2022 CE
Turned the research into a project to design and produce a comprehensive system for social credits. Acquired technical skills. In search of a more practical application, the project drifted to social journaling.

Feder social credits

Feder visualises social recognition data. Our team believes a better society is possible when people can identify with the differences they make. The app enables people to credit one another mutually, so they can shape society in a positive feedback cycle.

The foundation of this project is internal research conducted between August 2018 and December 2021 by Taro, the founder of Feder. The conclusion of research is that society improves in quality by how people recognise the value created in the society.

In search of a feasible implementation of the conclusion in modern society, this project identifies a new form of value recognition and calls it “impact”. If money as a numerical value recognition facilitated material transactions, impact as a qualitative value recognition enables the creation of meaningful changes in society.

This idea entails a social environment of highly developed and diversified values. Also, the structure of the company requires access to a tech-enabled workforce, a venture capital industry that understands start-ups, and a favourable attitude of society towards social innovation with technology.

The initial product is a mobile-friendly web application where any individual or brand can collect “feathers”: mutually confirmed social impact data that testifies to the differences they made in society. The mutual confirmation process introduces an idiosyncratic way of data creation. It’s expected to validate perceived value created in society.

The production utilises the latest open-source web technologies and services. This approach has two goals. One is to deliver top-notch user experience on the consumer side, with the best technologies available. The more important second one is to minimise the friction of web development on our team’s side so we can deliver improvements in a shorter iteration cycle.

Mission

Feder aims to empower social autonomy. It means enabling people to deliberately shape their social environment in ways beneficial to them. It’s the independence to learn from others, to share a sense of purpose, and to create value together.

Our team believes such cooperation and reciprocity are essential for a healthy, vibrant, and innovative society. A society like this allows individuals to overcome conflicts and hardships, to become what they desire. People shape society, and society shapes people.

Modern society seems to be drifting the other way. Industrial capitalism has played an integral part in modernising society, promising material affluence. Monetary currency and transactions with it have been acting as the smallest possible unit of truth. But numerical valuation only has one dimension: more. Now people are disenchanted with it.

Nobody wants to cause destruction of the natural environment, contemporary slavery, orphans, or diabetes. However, what people want causes the problem somewhere in the value chain without them knowing it. That’s how we magically create a world we don’t desire.

All suffering is caused by ignorance. — Dalai Lama

Several wicked problems are on the rise, such as the climate crisis, economic inequality, and political radicalisation. People are confused and disoriented, seeking entertainment to distract themselves from the dissonance.

If you are thinking this is too broad and deep to discuss, you are right. Individually, each of them seems like a daunting challenge even just to look at. But the Feder team sees a common root cause they all share. It’s the work of our society as a desire machine.

Society is what we want and how we communicate it. Imagery of society might be a group of people sitting around a fire smiling at each other. In a clinical sense, society is a massive desire-processing machine.

Social recognition is how society reproduces our desire. Traditional society recognised hierarchical social classes. Modern society recognises transactional market value. And it can change what people want.

The rule is simple: people desire what others do, because we are social beings. And this all happens within our cognitive ability. We can only want what we can see in our minds. If we want better and talk about better, our complex societal system will respond.

We are ready for a solution. Our society has achieved unprecedented technological advancement, and it’s accessible. For-impact businesses are redefining success. Workforces are highly educated, consumers are well informed, and civilians have the power to engage. The challenge is not availability; it’s how we identify and orchestrate what we really want: a better future.

Strategy

Feder recognises society as a living entity. The symbiotic nature of society resembles multicellular organisms. It’s difficult to imagine individual survival outside a society, regardless of whether it’s a small tribe or a metropolis. Even if some do, they will grow into a new distinctive society.

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. — John Dewey, Democracy and Education

However, human society still has a long way to go until it actually reaches such a level of integrity. Compared to biological organisms, there is a significant discrepancy between individual motivation and social interest.

This gap is where Feder claims to be. We are here to fill this gap through better understanding, execution, and persistence using widely accessible technology. This is a universal, timeless human effort to make a better society, dating back to ancient times. But it’s another time, with different vision and tools.

In the past, the idea of society as an organism ended up with totalitarianism. Contrary to its name, the whole society was, and still is, enslaved by a handful of people. That was the limitation of our immature political ideology. Still, socialism in a political context has been linked to nationalistic authoritative institutions such as government.

Now we live in a different world. Thanks to the latest technologies and products, the level of communication is denser than ever, connecting everyone horizontally. Various web services work as platforms, eliminating middlemen. We can imagine what ‘social’ means once again.

