Flux #45 - UX Survey, Gift Economy, Cointelegraph Highlight
Hey everyone,
Eric here. Hope the tail end of the fall is treating you all well.
One of the things we’re excited about moving into next is expanding Junto from simply personal sharing to a platform that facilitates mutual support and meaningful flows of value. We’re currently working on a way for people to add more context to what they share in the form of flags/intentions (specific name tbd). Some examples include ‘feedback,’ ‘collaboration,’ 'advice,’ the list goes on.
What is often missed or misunderstood when sharing online is the specific intention behind our communication. We see this feature as one step towards facilitating more dynamic and authentic engagement as well as deeper levels of understanding between individuals.
In particular, two expression flags will include ‘offerings’ and ‘needs.’ Each community on Junto will be able to curate their own list of offerings and needs that are useful for that social context and members can submit things accordingly. We hope this will encourage the sharing of each individual’s and community’s gifts and foster an environment where people feel inspired to take care of one another.
If you’re familiar with gift economics, you might know that this medium of interaction strengthens community and enables us to make things happen outside of the context of fiat currency, which often reduces engagement that could unlock deeper wealth to simple transactions. You may be able to identify contexts in your life where this is already playing out, within your family, friendships, and random acts of kindness. We envision Junto unlocking significant unrealized potential by bringing some of these natural ways we experience mutual care and collaboration into the design of an online social space.
We’ve enlisted the CUNY design team that is supporting us to create a clean UX for this (shoutout Zoie, Veronika, and Syndi). Part of that process includes getting some initial feedback from you all. If you’re on the app, please take a moment to fill out this survey :)
We also need 5 to 8 people to participate in usability tests for this, so reach out here or to Zoie at zbaba11096@gmail.com if you'd like to be intimately involved in designing this feature!
Finally, we were just featured in a Cointelegraph article so feel free to check that outhere.
'Til next time,
Eric