NVC Dojo

In my previous blog post I outlined a case for a place to be in community. I made the case in terms of a Neurodiverse NVC community, but the case would be similar for any community. I have been checking out a few different technologies in support of this. My deepest need around this is 'connection', and I want to translate that into tech talk, please bear with me. Furthermore I think 'connection' best describes the need of the community too. I am enumerating this need because I can use it to judge the candidate technologies as to whether they are life serving.

Silo technology vs Connection.

Siloing is the practise of making a digital platform not connectable with others. It is about having control rather than sharing control. It is about containment. These needs serve corporation and not individuals. It is a practise that leads to separation. This is because each platform tries to make its silo more appealing. It leads to the development of multiple competing clients or 'apps'.

update In the previous version of this post I wrote that Silo's lead to competition. Feedback from a helpful matrix developer helped me see that my explanation was too simple...

Silo's hinder helpful aspects of competition. By example, a user enters all their contacts into Some Silo. Then say Another Silo develops a new feature or improvement. Unfortunately the user cannot benefit from that improvement unless they move all of their contacts to Another Silo.

In human terms this means that when I invite people to use a platform that meets my needs and that is mature enough for public use I often hear a moan of 'not another app'!

People like the familiar. They like to use what everyone else is using. People like ease.

Corporations are well aware of this and that is why they make it hard for people to change or to have choice around what app they use to access the platform.

They may claim 'security' but we know that this is a false arguement for numerous reasons, that I will not go into here as it is technical and is well written about. However despite that, the corporations get away with being trusted even though their behaviour is anything other than trustworthy.

Our experience is that we are told by authority figures what program to use, and this is why it can be confusing to have choice! And still choice is a foundstone of free(dom) software.

So, if I am to judge software with which to develop community then it must meet my need for connection. That is to say, the members of my community must have choice about which app they use to access to the platform. This would put the members of the community in control rather than the platform owners.

Do you want to know what it is?

There is only one modern platform that can provide this freedom. It is called Matrix. I find it is really exciting to see it get to this stage. I have been following Matrix for years but I have only recently fully committed to participating in its community and vision. My testing suggests that it is indeed ready for wider use. I really love the vibrant communities that I have found in the Matrix, people who share my needs to use and contribute to a culture of free(dom) software. It is awesome.

As their website says: Imagine a world... ...where it is as simple to message or call anyone as it is to send them an email. ...where you can communicate without being forced to install the same app. ...where you can choose who hosts your communication. ...where your conversations are secured by E2E encryption.

In other words, lets use one platform to access many places. One 'address' to communicate in ways which we choose.

At the moment the platform is easy to use for text chatting and it is easy to embed jitsi video conferencing. It is in development and it is possible to use it as an interface to other platforms or communication modalities – but it is early days for that (at least for me)!

This means that I will be asking people to install yet another client. I expect there to be groans. However I am hopeful that I will be able to make the case for this. I will be posting video's about this soon.

I am grateful for the conversations with a shiny Matrix developer for her clarity in explaining this to me as I struggled to choose which platform to use.

She offered “On Matrix, there are many competing clients that are trying to offer a user experience catering for their target audience. Element's aim seems to be to provide as feature rich client as possible. Fluffychat is for people who enjoy a more simple UX like Whatsapp. Nheko offers a feature rich native desktop client. Mirage offers multi-user support. Fractal and Neochat offer good integration to their target desktop environments (GNOME and KDE).”

In support of helping you make that choice if you want to try Matrix, use Element! (My next post will begin with revisiting the paragraph above and will be titled Where To Start with Matrix). It will help explain what you need to know about the platform to begin to use it. Join us!

with love,

~em~