The increasing popularity of concepts like fractional ownership, community-centric design, and collective intelligence has brought the value of community building into the limelight. It’s clear that we are witnessing the dawn of a more collaborative work environment.

Difficulties in nurturing shared spaces still exist even when there is a shared understanding and perspective. If there is no collective vision, then conflict management will quickly become a problem.

David and Rafa led a workshop discussing how metaphors affect our experience of being part of a community and showed how changing our perspective can change the work we do.

How Metaphors Give Rise to Community Structure

Metaphors shape human interactions in a big way. They’re not just poetic writing tools, but they’re also the lenses through which we experience being part of a group dynamic. Today, they can help us understand the paradigm shift the digital economy is undergoing.

Metaphors can help create new realities by providing new ways of understanding things.

The problem that Web3 is trying to solve is that the data-driven, numbers-focused approach to success that Web2 ushered in is a huge part of the problem.

Metrics are not the only thing that matter, but they are not bad.

We need to take into account community and other less tangible values to create a more sustainable work environment in Web3.

The biggest issue facing humanity is that our emotions are still from the Paleolithic era, while our institutions and technology have progressed much further.

Some people think that technology is a problem because it gives companies too much power over people’s minds and emotions. These companies can then use this power to get people to buy things, even if it is not good for them. We need to have the same understanding and empathy for each other that we expect from a god.

We can use metaphors to make our technology wiser and more caring. By internalizing different metaphors, we can create communities that adapt to the complexities of the digital age.

ël Govaarts Our metaphors shape our structures, and our structures shape our strategy.

Metaphors can help us build more humane communities by shaping our technology and behaviors.

When we use a variety of metaphors, we change our goals, methods of communication, and work experiences. With practice, we can control the reality of our various groups.

Exploring Metaphors for Community Building

keep in mind that every metaphor has its own good and bad points, and it is more helpful to try and understand when to use it rather than passing judgment on it

A commonly used metaphor to describe a business is that it is like a machine with parts.

The metaphor of employees as expendable cogs in a machine is common in capitalist societies, often without people realizing it. This metaphor harms people by treating them as less important than the organization or system they work within. To create more humane workplaces, we must be aware of this metaphor and others like it.

If we think of an organization as a machine, we’ll create more standard operating procedures rather than trusting each individual’s decision-making abilities. This metaphor shapes how we think in subtle ways and causes us to view the world as a controllable process instead of letting the natural qualities of our group emerge.

Even though the metaphor of a business as a machine is not necessarily bad, it has not been successful in creating strong organizations.

Not everything that can be quantified is important, and not everything that is important can be quantified. – Albert Einstein

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Various Metaphors

Below are some examples of the advantages and disadvantages of different metaphors to get us thinking about how they may or may not be useful in different contexts.

Community as a Brain

Some of the benefits of brain plasticity include an individual’s ability to problem solve, be creative, and continually learn and grow. Additionally, brain plasticity allows for complex integrations of information and perceptions.

The main weaknesses of the human brain are: that it requires dopamine to function; that it is biased; that it can be hijacked by outside forces; that it has a non-perfect memory; that it uses coping mechanisms to deal with diseases and emotions; that it makes non-rational choices; and that it requires a body to function.

Community as an Organism

Strengths: can heal itself, adaptable, collaborative, symbiotic, and self-sustaining.

Weaknesses: instinctual, inefficient, unpredictable, and susceptible to mob mentality.

Community as an Ecosystem

Strengths: balance, harmony, emergence, evolution, feedback loops.

There are several weaknesses to this system including the chaotic nature of it, the susceptibility to outside disturbances, and the competition between individuals. Additionally, the system is weak to invasions by outside species, such as bots.

Community as a City

The main strengths of the United Nations include its local governance and laws, which create positive externalities and deliver common goods to a population.

weaknesses: -traffic congestion -needing transit -neighborhood variation -predefined urban planning -decaying infrastructure -bureaucracy -pollution -negative externalities -governments and laws -demographic challenges

The process of playing with these frames is itself a form of generation, similar to the objects in the metaphors.

