We believe that we have everything that we need to be happy in this world, if only we allowed ourselves to do it. We believe that we all create unnecessary states of shame for ourselves: shame based on who we are, what we've done, or the thoughts that pop into our heads. We consider this to be a tragedy.
We want to combat this problem through community. We believe that, by connecting with other people, we can lift each other up to new heights. With a group of friends that love and accept us for who we are, we believe that we can build the self-confidence to do greater things. Usually, self-development is seen as a process of working on yourself, and then being worthy enough of human connection. In our view, instead, we think that human connection comes first, and self development follows naturally as a direct result.
OurSocialProject is an open source initiative that empowers people to create fantastic, supportive communities in their area. We have a set of rituals that we do as a group to create and spread this human connection to others. You can join our Slack channel to pitch in thoughts, and find like-minded people who share your vision. We maintain a Github repository, as a group, where you can see the rituals that we’ve come up with so far to help foster our own community. You can use these rituals for your own group, or you can also make a “fork”, where you can create rituals of your own. We also run a Medium publication, so that everyone can add stories about their own experiences with trying to get their social projects to work for them.
- We believe that everyone can attain a higher state of being through community.
- We believe that, with the right environment, everyone can be inspired to take action to benefit the whole of humankind.
- We refuse to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation.
- We believe that empathizing with others is the only path to persuading them to improve.
- We think that it's important to improve ourselves on a day-to-day basis, through the use of strategically designed rituals.
The rituals that we have committed to so far are as follows:
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We will always greet each other with a warm hug. We will make the effort to truly appreciate this moment of connection with every member of the group.
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We will commit to holding strong eye contact with each other where possible.
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We will offer constructive feedback to help each other to improve our social skills, rather than knocking down each other’s self-esteem.
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We encourage everyone to have a voice; we use phrases like: “what do you think about this?”, “tell me more about that”, and “Hmmm... interesting!”
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If we find ourselves annoyed by somebody’s behaviour, then rather than using a “you” statement: “you’re acting like an inconsiderate jerk!”; we will use an “I” statement: “I feel upset when somebody talks as flippantly as that”.
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We share vulnerability early and often. We look for that moment of genuine human connection, where we can express that we’re all imperfect human beings, really, and the sad thoughts that pop into our consciousness don’t have to define our self-image.
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We accept people’s thoughts and emotions as they are, without judgement. If somebody shares vulnerability, then we can build them up by non-judgmentally validating these emotions - “That must feel terrible. It’s never easy to feel like that”.
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When someone new joins the community, we each try to: (a) Make an effort to connect 1-to-1 with that individual. (b) Share at least one genuine vulnerability with the new person. (c) Approach them with curiosity - try to learn at least one important thing about the person’s perspective which will help us to understand their experience and behaviour in future.
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If someone comes to us with a complaint about another person, we start by asking: (a) What could you have done better to help them? (b) What good thing would you like for them which would help them?
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If an individual or group improves in any way, no matter how small, we mention it. Even better if this is in front of multiple people.
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We assume good faith.
This project is targeted at ourselves. We seek to look at ourselves in all our vulnerability and without judgement. Looking at ourselves with kindness, we seek, simply, to build the community which we would most like for ourselves. We seek to build the community which would help us to overcome our egoic mindsets together and to approach the world with the best possible intentions. If what we hope for resonates with you, then this is targeted at you. No one is one of us more than you are.
If you aren’t already familiar with our Git based version control system and the associated coding jargon, not to worry. This is how we organise our documentation, and you’ll pick it up as needed.
We recommend that the basic mechanics for getting involved with the project should stay the same across all forks. We have designed this system to be as conducive as possible for getting other people interested in taking part. We hope that you are excited by the mission of spreading real human connection to all of humankind, and about the benefits to society that this could bring about.
Saying that, we are also wary that different people are uncomfortable with sharing their personal insecurities around communities with other people - so you can also elect to make everything private. Even if that is the case, we encourage you to go through each of these steps by yourself, as the steps are also designed to help you to question everything, and structure your thinking in a constructive way.
All of the documents in this repository are meant to be working drafts, which should change rapidly over time. With a civil forum for discussion, we think that we can spell out our differences, and see things from new points of view. That includes ourselves too! We by no means assume that our conception of how things work is the absolute truth. We all accept that we have a long way left to go.
