Hey. Peter encouraged me to sign up and share thoughts (and questions; one of my main currencies)
1. How much do you feel part of a community here in FFF? I’m new and I’m interested to get a sense from anyone happy to share - do you feel seen, understood and cared for here? how much do you feel invested in the people in this community?
1a. Why?
2. I’m pretty excited at the mo about innovation in open community/ co-operative project management tech + the philosophy and practices of this new tech (eg. www.colony.io, www.part-up.com, Makake, etc) also very interested in where it has potential to seamlessly scale from individual level, to group/ org level, up to national/ global level (basically Deep Democracy theory; before you try to fix national/ global democracy, how do people in your project practice beautiful democracy, and before that, how do you practice beautiful democracy in yourself as an individual - hearing every voice, hearing your minority opinions and mixing rational with phenomenological? averting oppressive decision making, etc?)
Anyway, my first impressions here so far (and as I say, I’m very new!) is wow what a lot of interesting chat & valuable looking information (and probably great people!) but I see websites as virtual facilitators of conversations, and it’s hard to facilitate a generative conversation between many people in person, and in many ways, I’d argue no easier (to do well) virtually… a more traditional chat forum structure like this feels like virtual facilitation that’s nicely loose and open, but perhaps not really optimised for action.
^ All of that is probably prelude to:
Do people here feel like another tool/ space (such as www.Part-up.com) would be nice to have for action focused communication & collaboration? Or is this community not really self-identified yet as an action-capable collective? I know there’s a routine mumble (haven’t joined one yet) so maybe these are more action-focused, or there’s a action space already used?
Also, a sure fire way to get me excited by a new virtual space/ online community/ collaborative web platform is to not just state its purpose (done pretty well here I think) but to mention at least a couple of the most similar existing things, how this is different & why it’s different (essentially justifying what might otherwise be deemed as duplication/ fragmentation - similar perhaps to how multiple lift sharing websites may reduce the net success of lift sharing because the lift you want could be on any of these similar looking websites and they silo data).
Welcome to the F3, lukeflegg. Your way of introducing yourself with questions is quite refreshing. I will answer them now:
Ad 1.
It seems that you will get your first answer from the guy who started the F3. I have been part of the general futurist community for years, though my level of attachment to, and engagement with the community has varied over time. As a person with a serious growth mindset I tend to evolve my views, and that may make me feel less in alignment with the communities that I felt really part with before. Starting a new community felt like a good way of addressing that issue, but it doesn’t really solve it, since my level of agreement with different persons is still quite variable. Fortunately, this community gives me something that was apparently missing in my life before. It helped me to quit wasting so much time on video games, and instead started focusing more on seriously engaging with people and (their) ideas. And there are few communities which are better suited for that combined purpose than the F3, but of course I’m apparently biased.
Do I feel seen? Yes, quite. Do I feel understood? Moderately. It seems to be hard for people to truly understand me, because I have quite a few rather eccentric ideas, as seen in my most recent thread
Luckily, I feel more understood here than anywhere else. Do I feel cared for? At least somewhat. And that’s more than I got from the transhumanist community in general. It’s virtually impossible to please me completely, though, because I’m a terribly ambitious person.
How much do I feel invested in the people in this community? Slightly. I’m not the kind of person that gets easily invested in people, rather the opposite. Generally, I’m more interested in great ideas, projects, and improving the world. Effectively, this means that I’m at least somewhat inclined to feel invested into people with great ideas and projects.
Ad 1a.
I care so deeply about getting the cosmos right that I want to absolutely optimize my effectiveness for improving it. This leaves me little space to actually care a lot about people who don’t share this mission, though I do want to play the role of a bodhisattva who helps people to become better persons and stuff.
Ad 2.
There is indeed a lot of innovation happening in the open / decentralized / co-operative “milieu”, much more actually than I’m keeping track of, since I haven’t yet heard about the platforms you have mentioned. They actually do look quite promising and even slightly mind-expaning, as a lot of the things that get mentioned here in the F3. I wonder whether you have already heard about Backfeed. They are trying to make “decentralized open value networks” (as I am tentatively calling them here) work.
I also haven’t heard about Deep Democracy, yet. At first glance, it looks kinda woo-ish to me, but it does seem to include some really good ideas. From my perspective and experience, for democracy to work better than dictatorship, the size, activity, and engagement level in the community needs to rise above a certain critical threshold. That’s why I’m currently still the benevolent dictator of this small community. I’ve tried formalizing the decision making processes here, but people generally didn’t seem to bother with that:
Thanks!
Forums are really one of the best formats for generative conversations. However, the original purpose behind Fractal Future was to facilitate action that is focused on certain projects. With few exceptions, this intention hasn’t borne much fruit, probably because Fractal Future hasn’t become popular enough to attract a sufficient number of people who want to work on projects together. Nevertheless, the F3 turned out to be a useful and high quality idea sharing and discussion platform.
It would be very optimistic to call Fractal Future an action-capable collective at this point. Adding more tools or spaces is generally problematic, because it tends to dilute attention. That’s why I am trying to keep as much as possible within this forum. If a real need arises to grow out of this forum, then we would of course consider using external tools.
Yes, the mumbe meetings are usually more action-focused. Our “action spaces” are usually the project-specific categories and subcategories within the F3.
There is a list of transhumanist forums on the H+Pedia. In contrast to those, the scope of the F3 is larger, including the general futurist / world improvement community. It also has higher (implicit) quality standards, and is intended to facilitate project related work, which in part explains why there isn’t much more activity going on here.
I wonder whether you have already heard about 
