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Episode #123: Scott Murray
172 Plays7 years ago
Scott Murray is the Principal Learning Scientist at O’Reilly Media. Prior to that work, he was an Assistant Professor of Design at USF. He works with code, data, and computation to design learning experiences and is deeply interested in learning, teaching,...
The post Episode #123: Scott Murray appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Policy Vis Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, we are going to talk about data visualization on social media, kind of a little bit. And well, you'll see, basically, you'll see how we're going to talk
Guest Introduction: Scott Murray
00:00:26
Speaker
about this. So to help me talk about this, I'm very happy to have, returning to the show, Scott Murray, who is the principal learning scientist at O'Reilly. Scott, welcome back to the show. Hey, thank you. Hey, everybody. How are you?
00:00:38
Speaker
Oh, I'm hanging in there. I'm okay. I'm good. I mean, I'm great. I'm great. Everything's great. Everything's good. You're just you're just catching up on sleep. That's all perfect. Yeah.
Scott's Social Media on Mastodon
00:00:50
Speaker
All right, I have this sort of cryptic trailer here to start this off about data is on social media, but it's really not about
00:00:58
Speaker
putting data vis on social media, I don't think, right? It's really about this new social media channel that you started on Mastodon. Do you want to talk a little bit about the inspiration for that and what's going on on the platform? Sure. Do we want to assume people have heard of Mastodon? No, probably not. Okay. Well, Mastodon, it's really, really old and they're extinct now, but we're bringing them back. Um,
00:01:24
Speaker
Actually, there's no reason it's called Mastodon. I think the initial creator of the project just thought it sounded like a cool animal. So it's called Mastodon, the thing itself. Anyway, it's basically like an open source, decentralized version of
What is Mastodon?
00:01:38
Speaker
Twitter. So it's it's software, it's a social network. But it's, you know, free to the people, ad free, nobody's mining your data. You can't be manipulated.
00:01:51
Speaker
at least not easily by foreign governments to sway elections and that sort of thing. So really, it's like open source free social network. It's based on Twitter, so it looks a lot like Twitter. But it's also definitely different. Instead of calling them tweets, we call them toots. Instead of retweeting, you can boost somebody's toot.
00:02:12
Speaker
And to make it a little more- I mean, you laugh when you say that, right? Like in your head, you're laughing when you say that, right? Uh, yeah. Or am I just the only, I'm the only eight year old boy on this talk. Um, it's pretty funny. And this is actually, actually what makes it more humane. And that's sort of what is interesting to me about it is it's this, it's a huge, you know, distributed open source software project. It's found a lot of, uh, new users, new success in the last several months, especially.
00:02:38
Speaker
Um, most recently kind of the last couple of weeks, like the delete Facebook campaign reaction to all the Facebook stuff. So every time there's some data breach or, you know, something in the news about Twitter, Facebook, or one of those other ones, uh, a whole ton of people joined Mastodon to try it out.
Mastodon's Growing Community
00:02:54
Speaker
And, um, anyway, I, I was interested in it because Twitter was like, when I joined Twitter several years ago and started using each chat about database stuff, it was felt a lot smaller and a lot friendlier and really inviting.
00:03:09
Speaker
And I totally throughout this all acknowledge this is just my experience. A lot of white male privilege here. I'm not getting like harassed much by people on Twitter, not having a lot of the really negative experiences that people are having. But with that in mind, I found it pretty welcoming and really easy to reach out to people, other folks in the field, probably like yourself, who I hadn't even met in person yet. And it was just really nice. And then, you know, like political stuff started creeping in and
00:03:37
Speaker
uh, big data stuff started creeping in and all these reports of even more before like all the political manipulation stuff, there's, um, your reports of abuse and Twitter like was like failing to do anything about it. And everyone's like, look, these are solved problems. Why don't you guys solve this problems? And so everyone's speculating cause they can't provide real answers. So anyway, I was, um, just like disconnected from Twitter for several months and wasn't that into it. But when I do go back on, I really miss,
00:04:05
Speaker
that sort of getting quick updates on everybody's amazing projects, seeing what's going on with the field. Like I find it a really good way to find out what's going on with the field, interact with people. So anyway, when I heard about Mastinon, I thought, well, this would be awesome. What if we have like a mini version of Twitter, like a data is only Twitter or visual creative coding and data sort of Twitter where all the people that I want to talk to are there and we can talk to each other, but we don't have to deal with all the other
00:04:34
Speaker
kind of garbage that's floating around, by which I mean anger and vitriol and fake news and algorithmically manipulated timelines and just use it as an actual communications medium to connect people to people.
Vis.social: A Space for Data Enthusiasts
00:04:48
Speaker
That's what I'm trying to do with Mastodon and the instance is called vis.social, V-I-S.social. It's free for anybody to sign up and I hope people will join.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yeah, so that was gonna be my question, right? It's open, so it's not like you are the gatekeeper. It's not like a Slack channel where you sort of have to invite people, right? Anyone can log in. So I guess what's the mechanism by which you try to keep it small or intimate or, I mean, is there a mechanism for that? Or are you just gonna sort of see, you know, in some ways just sort of see what happens. And if it gets so popular, that's kind of great. And if it remains small, that's also kind of great.
00:05:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really good question. So right now I'm just checking at this moment, we have 855 accounts, 855 users.
Managing Mastodon Instances
00:05:38
Speaker
Now most of those people are not super active. It's a lot of people just sort of like joining to claim their usernames and maybe they'll check it out later. So a much smaller proportion of those are actually really active. But answering that question, I would like to keep it small, like human scale.
00:05:55
Speaker
And some instances do close down registration. So they'll have a cooling off period and then reopen it. Or even certain ones that there's a really interesting one called social.coop that doesn't exactly charge money, but it's cooperatively run. So basically, the users are co-owners in the service. And it's set up as a legit nonprofit cooperative. And so you chip in $1 a month or something like that.
00:06:24
Speaker
And then everybody has input and decision making about how it's administered and what sort of customizations go into it and what the code of conduct is and the rules. And it's like a fascinating social experiment. So I think that's really interesting. I'm not doing that. I'm not charging. I'm asking for donations occasionally just to help cover the hosting costs and people have been super generous with that. So I haven't lost money on it yet. So that feels like a huge win. My goals were like,
00:06:50
Speaker
hopefully do something really interesting as an experiment and connect people and not lose money on it. That was my goal. Um, it's pretty good. I like that. But it does, uh, I guess to explain how it works, like to keep it small, you know, there, I don't know how many mastodon users total
Community and Interaction on Mastodon
00:07:08
Speaker
right now. It's not, it might not be hundreds of thousands. It's not millions. Uh, is this what's relatively small, obviously compared to all of Twitter.
00:07:17
Speaker
but the way it works is you have different instances. So like vis.social is its own small little social network, but all the networks can talk to the other networks. Um, so you think about sort of like how your email is set up, you know, you have your email at John at policyvis.net or something. And so you kind of own policyvis.net, but you can email people in other domains, right? Um, so it's decentralized in that way. So in the same way, Mastodon, like you can have a,
00:07:46
Speaker
sort of main home, or you can have multiple accounts on different places. So like for me, like visit social is my mastodon home. And you have a local timeline. So that's sort of where you can see what everybody in your instance is tooting about. But then there's also like a global, it's called the federated timeline. So it's like what everybody on your local instance and then everybody that they're following and, and so on out into the broader world.
00:08:12
Speaker
So there's sort of these different levels of engagement. And for me, the part that's most interesting is this like local timeline idea. So it's like, if we can get an interesting, smart, diverse group of people, we could really foster some helpful discussion, not just announcing projects, but like really have it be a more less snarky, more humane place to provide critique on projects and advice and suggestions and point toward tools and
00:08:40
Speaker
approaches and all that all that sort of good stuff. So I'm one of the casual users, I drop in and drop out. So are there features?
Enhancing User Experience on Mastodon
00:08:47
Speaker
So really, I'm just asking you to help me. So it's like really just about me, really, Scott, just, you know, how can you help me? Are there features of Mastodon that aren't on Twitter? Things that things that, you know, sort of maybe help that engagement that you don't get from Twitter? Yeah, so one thing, well, you have a few more characters to work with.
