize gatherings of friends. It was an event I always looked forward to. A few good friends together in a room for an evening playing cards, board games, and experiencing each others company. I’ve decided to not wait for an invitation (I know you’re busy Ted and I love you!) and start hosting more get-togethers myself. Just this past weekend I had about 10 good friends going back years show up and hang out. It was great. No matter how close you are to someone over the Internet, nothing can replace being in the same room together.

So friends, as we enter the year of 2018, please consider this advisory from your computer guy. I know it’s hard. I know it’s easy to fill the little moments of boredom with one more scroll. If we’re honest with ourselves, what do we have to show for it, and what could we have done with that time instead?

You want an easy start? Invite me to the next poker night. 🙂

Image via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons