Social Infrastructure for Sparkly People

This is a collection of thoughts heavily influenced by Logan through his post on social infrastructure and conversations with him about this.

Definition

I use social infrastructure to refer to a process or institution that connects people in ways they otherwise wouldn’t be connected. It’s jargon that hopefully makes intuitive sense, but it’s important enough of an idea to me that I think it’s worth giving a much deeper account of what I mean by it, and what I think of the concept.

Specifically, people like Logan and I want to build scalable social infrastructure that creates and enables more Sparkly People, because we’ve noticed that environment matters immensely in encouraging people to develop more agency, curiosity, intelligence, and self-efficacy.

In an ideal world, the education system would fill that role, but a well-designed system of school clubs can approximate for that in the absence of broader education reform. These clubs should be deliberately engineered to cultivate the general space of traits that encompass sparkliness.

Analyzing useful examples of social infrastructure in the wild

Hack Club

Hack Club is a great case study of social infrastructure that broadly tries to do something similar (replace sparkly culture with hacker culture). It’s done quite well (at least on a surface level). In terms of pure reach, Hack Club has done very well for itself in the relatively limited amount of time it’s been around. There are amazing summer and winter events, and incentives that aim to build a vibrant teenage hacker community.

However, I believe it fails in its insistence on decentralization. The vast majority of hack clubs are dysfunctional and have marginal impacts on the lives of their members because there’s no attempt to regulate the quality of these clubs. It only really changes the lives of those that are plugged into the online community and are immersed in the milieu of teen hacker culture.

From my (n=1) experience, the best environments for cultivating these traits are small high-trust groups where the desired trait is the norm and present everywhere. In the backdrop, there can be a larger community that you absorb the trait from via osmosis. In an ideal world, the in-person school clubs would serve as those intimate groups and the online community would be the ambient backdrop.

In reality, for many the massive online community approximates for the intimate group, and the lack of a shared “canon” for most people (there’s just a massive amount of channels and discussions to keep track of) filters out most people. At some level, that’s fine. It means that teens who were already going to be hackers move down that path even more, and get a community that they can feel at home with. That’s a wonderful and worthwhile goal. It just completely breaks down if you want to bring in those who wouldn’t have been hackers without Hack Club.

My solution here would be to keep the IRL clubs as they are, but have a stronger emphasis on the online community to the point where it’s the norm for most people vaguely interested in Hack Club to join the online community. Within the online community, it should be the norm for people to join small groups (based on timezone, availability, etc) that basically just an online version of the IRL clubs. These “virtual clubs” will be quality-controlled by Hack Club with leaders who have been effectively taught how to lead, and a centralized approach to social engineering like this. They should know that the main goals of their virtual clubs are to gradually immerse and stimulate hacker culture, and to optimize for that.

Buildspace

I think Buildspace also fails in it’s refusal to engage in community building. Small high-trust communities within the massive buildspace ecosystem would be the perfect way to encourage people to keep moving through the program and stay consistent.

YC

I’m not too familiar with Y Combinator, but I believe they split batches into small groups of founders, and it seems to work quite well.

Moving towards a plan for sparkly social infrastructure

I broadly agree with Logan’s high-level plan to scale.

1. Build an online community with sparkly people. Currently working on this.
2. Work with cool people from that community and start chapters of a federated club in their local areas. (sorta like NHS; an exiting proof-of-concept federation/community is Hack Club)
3. Leverage local connections, existing networks, etc. to promote/recruit for that club in various cities. (Part of the question is “what do we do with the people once we found them”; some ideas include competitions, essay contests, speaker events, participant-run lectures/workshops on interesting subjects, and facilitated 1-on-1s, networking events, group skill-up sessions, etc.)
4. Scale. Get charitable funding, scale up, maybe hire people to actually support the org.
5. Become “how things are.” This is the end goal: make it feel really normal to have easy access to sparkly people and resources as a high school, middle school, college student. Just like how school sports, band, Model UN, etc. is a “thing people do in high school,” the goal is for whatever this organization becomes to be a fact of life. This is how we know we have succeeded.

The only things I would add are thoughts on (1) “what do we do with the people” and (2) what the organization would look like.

1. I would like the default state to be weekly Socratica-style sessions on convenient nights or weekends. Every week, you dedicate time to learn/make/do something (unlike Socratica, I don’t think the emphasis should just be on making), and with some clever social engineering you hopefully continue doing that outside of those sessions as well. There are consistently recurring special events like essay contests, speaker events, days booked out for participant-run workshops, hackathons, etc.
2. I strongly care about controlling quality, because things tend to degenerate without that. I think the ideal source of activity should be in city/region chapters (contra how the ideal source of activity in Hack Club is in individual school chapters). These city/region chapters break down their members into small groups that are run by competent leaders. School chapters will exist, but only as a presence that serves as advertisement (though the city/region should try to keep students from one school in the same group as much as possible).
   • Why I made these choices:
     1. I want to have intimate groups.
     2. I want to control for quality.
     3. I want to reach the people who are sparkly but go to a school where there aren’t enough interested people to run an individual chapter or don’t go to a school at all (the former is a major problem with Hack Club).