The Use Cases of Metaphors

We should only use metaphors that will inspire action and not become a distraction from what we are trying to achieve. We should develop and debate proper metaphors so that we can focus on building the communities that are already happening.

There is no set rule book for when it is and is not appropriate to use metaphors in speech. The best way to become confident in using them is to practice and then to trust your intuition. You should use metaphors as part of your inquiry process every day. When you are talking to someone, pay attention to the metaphors they use. This will give you a better understanding of the person’s underlying beliefs and values.

If you want to improve your ability to communicate and support others in your workplace, pay attention to the metaphors they are using. Identifying the metaphors people use can help you understand their assumptions and perspective, and either engage with them or challenge them.

Now it’s up to you.

What retellings Sunday mornings sound like? Most people use metaphors without realizing it. For example, when you tell your friend that you are “see-sawing” between two options, you are using a metaphor. In this case, the metaphor is called a “mental image metaphor,” which is a metaphor that uses words to create a mental image. When you tell your friend that you are “see-sawing” between two options, you are using a metaphor. In this case, the metaphor is called a “mental image metaphor,” which is a metaphor that uses words to create a mental image.

Community Metaphors in Practice

Here are some examples of putting metaphors into practice.

The Solar System Metaphor

We can learn a lot about a community by picturing it as a solar system with outer and inner planets circling a central point. The outer rings represent the less engaged members of the community, the inner rings the active and influential community members, and the central point is the founder/core team.

The rings in a community represent how strong the sense of belonging is. The closer to the center you are, the stronger the sense of belonging is. If you want a community to do well, you should focus on the people who have the strongest sense of belonging.

If you want your DAO to be successful, you should focus on maintaining a core group of approximately ten engaged people, rather than trying to involve a large number of people. Taking care of this core group will create a positive ripple effect that will benefit the entire community.

What creates the strongest community gravity?

The Lifecycle Metaphor

The metaphor of the lifecycle of a tree is also useful in understanding communities. Just as a tree is born, develops, dies, and is reborn, so too do communities evolve, change, adapt, and interact.

The main issues that DAOs are experiencing are due to their rapid growth. It is difficult to mature in a healthy way when expanding so quickly. There are many DAOs that have begun as a result of a popular meme but then just as quickly fade away.

A community will typically stay in the “seed” stage for at least six months and won’t become mature for at least two years. The main idea here is that if you’re too focused on KPIs and ROI to try and make the community grow quickly, you might lose the initial movement – along with the core group of people who made the community in the first place.

Project Liberty, 2021

Are you ready to create a web that is more user-friendly and efficient?

The homepage continues:

Project Liberty is designed to create a new web infrastructure using a protocol called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP). The goal is to have a social graph that is not controlled by corporations.

The proposition is to replace privatized social networking platforms with an open architecture featuring one unified social graph that is owned by everyone as a public good. The Project Liberty team believes that giving people ownership and control of their own data is the first step to break the cycle and shift the balance of power. In short, the project aims to reclaim the social graph.

The project inherits three dominant concepts without question:

• the concept of the social graph
• the concept of treating data as property
• the concept of the bureaucratization of human identity.

I’ll make one last observation here if only because it made me smile and made me look forward all the more to cooperating where we can. Its progenitors present four elements they believe distinguish Project Liberty from anything that has come before:

• The protocol is built to be a public good
• The proposition is not reliant upon traditional VC business models
• It places people at the center of the protocol’s design
• It’s a bold vision focused on achievable innovation.

All of this sounds familiar to me and my colleagues at the AKASHA Foundation!

DeSo (previously often referred to as BitClout), 2021

The DeSo initiative claims to be “the decentralized social blockchain”, and believes that social media is “one of the biggest markets for blockchain”.

