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A big Google Document full of helpful tips for online meetings, classes, and events. Friends, as we scramble to move our offline interactions online, this is an emerging initial place to share, curate and organize resources. It could really use the loving attention of a great curator!

This document exists to lay out some general principles of running a small social network site that have worked for me. These principles are related to community building more than they are related to specific technologies.

For a brief moment, Tumblr played host to a tight-knit, but open-minded, community of music lovers who were thinking and writing deeply about music and its place in the world. --- In some ways, we were naïve. When Music Tumblr was humming, few people stopped to think that what we were really doing was providing free content to a large company that was trying to figure out how to turn that content into money. Just about everyone I can think of from the Music Tumblr days is now on Twitter, and just about all of them seem miserable there. You go to Twitter expecting the worst, and it rarely disappoints. As crazy as it sounds now, for a short while, in this time and place, social media seemed like a good idea. But there's always hope.

Once upon a time, my Tumblr Dashboard was full of writing about music.

Makerbase was built to allow anyone to edit it — here’s how we’ve tried to stop abuse of that power before it starts. The biggest lesson here is that it is possible to build social platforms where abuse and harassment are not the norm.

And we won’t kick ourselves for having bugs in the software, or for not being compliant enough with the technical preferences of a small, geeky crowd. We will regret if we just give power to ourselves and to the existing institutions again.

As Paul Ford says, “The fundamental question of the web.” Discussions about examples thereof, with Paul Ford himself contributing.

"...would he be instituting the most open and participatory executive branch our nation has seen, directly following the most closed and secretive? ... Oh, the answers are: yes, sure, and of course."

Another Ze Frank project, this one centered on crowd-sourced advice. Write a letter to Ze asking for guidance, get it from everyone else. Intriguing!

A visualization of the feelings of the web. Beautiful and moving.

Augmented Social Network, explained.