Research

Feder developed the current approach from internal research revolving around social philosophy. The goal of the research was to make a comprehensive survey of our understanding of society and figure out a feasible way to make a meaningful impact.

Following is a timeline view of changing topics of the study conducted between August 2018 and December 2021 by Taro, the founder of Feder.

Corporate structure and limitations

The initial motivation of the research had a focus on corporations. Big companies are the economic powerhouses of modern society. It’s a feasible way to scale and condense human effort for value creation. If we can enhance this structure somehow, that’s a meaningful contribution to society.

Corporate structure introduces many challenges. We can scale financial capital, size of workforce, and infrastructure. But it’s much more difficult to scale leadership, innovation, and learning. We risk diluting them. This is important because, at the end of the day, a company is where people get together and make something. And corporate structure itself is a tool to sustain such activity.

Modern office working culture is largely based on that of a manufacturing factory. And factory working culture was an innovation. Taylorism increased productivity and value of each worker. This was possible because the required input and desired result were easily quantifiable in a linear manner.

With advanced technologies, manufacturing standardised many aspects of its productivity because tangible products have much larger opportunities for direct manipulation. This is not the case anymore in many workplaces. For knowledge workers, often the quality of work grows or shrinks exponentially.

For knowledge workers, the personal computer was the greatest innovation. But despite its convenience, researchers say there wasn’t a substantial boost of productivity for office workers with personal computers other than saving paper.

Results are diluted talent, leaders suffering invisibility of their organisations, and demotivated, demoralised employees. Acts of selfishness and indifference have many friends and their ways of hiding. This gap is diverging as more and more positions demand the creation of knowledge and qualitative results.

This research could not answer how such a human quality could simply scale with corporate structure. The reason comes down to particularity. Each unique individual and company has a unique mental and organisational composition, respectively, and cannot be standardised.

In conclusion, it seems corporate structure would hardly overcome its transactional, quantitative nature and develop some idiosyncratic way to harbour creative, qualitative human activity. And as we expect demand for such opportunities to increase, the research redirected its focus to informal substructures of corporations.

It doesn’t mean corporations have lost their chances to harness the creative nature of the human mind. People have found an answer in smaller, denser organisations. As the start-up ecosystem matures, larger companies are busy making their innovations to foster in-house entrepreneurship and strategic partnerships and, of course, mergers and acquisitions.

Systems theory and social feedback

Systems theory is the overarching mental model for this research. This interdisciplinary field of study was started from an alternative approach to the biological ecosystem of an Austrian biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972).

He discovered that analysing individual species and putting them together cannot depict complex ecosystems very well. Instead, he brought context and relationships among species and their environment to the stage. And built a more universal mathematical model for the biological ecosystem as a whole.

The theory eventually developed into general system theory, now referred to as systems theory, as it governs general rules among all sorts of different systems. This new approach appealed to not just biology but many different fields of study. Especially organisational studies and economics welcomed its focus on structures, which is useful as they have no control over the atoms—people.

One of the most important languages of the study is feedback. Systems theory is all about the network of systems connected with feedback loops, which is a system itself. Feedback happens when a system’s output eventually comes back as an input. Positive feedback makes the system grow or shrink exponentially. Negative feedback regulates and stabilises the system.

The question is: how can we make feedback loops in this society? Corporations fail in quality because they can reproduce powerful feedback loops in quantifiable ways, but not as much in qualitative approaches.

Social feedback is often conflated with that “pat on the back”. And of course there is a benefit in giving kudos. But such personal feedback doesn’t travel too far. It might work on a micro level. But macro-society is vast. The output needs to survive the distance to complete a feedback cycle.

Clarity is a bigger challenge of personal feedback. Sometimes we are straightforward and honest. Some other times we are not. Positive personal feedback can be an encouragement, a tactical attempt at diplomacy, or pure randomness. The complicated nature of human interaction makes it hardly identifiable for society as a whole.

Monetary currency, or money, is a much more reliable example of social feedback. Capitalism is a model of a positive feedback cycle implemented with money. This was useful, especially when society had limited means of long-distance communication. The numerical nature of money is easier to understand and handle.

Money or any other form of numerical valuation will remain useful for quantifiable commodities. But we have arrived at the age of affluence. People want to stop working for “more”. In micro-society, we all crave “just right” and “better”. But we don’t have a macro system for it.

