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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.

8 reactions on “Our Company Mastodon Instance M.tgl.eu”

  2. @roel yes, I’m curious too. I think group instances (company, neighbourhood, sportsclub etc.) may well make sense. And what that will do for interaction between groups through those group instances.

  3. @ton I’m wondering if you made any changes or configured it differently.Registrations closed, seems obvious. But maybe something like “making the ‘local’ tab the home tab” would be usefull too.

  4. @berkes not yet no (except for closed registrations). The instance isn’t for internal stuff (we have our rocket.chat instance for that), so the local timeline would be mostly to see what colleagues are sharing. But as I follow them (we’re just 9), I see that in my home timelines anyway. I expect more from the global timeline, where the interaction between colleagues and their peers from elsewhere becomes more visible? (Local timeline in general for group instances I can see as key, yes)

  6. 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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