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As the Internet is alive with the sounds of #twittermigration these past days, I returned to some earlier thoughts and ideas, w.r.t to both self-hosting fediverse instances, and mapping those on to the business network of my company.

The resulting question is, would a set-up like this work?

If our company would set-up their own fediverse instance (m.tgl.eu here, with accounts for our team). This gives all of our team a ‘verified’, because of the company url, presence as part of their current work. That doesn’t mean we can’t have other accounts (see @ton in the image). And others in our network would do the same (names of organisations for illustration purposes).
If we would run one instance together (samenhankelijk.nl here), that is a relay for all the instances of the organisations involved, and the instance for any individuals in our network (@w… here).
Then we would have a fediverse network of our company’s actual network, where it becomes easier to interact more frequently across the entire network, where discovery is possible because of the shared public timelines through the relay. It’s bounded by being a representation of an actual network, but open within that and based on the permissive boundaries the various organisations themselves have.

I’m not sure if this is how ActivityPub relays are meant to work or are useful, but that’s what I want to explore.
A few of those building blocks are easy to set-up, a company instance and the instance to function as relay. Others are harder, getting our own instance used (we have internal asynchronous interaction through our own rocket.chat instance), getting others in our network to take the same steps.

Notions that play a role in this

My company is part of a network of similar groups and initiatives. Internally we call them friends of our company. These are the people and organisations we invite to events and parties, that we like to hang out with, jam about ideas with, and when possible work together with. That can be because we worked together in the past and thought that was fun and worth repeating, or because we share or shared office space, have similar perspectives or visions, and having overlapping or complementing activities. It’s a network of individuals in larger organisations that we interact with individually, and companies, non-profits and NGO’s that are Zebra’s, like us.

I think that technology should be smaller than us, in order to provide agency to us. With smaller I mean that the deployment and daily use of a tool must fall within the control and capabilities of the user or user group. Specifically the off-switch should be in control of the user group itself. That way a user group can use a tool under their control to address issues that group has by themselves in their own context. This is what I call networked agency. Different groups can strengthen their tools and work, by networking with other groups, yet tools stay useful on their own and get more useful when connected.

I also think that human networks of connections are similar to the structure of peer-to-peer internet structures. A network of many smaller nodes and areas where those connections are denser, individual nodes that are more intensively connected to others and form a local center. I’m convinced our digital tools work better if they deliberately mimic that human network structure, so that the digital affordances those tools provide flow naturally into the human network connections we all have. That’s what I call human digital networks, and distributed digital transformation.
Openness is a necessity in the networked age. But it also needs a limit. That limit is tied to our personal limits, the way we need to feel ‘at home’ in the context in which we exchange ideas. With the new influx of many new people on Mastodon I noticed how my timeline is feeling more alienating than before when it was more like hanging out in my favourite watering hole in town. That will settle, I’m sure, yet in social platforms that treat the entire globe as the same public square you are continuously exposed to the algorithmically amplified onslaught of all of it all the time. Which does not reflect human network reality anymore. Bounded openness matches that reality better.

All this maps on to the fediverse I think: if each company or group in our network has their own instance, that allows internal interaction and public interaction in parallel, and if that public interaction is always visible locally in all other instance in the network, then more direct and deeper ties between the people in the network may grow. Such interaction would create more ideas, more initiatives and help spot more opportunities to do things together I think (or equally quickly expose we’re not as nicely aligned or matched as we thought).

11 reactions on “How To Federate Like Our Business Ecosystem?”