As a first step, we want you to write out a personal story expressing why you are getting involved with the project. This will act as your personal “manifesto” - a rallying cry to communicate exactly what you are looking for. This document will be important, because you can use it as a way of connecting with other people in your local group. This might involve talking about why community is important to you, and what you are hoping to achieve. Some good questions to touch on might be:
- What does a good community mean to you?
- Can you describe how you felt at a time in your life when you lacked a good community?
- Can you describe a time in your life when you had a great community? How did it feel physiologically?
- What are you hoping to achieve by making a community using OurSocialProject?
- What would your ideal community NOT look like?
- What kinds of interesting ideas do you like, which fit together with the overall themes in OurSocialProject?
As a general word of advice, we would recommend this manifesto to be deeply personal. If you can bear to do it, mention something that you feel insecure about, which makes you feel a little vulnerable. This is important, because true connection can only begin to take shape in a world where we accept ourselves as human beings. It gives us something tangible to connect over. It also happens to project an extreme sense of self-confidence - as you are accepting of your own flaws, without letting it affect your sense of self.
We would also encourage you to share this manifesto on social media. The aim is to get people genuinely interested in this project, and to spread the project as quickly as possible around the internet. We believe that hearing real human stories, told by people that we love, can inspire people to get involved for themselves. Maybe the reason that you got involved in the first place was that you saw a friend open up about their own insecurities about community for themselves. Do you think that you would have been more convinced if they strictly stuck to writing a dispassionate argument based on facts?
If you feel comfortable with it, then you can also publish your manifesto to Medium, where we have a channel set up. If you really don’t feel like writing a manifesto out, then you can also make a video manifesto. The idea here would be to chronicle your progress as a “vlog”, rather than a blog. These videos can be shared on YouTube - and similarly, you can share these videos on the OurSocialProject YouTube channel.
Here is an example of the first manifesto that was written to try to communicate this message.
Next, you'll want to make a fork (a personal copy) of this repository for your own personal use. This repository will be an expression of your own personal learnings about community building, and a consolidation of your thoughts on the subject. Over time, you will make new pushes to this repository, which will chart the personal development of your thoughts.
If you haven’t already gotten setup with GitHub, then there are some simple instructions for getting started that you can follow along with here. For this particular project, since you’ll likely just be editing text files, you shouldn’t need to have to learn to use the GitHub CLI, and you can probably stick to just using GitHub Desktop.
The next step is to tailor the values and rituals that we have set up in our master branch to work for you. We don’t expect that you will agree with the way that we see the world. You might actually hold dramatically different views, and you might see the world in a completely different light. We think that everyone, no matter what their background, is deserving of human connection, so we want to make it easy to take this framework in any way that you like. You are totally free to build your own social project, which fits to a radically different agenda than ours. We hope that in time, filled with love and compassion as a member of fantastic community, you will come to share our general worldview, and try to improve it where possible!
If the existing values, rituals, and mission statement seem fine to you as they were written here, then you might not need to change anything. However, we encourage you to think critically about whether you truly buy into the messages that we are advocating. For every ritual and value, think to yourself, “does this make sense to me?”. We want to empower everyone to come up with edits of their own, so that over time, we can crowdsource a set of principles that make sense to us.
If you find that your own values are so far removed from what we have come up with to be unacceptable, then you can edit this README to link back to your own repository as the “master branch” that you’re copying from. This will allow us to be far more inclusive, bringing human connection even to people that we feel no connection to at all.
The next step is to isolate a group of people that you can start socializing with. We want to give you as much flexibility as possible with this. You might decide that what you want from this open social project is simply for you to gain a better relationship with your friends. If that’s the case, then you could simply share your manifesto with a few friends, and try to get them to buy into it. Ideally, you’ll get them to follow these steps themselves, thinking through their own manifesto, rituals, and values - and you’ll be able to compare.
If your friends seem unwilling or uninterested in doing this, then you can join the OurSocialProject Slack channel here. The Slack channel as a whole is meant to be an open place, where anybody in the community can feel free to discuss about topics related to the project, as well as offering suggestions for how to make it better.
Search to see whether there are any open channels in your area already, and if not, you can make one for yourself. Once the channel has a decent number of members, you can start proposing friendship groups where you can try out your rituals. You might like to share your own GitHub repo here, allowing you to sort yourself into a group of people that seem interesting to you. Once you have identified a few people that you would like to start a group with, then create a group message with these people in it.
