Exploring Social Experience Design

TODO This is just a placeholder topic for now.

Quoting myself for a rough idea for what SED is about:

From our perspective Product Management involves a continual process of determining where it is valuable to add automation in support of “Social Experience Design” as it were (we might make this the name of one of our sub-domains).

I think product-wise “Social Experience Design” as the methodology to create next-gen fediverse apps is a good approach. We are talking unique product positioning that way. Putting the focus on what we want: Rich social fabric and evolution of fediverse to its full potential.

Consider the power of language. If I am a dev and I want create a fedi app, I have already 2 notions in my head “Develop App” and “Software Development”. These are rather technical. This steers project direction right from the very earliest start. Then I want start fast, and first create a repo with only the vaguest notion of the kind of app I wanna create (it may be 2 sentences that triggered me). I am going to look at AP specs, libraries and other AP apps… and start coding. Only to find a wealth of accidental complexity in the form of Protocol Decay. And things ever change while I move along. End result is that I get to be bogged down deeply in highly technical issues to the detriment of the functionality that I be able to deliver. And also to the detriment of the community and ecosystem I could build around my project, because only fedi experts are able to help. This is the landscape where we want to bring improvements.

If I am doing Social Experience Design I will have a different mindset right from the start. And I will be guided to the process all along the way, with automation of tasks boosting my productivity and keeping things in sync for me.

I can collect a group of people interested in the ideas related to the app, and these folks can be non-technical or have different skillset than my hacker skills. And these people will find fun tasks to be available to them, so they are encouraged to be contributors. They will develop a passion for the project and be much more committed community members than when they lurk in a Matrix room waiting for stuff they can finally test-drive.