The author argues that social media platforms should not be described as markets, as this focuses too much on the commercial motivations of the early investors, which may not be in the best interests of users.

Even though there is a great need for DeSo, what can we learn about the initiative’s conceptual reasoning?

The DeSo initiative’s documentation (especially here) and a fleeting reference to the social graph in a blog post appears to confirm that the project inherits two dominant concepts:

• the concept of the social graph
• the concept of the bureaucratization of human identity.

Lens, 2022

The Lens Protocol is a protocol that allows for the easy creation of social platforms on the Web3 network. It is permissionless, meaning that anyone can use it, and composable, meaning that it can be used in conjunction with other protocols. It is also decentralized, meaning that it is not controlled by any single entity.

Marketing communicators should be praised for their efforts to make things “social” more difficult. Social interactions can be difficult to manage, so they need to be commended for their work.

Lens renders a singular social graph publicly on a blockchain, and the introductory overview talks in terms of people owning their data and owning the links between them with shared ownership of the resultant monolith. So just for clarity:

Users will own everything.

The project inherits three dominant concepts without question:

• the concept of the social graph
• the concept of treating data as property
• the concept of the bureaucratization of human identity.

Conceive to conceive

The word “concept” is derived from the Latin word for “conceiving,” which means to create, form, or devise something new. In other words, we are less likely to achieve anything new if we don’t create something new.

The implication here is that we need to examine our context critically.

What if our ability to envision wonderful new futures for social networking participants and communities pivots on the choices we make right now? Are we not, in this moment, creating a system for envisioning? If a system falls short of being generative in this way, is it degenerative?

Misconceptions

Graph theory is the math of relationships. It’s the study of nodes and edges and how they connect. In plain English, social graphing is the study of how social relationships are represented by nodes and edges in a graph. Project Liberty, DeSo, and Lens all use social graphing to varying degrees to represent social relationships. Graph theory is the math of relationships. It’s the study of how nodes and edges connect.

Trying to treat data as property is a category error and is unethical. This is well summarized by the European Data Protection Supervisor who likened the possible emergence of markets for personal data with markets for live human organs. If you want to know more about this topic, there are three blog posts you can read that go into more detail: The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of “personal data”.

The dominant computer science conception of identity is inherited entirely from the bureaucratization of identity, of which legal identity is a well known example. However, this approach to identity is not how human identity works as a sense-making capacity in human community.

It is not possible to completely separate data about a person’s identity and social interactions from each other.

Your graph or mine?

Human identity can be seen as a ever-changing and complex social construct that is created through our interactions with others. In contrast, bureaucracy relies on a set of simplified and unchanging identifiers in order to understand and control citizens. With the increasing digitization of our lives, more and more aspects of our lives are coming under the control of bureaucratic systems.

The Facebook social graph is not something that belongs to any one user, but rather is owned by the Facebook system. This means that the information included in the social graph is determined by what the Facebook system wants, not by what individual users might want or need. Whether Facebook is run by a for-profit company, a non-profit company, or as a public good, the social graph is a deep and wide structure that is not easily changed.

The social graph is a tool that is used to determine relationships between people. It is not perfect, but it is the best option that we have. The system uses the social graph to determine who knows who, who is interacting with whom, and to determine what is important and what is trending. We are nothing more than a weak signal to the system, and it is set up to atomize us and demarcate us for the purposes and assumptions encoded in its architectures and algorithms.A graph connection is stronger than a normal connection.

We, Digital Poets, Craft New Realities

Our technology advancement is continuing to speed up. Therefore, our ability to understand it must grow at the same rate. We need to be aware of the metaphors we use as our default way of thinking. Then, we must diversify our perspectives and take action. Web3 is giving us a new beginning – it is an opportunity to build organizations that are much more productive than the ones we’ve created in the past.

We can understand our community’s inner workings and see its potential by looking at it through different metaphors. By working together, we can create new myths and realities.