It’s totally up to you how the first meeting might pan out. You might decide that you’d like to create a really solid group by yourselves before doing anything else, so you might just meet at a bar for drinks. You might all have a real passion for modern art, so you might attend a gallery together. You might meet up for a run. Whatever you do, you will commit to following a set of group rituals (set up in the next step), which acts as an amalgamation of your individual rituals. You can take the time to discuss which rituals you like the sound of in this Slack group. Our main recommendation is that, whichever rituals you choose, you should carry them out with a singular purpose - truly connecting as a group.
You are also totally free to decide how large you want the group to be. You might think that it’s easiest to start out with a small group of people, allowing everyone ample time to speak. You might think that you can bring a huge group in early, if everyone shares the same level of commitment. You can decide this for yourself.
The next step is to for a member of your group to come up with a GitHub account for your own local community. Be creative with this if you want! Come up with a fun team name! Design a logo! Be as cheesy as you feel comfortable.
Once you have this set up, you’ll want fork the OurSocialProject master repository once again. This time, you will fill out the values and rituals with something that has been agreed by the group as a whole. Once this has been set up, you can add each of the group’s members as collaborators, and each of you will be able to edit it. You can make pull requests amongst yourselves, so that you end up with a common ground set of rituals that you can all agree on.
In this step, you actually make it happen, and meet up with the group of friends that you found. Although you’ve probably met up with friends thousands of times before, this time should hopefully be different! If your rituals are anything like the master branch’s, then you should hopefully feel a sense of true belonging in the group that you’re a part of.
Hopefully, this will feel truly special. Hopefully, you will start to feel that, as part of this kind of community, you really are deserving of love. Hopefully, you will foster an atmosphere of love, compassion, and acceptance - and you’ll soon want to meet up again.
However, this could easily feel anything but great. This might feel rather awkward. You might feel like the social dynamic that you have engineered seems a little forced. You might have trouble connecting in a meaningful way, or you might not feel secure in yourself to truly share your vulnerabilities. Either way, you will make a mental note of how this all went. You will see which rituals succeed, and which rituals fail, and next time, you will do better. Over time, as each of your skills at this process increases, you should gradually feel like every meetup is more impactful than the last.
If you haven’t joined the OurSocialProject Slack channel at this point, then this could be a great time to pitch in to the discussion. You can post about your first experience in the general channel, and share any learnings that you might have. Did any of your rituals backfire terribly? What worked especially well? How would you rate the experience out of ten? You might also find it useful to learn from the experiences of others, who are all searching for the same goal as you.
You might find it useful to share your experiences publicly with your friends. It could be an interesting story to tell; how one day, you decided to do this wacky thing, where you met up with a group of complete strangers and did a bunch of cult-y stuff! In the best case, it might be a funny horror story of something that, “just isn’t for me”, and in the best case, you might want to share these benefits with the world at large!
Again, you are more than welcome to post these stories on Medium, where we would be happy to feature your perspective on our blog. Again, if writing really isn’t your cup of tea, then you can also post this as a video, and you can share this with our YouTube channel.
Our hope for this project is that, as a group of like-minded individuals from all across the world, we will be able to really get at the heart of what makes communities “tick”. We want to reach a level of sagehood, where our collective society knows how to reach out to everyone, and make them feel connected to us all.
Although every contributor has their own motivations for why they take part in this project, we firmly believe that by improving at what we do, we can change the world. If 10 years in the future, every living human knows the skills that are necessary to spread real human connection, then we think that the world would be a totally different place. What would this mean for the way that we treat each other? What would this mean for our politics? What would this mean for our own sense of self-esteem?
To make this happen, we want you to get involved with improving this master branch. That’s why we want to encourage you to take the lessons that you are learning in your localized social groups, and share your newfound knowledge with the world. If you believe that you have found a new ritual or value that we are missing, then make a pull request. If you want to make any edits to the README, then make a pull request. If you have a cool idea for an extension to our website, then make a pull request. We might not ultimately accept every amendment that is made, but we will certainly make an effort to respond to any suggestions with a reasoned reply.
For less technical members of the community, you can also create a feature request in this repository, for an addition to our website, which somebody else could help to build. There are some obvious features that we are trying to work on right now, but we could imagine many more possibilities for extensions into the future. What about a cool Tinder-type app, which could make finding friendship groups easier? What about a page that makes it easier to share this information with your friends? What about a page that collates “field reports” from group meetings? The possibilities are endless, with the goal in mind to increase total human connection.