  7. Following up on “How to federate like our business ecosystem” I went ahead and created a Mastodon-instance for my company. It’s at m.tgl.eu. Next to me and a generic ‘team’, three colleagues have created an account, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll be active or not.
    Some observations:

    The distinction between separate accounts can cause confusion. On Twitter one is conditioned to see one account as ‘all of me’. On e-mail however we have different mail addresses for different contexts, of which work and private mail addresses are the most common two. To make the distinction visible between my personal and company account I used different avatars.
    Some of our team have been hesitant about the context collapse between work and private life. E.g. sharing phone numbers, or posting work related material on your personal social media accounts. This is completely understandable (even if for me personally all work has come from personal interests so there’s an almost complete overlap between work and private, even if not the other way around: almost all of my work would fit in my private context, not all of my private context would fit in my work context.)

    Having company accounts could help, as having different accounts for different contexts works as a sort-of category filter for the types of content that are being shared. I notice that from my work account I now do follow organisational accounts, whereas from private accounts I usually avoid doing that.
    That’s all on the individual level.
    The actual experiment here is to see a) what occurs if everyone in the team has an individual voice in their professional context and b) how that works out across organisations in our ecosystem. Does it lead to different types of interaction, more low threshold casual interaction, between people from organisations we regard as part of our ‘scene’? It’s a type of collectiveness that is impossible on global platforms like Twitter. It’s based on a locally more dense network between specific groups of people. As yet, this is still entirely theoretical, as it depends on other organisations also having such instances, from which people connect to us. Having at least our instance makes it possible to start the experiment if there’s at least one other. Maybe having ours helps that second one to start.

  9. I didn’t blog my Week Notes last week. It was a busy week, with an active weekend that included a museum visit, and it just didn’t happen. Mostly because I spent the entire Sunday doing the bookkeeping for the quarterly VAT returns, and had enough of my laptop screen to do the week notes in the evening.
    This week was a busy one too. I

    spent quite a bit of time on financial stuff for the company, not all of it very productive in the end but quite demanding in terms of attention.
    Edited a MoU for a client between them and the EC

    Participated in a session of all the provinces discussing a national AI algorithm register, and the expected impact of the EU AI Regulation
    Reached out to the consortia for both the Green Deal Dataspace and the Data Space Support Centre preparations to meet-up
    Had the weekly client meetings
    Had two meetings at Y’s school for conversations about how they support faster-than-average learners, and how they specifically cater to Y’s learning needs. This was very good and helpful, also because during the pandemic we simply weren’t able to do this type of sit down and chat. I trust this is well organised and pedagogically sound. Y’s a happy pupil now, and I’ll remain alert to see it stays that way. My own experience is a clear example of the type of thing to avoid.
    With the help of colleagues am accelerating the tracking work I’m doing w.r.t. EU datspaces, related legislation outside the 6 major parts of the EU legal framework for data and digital, and a few events to discuss them.
    Evaluated a recent session with the National Statistics Office, and discussed with them the next steps to take.
    Went and got a covid booster jab. The next day I had a major headache, and heightened temperature for part of the day, so I took to be for a few hours and slept.
    Discussed the angle to take and outline of a position paper I’m writing for the Dutch national geo-information board, with the primary client within the Ministry for the Interior. A helpful conversation to ensure that the contents of the paper get used
    Saw my blog reach 20 years, which I had to commemorate with a blogpost.
    Spent more time than I should have on watching the #twittermigration to Mastodon unfold. A very large influx of my network into this environment has been going on.
    Launched a Mastodon instance for my company on the back of that migration wave. An experiment to see if it can mean something different for how we interact with our business ecosystem.
    Joined Y and E in their exploration of ‘Texel’ our island in Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch that we have had here for the past two weeks. It’s fun because it’s collaborative in setting, allowing the three of us to interact in different ways. Y is the island’s spokesperson so she has more control over how things unfold than we do.
    Took Y to her swimming lesson
    Dropped off a car load of baby and toddler gear at the neighbourhood circular / second-hand shop, for other parents to put to good use.
    Helped E connect her blog to her new Mastodon account (on my personal instance, which now is a household instance)

    Like every year the park around the corner is exploding with fly agarics this fall. This one was almost like a satellite dish, pointing slightly tilted at the sky.

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