00:09:10
Speaker
That was its initial thing. It has a content warning feature, which is sort of like you could consider, you know, that's the preferred language now instead of trigger warning content warning. Because content warning could be like a spoiler, you know, to a movie or it could be, you know, you're posting about politics or something, mental health or something more traumatic that might
00:09:39
Speaker
be troublesome for other people and maybe they don't want to see it. So one thing that's pretty cool is every time you toot, you can turn on the content warning feature. So it sort of buries your, whatever your post is under a little flag and people have to sort of actively tap it to reveal it and click onto it. Um, and that's fascinating to me too, because, um, people use it really generously. Like it's very, it's considering cause it's optional, right? Like you could start going pasting,
00:10:06
Speaker
posting lots of triggering, hateful, whatever, garbage stuff. There are ways people can block you and filter you out and all that stuff, but people use it very proactively like, hey, I'm feeling down today or this isn't so much on viz.social, but some of the more general instances where people are getting maybe a little more personal. Or it could be like, oh, usually I post about data viz, but today I'm so mad at
00:10:35
Speaker
our government or whatever. It's like, well, I'm not here to read about that. That's kind of why I left Twitter. So people will use a content warning feature for that. It's interesting that it's like an opt-in rather than an opt-out, which is obviously a whole line of economics and psychology literature about the differences when you have a program where you opt to opt out versus opting in.
00:10:57
Speaker
And it does make me think about how people opt in to use that as opposed to having it the other way where if everything were sort of tagged like that and you have to untag it, what would the feed look like? What would the differences be between those two feeds? Yeah, and there's another feature Mastodon doesn't have that I think it would be really interesting. We had a threaded discussion about it.
00:11:23
Speaker
you know, like a lot of the complaints of Twitter too is like kind of once you follow enough people, there's so much, uh, again, garbage, like, Oh, maybe, you know, I loved, loved when John talks about his database, but when he posts pictures of his lunch, uh, just what a waste of my time. You know, I don't want to see it unless it's really delicious. Like, um, you know, like the nachos you were talking about or something. Um, so like, I, I don't know, I think it would be interesting to have a sort of significance flag.
00:11:52
Speaker
uh, that also would be sort of opt in. So, you know, be optional, but you could, you could say, Oh, I'm posting about my lunch. So this gets flagged as, you know, trivial, like I'm just spewing stuff out. It's like a, like you grade your own. Yeah. Like you grade your own, your own too. Yeah. Or Hey, I launched this huge new project or I have a new book out or, um, you know, here's something that might actually be more important. That doesn't happen several times a day anyway. Um,
00:12:22
Speaker
So then, you know, you could, you could imagine having sort of different timelines or, you know, Oh, maybe today I want to see all the nitty gritty weirdness or today, like I'm just here to sort of catch up on what I missed in the last day, say. So I know that doesn't really exist. That's just an idea. But what I love is that this is open source and developers are super, super engaged. Uh, so you can toot at them. You can post feature requests. Like there's lots of discussions and it's really interesting that there's,
00:12:50
Speaker
without the profit motive, all the decisions are made around sort of what is best for the community of users and what is best for kind of fostering human connection rather than driving people apart. Um, and one example of that is since Mastodon started, people have been asking for this feature to like on Twitter, you can quote a tweet, you can like retweet, but then put your own commentary on top of it. And
Mastodon's Open-Source Potential
00:13:20
Speaker
the mastodon developers have identified that as just generally being more divisive and like being incentivizing more snark and kind of vitriol, um, more often than being kind of useful in terms of having a positive like human connection. So they've made the explicit decision like, no, we're not going to do that. So you can boost tweets, which is just like resharing them out to your timeline. Um,
00:13:46
Speaker
But if you want to comment on them, that's a whole separate thread. So they, they actually encourage you to, you know, if you have something to say, respond back to the person who wrote that thing and connect with that person. Don't just comment quasi anonymously and say, Oh, isn't this person such an idiot? Or this is so dumb. I can't believe they did that, but I'm not going to engage with them directly because that would be too scary. So they're saying, just, you know, just engage directly. We're all people here.
00:14:10
Speaker
Yeah, no, I want to get back to this idea of using Macedon or any social media really to have comment and critique and discussion about database projects. Because as you mentioned, is that what's going on?
