This morning I posted on the Social experience design channel a HN submission of a guide to learn basic social skills. In the discussion various other such resources are named tooâŚ
- Basic Social Skills Guide - Improve Your Social Skills
- Succeed Socially - Guide to getting past social awkwardness
I should add here, and this is also reflected in a number of the HN comments, that I am in general wary of all the ways people suggest how you can deliberately learn or teach social skills. They are typically acquired by experience and being âout in the fieldâ as it were. And to deliberately âlearnâ them walks a fine line of actually learning and becoming a more social person, or rather learning them to be wielded as tools, masks to wear, which makes one a less genuine person. A lot of âleadershipâ training and 95% of the field of Marketing are based on the manipulative side of Humanity and social skills, i.e. they wield virtues to feed into vices.
But I wanted to write down some notes on how this relates to SX, so here goes âŚ
Intrinsic value of Humanity
The relationship with Social coding commons and SX, both intent to âreimagine social and imagine a peopleverseâ starts with the intrinsic values of Humanity and Freedom (and in that order, humanity first, freedom second). Intrinsic values to be fostered and nourished throughout the evolving affiliation network form the lifeblood of a commons based value economy to organically emerge over time. All the aspects of Humanity carry value, and are powerful. Power which modern society - with its dehumanising hypercapitalist race engine - makes us forget and underappreciate. When considering them deeply, all these intricate facets of Humanity and Freedom become like currencies for value creation and exchange. Going much much further than economic systems only based on money, and seeing all the rest as external to the system.
Social skills can be said to constitute the ways and ability for us to express our Humanity to others. How does this factor into SX solution design then?
Example: Design for Gratitude
We can design software systems that encourage the acquisition and exercise of particular social skills. Take for instance the concept of "Gratitude", just one of the numerous âstocksâ in the broad Humanity âinvestment portfolioâ. We understand gratitude, right? How it works and all that. Well⌠not so much, in practice. Especially in online contexts and in grassroots chaotic commons we donât. We take the work others do for granted, take contributions and other value exchanges as a given, and it all-too-often this eventually leads to yet another Tragedy of the Commons.
Now, Gratitude is a very powerful currency, and we tend to forget that. People are willing to do a lot for other people with the only reward - the âpaymentâ - being gratitude alone. In our grassroots commons, for instance the FOSS and social impact movements, the majority of all the work and collaborative activities is done by volunteers. We also know that FOSS and doing community work is a âburnout factoryâ and sees people leaving disillusioned all of the time. Why is that? There is an imbalance in the value exchange that takes place. In general people are very bad at perceiving value as it is being excanged and this leads to âunbalanced budgetsâ in the commons based value economy.
(Aside: There are very interesting social dynamics at play in FOSS projects, that I wonât delve into now. Among those are the privileged position that FOSS devs gain over time, and the unawareness of that privilege. Esp. where they consider themselves to create software for the benefit of âusersâ, a term that leads to othering of their audience, actual people, whereby the mere use of that term impacts how they perceive value. FOSS devs often regard contributions as expected, a gift as gratitude for the coding work they did. This may (and imho is) not be a proper way to perceive the value other people add to the project. Under SX contributions count as Gifts, a one-directional value exchange, that puts the recipient in âdebtâ, as it were.)
Gifting gratitude?
Showing due gratitude and appreciation are social skills. If we master these skills we carry a âwalletâ full of value to exchange with others. We can create this value at any time ourselves to add it to the value âsupply chainâ, and the care and attention we give to that determines the âdenominationâ of this value. We donât have to be rich and have money to get things done, when we know how to create value - wielding the power of Humanity - we can pay, in this case using Gratitude as our âcurrencyâ. We are our own âbankâ of Humanity.
One of the SX instrument sets I want to elaborate is named 
Gifting. Since we can easily create all these values of Humanity based on our social skills, we can participate in a Gift economy of sorts, and engage in gift exchange. While money and material goods play a role in the commons based value economy, Social coding commons takes the notion of gifting deep into the realms of immaterial goods.
(Note: I also wonât delve deeper into the mechanics of the Gifting SX instrument set at this point. TBD)
Technology can support people to wield their social skills appropriately, stimulate to practice and subsequently improve them, help acquire the skills in natural ways. One of the SX formulaâs that Social coding commons pursues is called âJoyful creationâ, and gifting, gratitude, appreciations are major factors to help increase the joy of collaborative activities and cocreation. Thus social experience design explicitly makes them part of solution design. It is not hard to imagine all kinds of UI/UX that help convey these human qualities and traits online, to have the desired rewarding effects that help stabilize the commons based value economy.