Previously there was an article describing an idea called “Reimagining a social network for EA community” [1], and today I present a prototype of it.

To summarize the whole idea into one sentence, it is goals and tasks oriented social network. Or we can also call it - action oriented social network. It is built on the premise that open internet collaboration can work and there is a lot of space to improve this process. The core concept is connecting like-minded people together and streamlining simplified collaboration tools, empowering community members for possibly new level of achievements.

Testing the idea

During this initial stage I searched for a way to build the prototype in 100 hours. This goal required to reduce features and search for alternatives.

I chose to refactor existing “Open Social” [2] platform. It is super flexible system where I already knew well how to modify, create and delete features. This enabled to create a functional prototype built on a solid base with a lot of common features already done (for example, notifications).

Next awaits a testing phase, during which I will ask questions to improve the prototype further, such as:

1. What are reasons this is a bad prototype (and concept)?
2. What are reasons this is a good prototype (and concept)?
3. How to improve good parts and remove bad parts? Or rethink.

Walk-through the prototype

1. Explore page helps to find goals, projects and organizations to join.

2. "Goal"page is where people join and collaborate towards a common vision using "activities".

3. Activity is a conversation between people. For example, it can replace email in many situations, but it also has many project management features:

• Activity has a status to indicate completion: Active → Done, Postponed, Canceled.
• Activity has a type assigned to track progress: Idea→ Conversation →Task → Resource
• Activity has a project assigned* to categorize activities by work area.
• Activity has granular access permissions. Allowing conversation to be between the organization’s community, or between the team, or between selected people, or private, to the person only*.

4. User profile is like all profiles - with various user information.

5. Organizations and projects are similar like a “goal”, but with extra capabilities.

• Organizations are public for anyone to join, but they also have team members.
• An organization’s activities can be either public to the community, or private to the team members* only. This should help community to access and join the effort on certain daily tasks.
• If anyone is doing any project, they can try to create an “organization” for it on this platform and create work oriented community around it.

6. Dashboard page helps to follow all activities in one place.

* Underlined features marked with an asterisk are not yet fully implemented.

Volunteering opportunities

If idea is interesting, you are welcome to join some of these opportunities below:

• Using the prototype and providing feedback. Please add your name to the waiting list [3] https://forms.gle/Tht3UeUFrTwDBJ8U7. Access to the prototype will be growing by invitation.
• Content creation and moderation. Goal creation is done by moderator at this point. It would be nice to have a lot of goals created for people to choose from, covering many EA cause areas. Users themselves will also suggest new goals or organizations or projects, but moderator chooses, creates and makes it available. There could be multiple moderators. Please contact me if this sounds interesting to you.
• Like minded motivated team members in all other areas, who have some spare time for discussing and building this.

Reference and links

1. Prototype is based on the concept described in the previous post “Reimagining a social network for EA community”.
2. Prototype is build on top of open source platform https://www.getopensocial.com/
3. Registration to the waiting list https://forms.gle/Tht3UeUFrTwDBJ8U7