00:14:27
Speaker
No, not at all. I now have a whole, I just took a list, I have a whole bunch of new technique strategies for basketball. Okay, good. I mean, there's certainly this snark on Twitter, you know, this project sucks, this project is great, and then people move on. And it was one of the reasons why I started the
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, right. And it's one of the reasons why I started to help me this site was this idea of, let's get more constructive criticism and, you know, force people to say, Oh, here's my idea for how I can make this better. But I think one of the reasons like help me this hasn't really taken off or a lot of the other projects is that, at least in like the pre release,
00:15:08
Speaker
version or the draft version. I think people are sort of hesitant to put their stuff out there. And there's lots of reasons for that, obviously. But have you seen thus far on Macedon people being a little more, I don't know if the courageous is the right word, but maybe courageous with their with their draft projects and seeking advice and feedback and support? Yeah, I wouldn't say there's been a ton of that yet. But yeah, people, at least on this
00:15:38
Speaker
social. It's interesting because you have more characters to work with. And so I've noticed a lot of people posting something like, um, you know, here, here's a link to a new project or here, here are some images or something. And then they'll really qualify. They'll say, you know, Hey, I love comments. And then it's like, no, no, really, like, I really am asking for your feedback. It's not, you know, it's not sort of like,
00:16:04
Speaker
oh, look at this awesome thing I did, and I'm putting it out there. I would love comments, but really, I just want you to see how I'm super awesome. It's like, well, no, actually, I'm actually asking for feedback. And people are really good at clarifying that. And seeing a lot of helpful conversations so far, people responding with other ideas and links to other references, and oh, you check out of this person, address that same problem. And yeah, so I think I would love to see more of that. I want to figure out how to,
00:16:35
Speaker
you know, help foster that however we can. Right. Right. Okay. I'm going to move you to another topic. I don't need to keep you on a single topic. Um, I want to hear about what you're doing at O'Reilly.
Scott's Work at O'Reilly
00:16:45
Speaker
You've been there now for what, like two, almost two and a half years. Yeah. Um, yeah. Well, I say I'm designing with data for human and machine learning. Uh, I'm in a research and development group called learning group at O'Reilly.
00:17:01
Speaker
Uh, we do stuff with machine learning. My particular interest is on online learning. So, uh, let's see, people probably know a row. Like we, you know, the company started, uh, as a book publisher, technology book publisher. Uh, but now we have conferences, events, uh, videos. Um, and we have this online learning platform called Safari. And through that platform we feed
00:17:25
Speaker
all those things go through the platform. But then we also have live online training events, like several every day. So you can go on there and sign up for any of those. And they're mostly, you know, they skew toward technology topics, but we also have like business design, finance, you know, management, job skills type stuff. So it's very much for a professional audience. But one reason I joined the company is I'm really interested in
00:17:52
Speaker
I used to teach at the University of San Francisco in the design program and did some online teaching that way and was really, and also taught with the, sorry, the Knight Center at UT Austin did a, what we called a Bach, a big online course, not a massive open online course, but just a big one. And, you know, I'm really interested in how software mediates experience. Now software mediates that human connection. And what I love about O'Reilly just as a company,
00:18:21
Speaker
is although we have plenty of geeks and really geek out on the technology stuff, it's fundamentally about connecting people. That's the company's mission is connecting people who want to learn things with the experts and facilitating that exchange. So in the online learning, we do not do lectures. We just try and connect you with the experts. So our courses have as many exercises as possible. They're hands-on as possible. So when you finish a course with us,
00:18:51
Speaker
within two hours or three hours however long it is, you should have already had practice doing the thing that we said we would help you learn how to do.
Technology for Human Connection
00:18:59
Speaker
So when it's done, you're not just applying those principles for the first time, but you've already done it, and so you just get to get better at it.
00:19:06
Speaker
It seems consistent with the vis.social, right? It seems that your central interest these days is about how to use technology to get people to build virtual communities. Yeah. I use the word community very carefully because I think it's really –
00:19:31
Speaker
so often misused in this context, right? It's like, Oh, we both have user accounts on the system. We're a community. Yay. It's like, well, I don't know if that means we're close, or we know anything about each other, we would support each other in our times, but you know, so yeah, use that word carefully, but definitely to facilitate, you know, humane collaboration, like, so like one thing, one project I'm most proud of at O'Reilly is something that's often
00:19:58
Speaker
done very poorly online is like collaborative projects. And, uh, so we, we're trying to recreate, say, say you go to one of our conferences and you go to a workshop and you know, there's 50 people in the room or a hundred or 200 people in the room or whatever. And the presenter says, okay, well, here's this exercise. We're going to break up into small groups. It's really easy to just point to tables, say, okay, each table of four people or whatever, you're a group work on this together.