This lack of a proper system of feedback results in all sorts of pathologies and alternate approaches. Radicalised politics represent a lack of progressive vision. For-impact organisations struggle to reproduce their values substantially. Social initiatives often use smaller sizes to retain identity and quality. But they always fail in interoperability and end up with established capitalist approaches.

The theory of recognition

One book led the research to its final conclusion. The Struggle for Recognition (originally, Kampf um Anerkennung, 1992) is a modern take on German philosopher Friedrich Hegel’s theory of recognition. The author, Axel Honneth, states that what makes society progress is people’s desire to be recognised.

This idea penetrates all important keywords collected by the research. Society happens on the plane of cognition, our nervous system. It’s where people believe or know they can help one another. Actually being helpful is another problem. They need to be able to recognise how they could possibly, hopefully, add value to others.

If people can learn how to fulfil what they want for one another, society can self-organise into a more effective form. Learning is an intense process of recognising information passed around society. Information is how society reproduces knowledge—and knowledgeable people—and grows. Knowledge shapes values in people. Values come from people’s desires.

This cycle is surprisingly similar to that of capitalism. Society can learn others’ desires by making transactions. Successful and frequent transactions mean it’s needed much. The capitalist system enables producers to easily form a positive feedback cycle on such demand.

It works well when there is a heightened demand for material transactions. On the contrary, it’s almost impossible for people to learn why they don’t need something in a capitalist system. It only comes down to the merit of frugality. They obviously miss out on all the things they can do without buying anything. People can pick up such knowledge from other educative resources. But it contrasts with the strong, evident attraction of capital.

Lack of detail is another blind spot. Revenue is a positive signal, but it doesn’t tell you what’s in it. It comes down to how people would analyse and interpret it. Sometimes we are good at it; sometimes we are not. Again, this is what we can work on, but it doesn’t match the robust signalling of the capitalist system.

To compensate for this, society relies on political systems and public services, including education. So we can navigate through our life knowing what the market doesn’t teach us. But compared to resilient, powerful, and granular feedback cycles of a capitalist economy, they fall short. And this is why it’s hard to deliberately organise our social environment outside capital.

Our political system has elections on an annual basis. Imagine you can only make a single purchase a year. Political decisions are monolithic executions made after verbal discussion without reliable evidence. Instead, the market makes small, often individual experiments to check if things are done right.

It can all change if individuals can manifest their values in a reciprocated way, as it happens in the markets with transactions. However, “values” are not as dynamic as purchases. People could sometimes denote what they like or not, but there is not enough motivation for people to get eager.

Impact is a more specific, motivating category for the new feedback cycle. People want not only positive changes but also membership in making the changes. They don’t need to give in to anything like when they make purchases. They just need to recognise the impact they witnessed or created and get it reciprocated.

Product

Is it possible to help people recognise one another for their impact with available technology? Yes. High-level assessment of information technology and its availability easily exceeds the requirement of this venture. Feder can take start-up best practices quite literally. Go software-centric. Listen and learn from users. And iterate.

Our expectation of user experience can be listed as the following.

The modern web ecosystem is incredibly accessible from both sides. Every single end-user device is shipped with a web browser by default. Useful frameworks, tools and services are making hard competition in the developer’s favour. Feder products will take advantage of both.

In the long term, web technology has never stopped improving since its inception. Its democratic decision-making process promises security and neutrality. Upcoming or young components of web technology include progressive web apps and web assembly. They will deliver native app experience over the web in the near future.

Key features

The Feder application focuses on visualising social data generated under mutual confirmation of different parties. It provides its users with an interface to credit each other so they can secure social, evidential, and favourable data that represents their social impact.

Feathers: mutually confirmed social data

Feathers are textual messages written down to testify to the perceived social value of their recipient. An important aspect of feathers is how they are issued. Feathers can accommodate hashtags that work as metadata. Hashtags can highlight important keywords in a feather. It also can be used for sorting and filtering feathers.

Before getting published, a feather has to get reviewed and confirmed by both lateral parties—the issuer and the recipient. Initially, a feather can be either pushed or pulled. ‘Push’ means the pusher is giving the feather to the recipient. ‘Pull’ means the hopeful recipient is asking for a confirmation of a feather for themselves from the issuer.

The issuer and recipient take turns to take action: confirm, revise, or reject. If the feather is pushed, the recipient takes a turn. If it’s pulled, the issuer takes it. Regardless of which side did it, confirming the feather permanently defines the content of the feather. Either of the parties can delete the feather, but it cannot be revised again.

If one side revises the content of the feather before it’s confirmed, the new content is pushed or pulled to the other side. It’s functionally identical to pushing or pulling a new feather to the other side. The only difference is the overall context. Either side can decide to reject the issue of the feather or delete the feather after it’s issued.

