Helping people self associate with P2PU

[Carl]

OK, so a badge/code snippet

• would achieve the first and fourth of your goals (traceability)
• might achieve the second (good brand extension where we like the person using it, bad brand extension where we don’t)
• won’t achieve the third (would providing a badge really raise the activity level? Apropos of which, I find it interesting that none of the personal home pages you point to mention P2PU at present; I wonder why? do you think its because there’s no downloadable code snippet on p2pu.org?)

Overall I think a downloadable badge/code snippet is a great idea for minimal investment. Additoinal traceability & name-spreading always good; just not pinning hopes on it to achieve particular traction among a community not already participating . Though happy to be proved wrong so lets try it and see!

In same vein, agree an ‘I donated to P2PU’ badge wouldn’t hurt, presumably released by an auto-mailer as part of thanks and acknowledgement of donation.

[ralfe]

‘self-association’ is always fraught because ripe for abuse. No way to avoid that while maintaining true ‘self’ association - either you leave choice to associate 100% up to the individual (and just accept you may not like/agree with everyone who self-associates) or you act as gatekeeper (curate associations, maintain definition of what ‘association’ means, define content of the user’s profile), in which case it is no longer true ‘self’ association (so not what I understand the original request to be about).

@Carl, If I understand your argument, you are suggesting that the problem with self-association is that either there will be people who don’t “deserve” to be associated, who associate themselves, or there is some moderation which affects the self aspect of self-association? If I have understood correctly, then perhaps there is a simple technical solution to this. So the purpose is to allow those who are part of the P2PU community to self-associate their online presence(s) with P2PU. WIth regards to this, one could begin by defining what does it mean to be part of the P2PU community? As @1L2P pointed out, according to the current strategic thinking of P2PU, participation would involve discussions on the Discourse platform. Thus, it would be relatively trivial to provide the “code snippet” for self-association only to those who have engaged in discussions on the Discourse platform. Thus, no moderation is required, as these individuals, by definition, are part of the P2PU community.

I’m not suggesting that this is what should be done, but rather, that there could be a technical solution to the problem you present. It would also then mitigate this concern of yours:

just not pinning hopes on it to achieve particular traction among a community not already participating

Another idea may be to ask people for donations and give them a custom image they can put on their website that says: “I support P2PU”. But I suppose that’s a different kettle of fish again

I think it should be noted that this changes the implied purpose of self-association, as the relationship between the online presence and P2PU then moves away from “I participate in the P2PU community”, to “I donated to the P2PU community”. I think this is an important distinction.

I find it interesting that none of the personal home pages you point to mention P2PU at present; I wonder why? do you think its because there’s no downloadable code snippet on p2pu.org?

@Carl, I’m not sure if you were being sardonic here, but it does raise the valid question of whether it is the effort to provide a mechanism for self-association will be worthwhile.

Regards,
Ralfe

[1L2P]

Apropos of which, I find it interesting that none of the personal home pages you point to mention P2PU at present; I wonder why? do you think its because there’s no downloadable code snippet on p2pu.org?)

Not to disagree with your broader point, but my blog does mention P2PU as my main affiliation (together with MIT Media Lab). And the page says that it recently moved from wordpress to github and not all content has been migrated yet. My old about page has a lot about P2PU, and I even had a separate P2PU page.