00:20:25
Speaker
But if you're online and you have like 200 or 300 people in the class, you know, how do you facilitate splitting them up into small groups? So, uh, we built something called group bot, which is kind of what it sounds. That's really creatively named. Uh, it's a bot that splits people up into groups and every which way so that instructor can say, Hey, Hey group bot, uh, you know, it's time for the next exercise. I need, uh, groups of five people each.
00:20:51
Speaker
And it'll go bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, and split everybody up. Or say, hey, group bot, split the whole class into three evenly sized groups, 33% each, or whatever. Your group A, your group B, your group C. And we give you each separate tasks. And then we come back and talk about how it went. So there's all these different ways you can sort of split up the classes. And it sounds weird because it's just over Slack. This is just over chat.
00:21:19
Speaker
But people surprisingly, it works really well. Like you throw people into group and you say, Hey, you have five minutes to solve this problem and come back with a proposal or some answer response.
00:21:29
Speaker
Yeah. And they're like, OK, let's go. We have five minutes. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's true. When I taught at Micah a couple of years ago, we used Adobe Connect was the platform. And it's fine. But one of the things that the administration would encourage is to break people into groups and to get them in their own rooms. And they would do some little project, the same sort of thing. You have 10 minutes. You have 15 minutes to come up with ideas. That was a data vis class. So come up with ideas how to visualize.
00:21:58
Speaker
you know, this little data set, you know. And it's hard when you have people all over the world, you know, together in this sort of, you know, these online platforms. How do you get them? I mean, there's a general challenge with teaching online. How do you get people engaged when you as the instructor can't see their faces? Or, you know, it's so easy to minimize the window on your computer and check your email, right?
00:22:20
Speaker
Um, so all those exercises, things where people have to be super active and super, you know, you force them to do something, um, is how you sort of, you know, grab that engagement, grab that. Well, one thing is we're really lucky because we mostly have a professional audience. So nobody's, uh, we're not a degree granting program institution. So, well, and even the Mica program that's grad school. So presumably those students chose to be there and they're committed.
00:22:47
Speaker
uh, as opposed to maybe undergrads who might be, you know, depending on, you know, just 300 people show up and, you know, who knows how many of them are actually paying attention, but you ask them some poll question. Um, then you find out pretty cool. And actually what we do with group bot is before we assign people a small group. So say the presenter says, Hey, group bot, uh, split everybody up into groups of four, um, before it assigns groups.
00:23:14
Speaker
Let's say we have a hundred people logged in. It'll actually ping all 100 people. And this is all over like direct message on Slack. So say, Hey, it's time for groups. Do you want to join a group? And only if they proactively click yes, do they get put into a group. So everybody who's not responding, who's like a little checked out or who's just listening to the audio or they got up to, you know, go to the bathroom or what, you know, like they're not at their desks anymore. It's sort of like that check of like,
00:23:41
Speaker
Hey, are you really there? Hey, how engaged are you? Because we only want the people really engaged to be there. So we end up with groups. And so those people are not, they're not put into a room at all. No, not until they click. Yes. You know, they can click. Yes. But it's sort of, you know, we also for our, for our audience, like, you know, things come up. People are taking these classes at weird times. As you said, everyone's in a different time zone. Usually people are doing these at their desk at work. So, you know, things come up and they get interrupted or whatever. So,
00:24:12
Speaker
we have to design things to be as flexible as possible and basically help, help people get as much out of the course as possible. Even if they're not, um, you know, able to commit a hundred percent of their attention the way we would love them to. But for the people who can commit, you know, we want them to absolutely get the most out of the course. Right. Cool. Sounds like good stuff. And you're enjoying it. It's pretty fun. Yeah. And we're, um,
00:24:37
Speaker
I want to say we're hiring.
Diversity and Inclusion Challenges
00:24:39
Speaker
So it's really interesting place to be that that's not really visualization related. I'm also doing some other visualization stuff that I could talk about, but yeah, it's a fun place to be. It's great. What else do we want to talk about? We were talking about some stuff before we started recording. We can, we can chat about all sorts of good stuff. I want, well, I did want to mention, uh, I don't have any answers. I wanted to talk about like diversity and inclusion.
