Communications: Attempt at a Mental Model

[aliyajypsy]

@saintsal said:

A few dimensions from our convo:

• opt-in vs required (or effectively required)
• noise level
• age group & which channels already have their attention
• which use cases require intermediatedl, centralised or official communication, and which are better suited to enabling direct p2p

[saintsal]

Good to see your thinking exposed - thanks for that.

Trade-off curves

The trade-off curves will be much better with numbers, to really see where the important ranges are for us to manage. Without them, they’re a useful expression of opinion, but not that actionable for designing options. For example here, if there are clear answers to how many notifications per day become too many, we can design around that.

Personally, I think we’d see that a lot of the linear, up-to-the-right graphs are more likely to be bell curves. Specifically, actionable info and steward damage control would go up in cases of too few notifications or too little or unfindable information.

Decentralisation in our comms

Stepping back to the main concept, it would be useful for you to show which use cases you see depending on Comms, and how you distribute them in those two categories.

One thing I’ve noticed is that tools that require “admins” force centralisation. Tools that give agency to people without them needing permission don’t. (Vitalik explained this at a high level which is relevant to us here.) That’s a salient issue for me when thinking about what Comms tools and modes I need for Topic Tracks and Juntos – and tbh any type of education that’s peer-driven – since we want our tool choice to “slope down” towards more agency rather than depending on permission.