E-mail integration

Users can confirm or reject a feather by e-mail. The Federated account is email-based. So every time someone pushes or pulls a feather, the other side receives an e-mail. The e-mail consists of all the information from the feather, such as the other side’s profile, your own profile, the timestamp, the message and tags. It also includes buttons that tell Feder APIs to invoke corresponding actions. Users can confirm or reject the feather by these buttons.

Even e-mail addresses that do not have a Feder account can receive feathers. If an existing user of Feder pushes or pulls a feather from/to an e-mail address directly, Feder will still send an e-mail on behalf of the user. And a corresponding Feder profile will be automatically created for the new e-mail address to attribute the feather.

E-mail integration is important not only for the user experience but also for active usage of the application. It enhances accessibility because users can send feathers to any e-mail address and still expect a response. For light users who don’t check Feder very often, e-mail notification enables them to react to any unexpected request for a feather.

Multiple profiles

Social media have started to implement multiple profiles. Feder got this by default. Users access their Feder account by their emails. But the account is not the primary agent in Feder; the profile is. One account can have multiple profiles. Each profile can have a distinctive name and image. So it’s impossible to see how profiles are linked just by looking at them.

Profiles are allowed to receive feathers even if they are from the same account. It’s even possible for a profile to receive from itself. This is because social recognition is about social personas and not individual identity.

It’s also possible for multiple accounts to manage a single profile. This would be the case for larger organisations where many stakeholders are managing a brand. Multiple accounts will be able to collaborate similarly to other SaaS. Further details will be implemented as Feder matures, as this is an advanced use case.

Sapir keyboard layout

Sapir
z l h g q j f o u ` 
s r n t m y c a e i 
v x b d k w p ' , . /

Sapir is a keyboard layout by Taro. Based on Whorf, Sapir keeps frequent consonants closer to the hands for shorter pinkies.

Whorf and Sapir

Whorf
f l h d m v w o u , 
s r n t k g y a e i 
x j b z q p c ' ; .

Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf are known for Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Although they never co-authored any work or called it a hypothesis. The concept describes linguistic relativity where thoughts are shaped by the language used.

Whorf is a purely algorithmic layout. It’s optimised for the shortest path travelled 2-dimensionally. The heart of Whorf is the vowels on the right-hand side. Sapir relocates consonants to add human factors. Least used keys are placed on the outer corners so pinkies don’t have to reach out as much.

Performance

Layout SFB Roll Alt
Qwerty 5.84% 38.43% 19.31%
Dvorak 2.60% 39.32% 34.65%
Colemak 1.51% 45.82% 22.11%
Sapir 0.43% 43.11% 29.11%

Reference

Hardware

ZSA Planck EZ has been discontinued.

Social journaling

Social credits plus a gratitude journal equals an impact journal. It means journaling that is impactful and journaling about some impact. The new model is a combination of a gratitude journal and impact measurement. Users can write down anything they appreciate. These new feathers don’t have to be credited. It’s more or less a personal record of noticing/making differences. Users can optionally credit the journal entry to other profiles. Crediting can still be refused.

But still, Feder differentiates from other journaling apps for the crediting part and from social media for the personal journaling part. Its delivery is more concise. Impact organisations can also write down the differences they made/noticed and credit backers, supporters and activists. But more importantly, these organisations can be credited for the entries from the people they help.

Since it’s a journal after all, the act of writing is more important now. Why? Imposing a credit-confirmation process makes it sound difficult and burdensome when I explain it to people. Probably it is. Imagery of review: people still feel anxious about the idea of social credit and attributing some value to “people”. The journaling model mitigates this. Although not very popular, gratitude journals and impact measurement are well-known concrete use cases. Still, the new model approaches what Feder has been trying to do, just less imposingly.

The new feather looks a little blander. I’m not sure if it reaches my vision of developing a better social system. But when I think about the overall impact on the ecosystem, the organisations, investors and governments, this could be it. Feder is the valuation and archiving part of those social institutions. I still haven’t figured out a very strong attraction for the users. Maybe impact organisations could be the most motivated users. Since the new model is simply more approachable, I’m expecting to get actual users with it and learn from there.

The new approach can overlap with social media and simple journaling very easily. And there is no good measure to confine it to “impact”. Users could be writing arbitrary prose. It would be just harder to credit others, as they would refuse. I see a clear requirement for further definition of functionalities for feathers. I should figure these out by learning the use cases.