00:25:05
Speaker
in the field, but also on this vis.social experiment. So I failed to mention that before. You know, right now, as Andy Kirk pointed out, and Kristen Henry and a few other people on there have pointed out, rightly so, for some reason, it's like overwhelmingly white dudes, or people who, you know, I'm not gonna say everyone identifies as white dudes, but I'm gonna classify them as such.
00:25:35
Speaker
Um, that that's who's participating on biz.social and not, not entirely, but I dunno, 90%, like a very large proportion. And I was surprised partly I just sort of thought because Mastodon is kind of has all these, you know, anti abuse features and things built in. It's supposed to be so much better at that for Twitter that I thought it would just kind of automatically seem more welcoming to a more diverse crowd. Um,
00:26:02
Speaker
but I haven't really publicized it at all. I mean, I'm mentioning it now on the podcast. I'd only publicized it on Twitter. So I don't know if that reflects like that's the demographic of folks who follow me on Twitter. And so that just reflects that or that's who is interested in trying a new social network or that's who can get over the weird name of the thing or, you know, I don't know what the factors are, but yeah, I did just want to mention that I find that to be, again, this is just totally like,
00:26:32
Speaker
a side project and I'm not unfortunately not able to put like a ton of time into it, but I'm looking into, I'm asking for help and looking for ideas in how to make sure it feels like a very inclusive space and we can get a lot of different voices on there because frankly, it's not going to be super useful in the current incarnation. If we just have, you know, a lot of people who look like me or have similar background to me, um, you know,
00:26:59
Speaker
clapping each other on the back like, Oh, look, you did something that looks like something I would like. So that looks great. Good job.
00:27:06
Speaker
So is it the people who are active on this social are white dudes or is it the majority of you signed up? Cause I, cause I feel like, you know, there's 800 or so people signed up and there seems to be a smaller group that's active. And I just wonder if a lot, I mean, I think for me personally as a white dude, I think for me, it's like, it's another like social platform. And so,
00:27:33
Speaker
I just wonder... I mean, I guess that wouldn't really vary by gender or race, though. Although maybe it does. I think it depends if you're more of a dude or more of a bro. Are you sure you're on the dude side? I have no idea, to be honest. I'm getting too old for this. I'm sure there's a quiz online that will tell you. I'm sure there is, yeah. I'll find the quiz and put it in the show notes. Are you a dude or a bro? So, you know, I don't...
00:28:02
Speaker
But I mean you're spot on and there's this whole ongoing discussion now obviously about diversity across multiple fields. I sort of span multiple fields and economics has tended to be very
00:28:19
Speaker
white male dominated.
Need for Diverse Representation
00:28:22
Speaker
And recently, there's been a lot of interesting research on how women have been treated in the field, both how their papers are reviewed and published and not and also some of the online social like econ social job boards are pretty nasty towards different groups. And so I think there's sort of a reckoning happening a little bit in the economics field and lots of other fields. So
00:28:48
Speaker
I don't know, it's also interesting how people respond as like, well, I'm not a racist, which is really not the claim. Like if you say to someone, well, your conference only has white dudes in it, you know, the response, I don't think the response from a person should be, well, I'm not a racist, you know, I just, you know, I just, these are the people that I found, right? John, are you talking about any instance in particular, or this just a random example? Just a random example.
00:29:15
Speaker
Just a random example of just, you know, like, like, I don't know, it's hard, I think, from everybody's perspective to find the voices that need to be heard. And I don't think it necessarily has to use the word racist or sexist. It's just being attuned to all these different groups.
00:29:35
Speaker
that, you know, their voices should be heard and have may have not had the opportunity in many cases. Yeah, I don't know. Is that right? I mean, I think that's the core of it, right? And it's the idea, I think the challenge is how do we embrace all these different groups and perspectives, which don't necessarily have to be
00:29:53
Speaker
You know, biological, right? It can be gender, race. It could be where you live in the world. It can be, you know, rural, industrial, not, I don't know. Well, we have, I think, no, go ahead. I was just saying, I think, you know,
00:30:08
Speaker
I know Enrico and Moritz and the Data Stories Podcast and I have both been frustrated with trying to get people from outside like Europe and the US to come on our shows. And I know they do like an international around the world thing they do at the end of every year, which I think is really cool. But it is hard. And, you know, I think that's just because of our all of our, you know, just our networks are grouped that way. Right. And that's, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's the thing like my
00:30:36
Speaker
my network is going to bias English speaking folks for sure. Right. And then probably, uh, skews a lot more male than I would want to and skews more white than I would want to. And like, frankly, that's what made, uh, I know one thing that is makes me uncomfortable talking about this is, well, geez, what if, what if I'm not being inclusive enough or not to, you know, sort of helping bring people in because
00:31:05
Speaker
Like it's actually just reflecting my own network and like the people that I'm following or whose work I'm paying attention to or whose work I value or have questions about or find provocative and so maybe you know, hopefully this isn't just reflecting my Personal bias which would then make me feel like a horrible person and all that, you know Like there shouldn't have to be this you know, you said like no population, you know, it shouldn't be like oh I'm in a really
Valuing Diverse Voices
00:31:30
Speaker
go out of my way and embrace all these other really equally valid, great ideas, like these wonderful people, it should be like, no, I should already have been paying attention to all of this. So I hope it's not me. I'm sure some of it will be me. But I used to run a, just out of college, like a bulletin board, PHP bulletin board, and like was sort of like community manager for that as a side project thing. And in my experience, running,
00:31:59
Speaker
And I'm, I'm no expert in this, but like running, like facilitating sort of online quote unquote communities is just a ton of actual work. Um, you know, it's like reassuring people, you know, things get out of control. Someone misinterpreted something. Um, so even if people are polite 99% of the time there's like flare ups or, uh, you know, all kinds of issues. And there's a lot of just like things go more smoothly if there's kind of a,
00:32:26
Speaker
admin, webmaster, whatever you want to call them, uh, sort of, you know, actively facilitating. And when I first joined mastodon, um, I joined mastodon.art because there was no data of his, uh, mastodon. It was just a general art, art one. And the curator, uh, I don't know the person's actual name. Actually, they just go by curator at mastodon.art. Uh, they're really super active and hands-on and like,
00:32:53
Speaker
boosts everybody's work and like helps, you know, it's like a lot of people who make their, make their living that way. And so they're like, they're helping spread the word about their art. And I think it's like really nice that they're so hands on. And I had this dream that masks, you know, we could have this really great instance and great discussion without me committing hours and hours and hours of like, you know, volunteer side project time. But I think that might just be what's needed is we might need people
00:33:21
Speaker
you know, like actual like outreach efforts and inviting people in and, you know, bringing them into the conversation and making sure that there's value in the conversation for everybody. So it's not just like, Hey, we need women, we need people of color, we need gender queer people, we need trans folks, we need, you know, like all these people, it's not just like, Oh, we need that to like make our numbers better. Right. There are no numbers. It's just me. It's just a side project. It's the,
00:33:48
Speaker
you know, this conversation should be more valuable for everybody if everybody is there. That's my theory anyway. I hope I hope it's right. I mean, I think it's a good theory. I mean, well, I think we're I think we're like committing the cardinal sin. Also, it's like two white guys talking about diversity, inclusion. Exactly. Totally. And but but the reason I wanted to to come today and talk about this, since you asked me is seriously in all in all seriousness, just like we were talking about
00:34:18
Speaker
people on vis.social asking for critique. Hey, no, really, I do want advice. I'm really asking if there are folks listening out there to the two white guys talking. I'm interested in exploring all kinds of ideas. And if you check this out and you're like, oh, this is uncomfortable, I would never join that. I want to know why it's uncomfortable. And it's not your job to tell me why it makes you uncomfortable. But I would like to know if you have a second. And if you have examples of other great
00:34:48
Speaker
inclusive, safe, productive, online communities, things that aren't Twitter or Facebook or whatever else. Let me know. I would just love pointers because this is not my area. Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, I'll put the links to the Macedon sites and you've mentioned a few others. I'll put those up there as well in the show notes and do a few other things so people can check them out.
00:35:13
Speaker
Scott, thanks for coming on the show. It's been fun. And yeah, thank you so much. And thanks to anybody who made it through all of my rants today. You're a hero. If they've made it this far, they're used to it by now. If they've made it this far.
00:35:29
Speaker
All right. Well, thanks everybody for tuning into this week's episode. Please do reach out to me or to Scott if you have comments or ideas or suggestions about this social or any of the other things that we've talked about today. So until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.