Our next speaker will actually explore. That's you Matthew. Our next speaker, Matthew, over here from AT Connect, will actually show us a broader application, how scientific communities, newsroom and public institutions can actually integrate sly into hr. And it equally, Matthew the floor is yours. Okay. Hey, is this thing on? Okay, great. I'm gonna run really fast through this 'cause we're running a little late and I've got a train to catch and I really feel bad about kicking the previous guys off the stage. What they're doing is amazing and I think the economies of scale, that is a brilliant example of infrastructure in the social media space for Europe. So I'm not here to talk about that at all. Um, my background, and this is not actually the right slide. Yeah, my, I'm Matthew, uh, I'm an Australian in Brussels and the reason I'm introducing myself mainly is to explain that I do a lot of work with the European Commission, but these are personal views only. I'm not here representing them. Uh, in my background I've done a lot of work in building communities. My background is in science. I became a science journalist doing a lot of work in the public sector. So that's why I'm here to talk about how you can build communities in at proto, which can be really bene beneficial for newsrooms, scientific organizations and governments. 'cause those are the three sectors I know, but it probably will help for other sectors. So if so, do reach out to me. Okay. I'd love to know about it. Um, I've been trying to convince people, particularly in Brussels to adopt Blue Sky for a while now. And it's okay, when you talk to an individual you can appeal to their better nature. But when you talk to a social media manager at a large organization, they'll say, listen, I know what you're talking about, but I've got targets, right? I use an X account which my organization had 15 years ago. We've now got 12 million followers and you want me to start up something on blue sky and I've got no followers, it will take me forever. I've got targets, I've got limited time. I'm sorry, can't do it. Some of the narratives that do work is when you start pointing out to them though that the actual quality and value of their followers on X isn't that high. After all half of them are bots anyway and every time they do anything other than broadcaster press release, although they can't do that anymore because if you share a link, nobody sees it. So you're down to, they're reduced to publishing memes as if that convinced anyone of anything. Um, they do admit that in fact what they have is of reasonably low value. So what you can say perhaps is that you can do quite a lot. You can get quite a lot more value out of a smaller blue sky audience. And some of the speakers before have pointed out that this is already being demonstrated today, notably by the media themselves who are reporting that, you know, they're getting a lot more engagement, a lot more traffic, you know, clickthroughs and subscriptions through smaller blue sky audiences than they are with their large X audiences. The other sector that I referred to earlier is science. Science loves blue sky. The science feed is one of the top 10 out of, what is it, 50, 60,000 feeds on blue sky. And uh, the reason for that is because scientists have really adopted blue sky massively. It's become a subject of scientific study. They're studying themselves on blue sky and they're liking what they see. And I know that some of you have already referenced symbol, these are some early, uh, mockups froms. I'm really looking forward to seeing how that evolves. For those of you who don't knows, has launched last week as a bookmarking tool, but it's gonna evolve into a social network for scientists. So scientists can have really high quality conversations on, uh, social media about their work. Now how are you gonna do this? How are you as a large organization? And by the way, it really is important for large organizations to come onto Blue Sky 'cause a lot of people get their news through social media. You may have heard about that. And the organizations they want to get news from have to publish on Blue Sky for them to be able to make the move across, otherwise they're stuck on X just to get the news. So how do large org, oh, before I even, uh, I wanted to mention something. Did you notice it's media and science that are these two early adopters? These are two sectors who are full of professionals who are both terminally online and also deeply inculcated in the ethics of don't publish something, you can't back up with evidence. I mean most scientists, some journalists, okay, but they have the journalistic method and the scientific method. I find it really interesting that these two sectors are such early strong adopters and are getting such value out of blue sky. And I think that's very promising. And I hope also that a lot of people in government and public sector and civil society would also like to say that they like backing up what they say with evidence. So this is a narrative that works. But how to do it is a bit tricky.
You see, you have to look at how most social media managers manage social media on SAX for large organization. You've got your social media manager there and he or she has, you know, the keys to the kingdom credentials for the official account, the holy grail and maybe they can ghost post for a couple of celebrities and they're surrounded by these blue beavers here. These are colleagues all tweeting away, building up a wonderful network of people outside the green externals. But that value in captured in that network is completely unavailable to the guy in the center because all those blue beavers are tweeting in a personal capacity only because it's complicated right now. All they can really do is circulate an internal message, please. Like anything I post on behalf of the president or the organization, which is a very crude and not very powerful way of capturing the value in those networks.
Now you swap it out for blue sky. Okay, same picture, same architecture, same organizational structure. But you can do a little bit more for a start. You can say, okay, we've got 3000 people in our organization, we're gonna divide it up using starter packs. So here is our organization active in this sector, you know, train, transport, here's our organization, active in digital policy, whatever. And you've got up to 150 people in each starter pack. That's great.
However, when you look at the feed from that starter pack, you get the holiday picks, which is not that great. So why don't we include some custom feeds. So a starter pack can hold a few custom feeds, right? And then the custom feeds, you include these externals, trusted externals, people that you trust.
And okay, before we talk about the benefits of that, the one thing you have to remember is that this is a bit of a coordination problem because the, the social media manager doesn't have the subject matter expertise to figure out whether this guy should be in this custom feed. You need to empower people across your organization. And this is the problem here because the value of the custom feeds accrues to these people, not the social media marketer. There's a lot of value in this for organizations, but it's not felt by the social media marketing guy who is the person you're gonna need to convince to adopt blue sky. But the value is actually coming to these guys because these, uh, these custom feeds are fantastic value for large organizations.
Whether you're a newsroom scientific organization like a university or, or government or whatever, it's really easy to set up. You simply say, okay, we'll make a list of all the people in the startup pack plus everybody else in the organization who didn't make the cut. Plus people we trust outside and we just talk, tell them, if you use this hashtag, you'll be in the custom feed. And in the custom feed, and I'm sorry about this, if this isn't very readable, um, you are creating a high quality conversation. And a lot of people on social media don't know what that looks like 'cause they've never seen one. But here you've got, you have, you are convening this or this, this custom feed. You are responsible for it. You have to manage it, but you can make sure that this is a high quality conversation about a subject that matters to you as an organization and everybody else in the feed. There are no trolls. And apart from increasing your reach, it's a great way of insourcing expertise. 'cause this is a, not even a two-way conversation, it's a multi-way conversation. It works like this. Basically being included as an external in say a university's custom feed is a bit of a consecration for somebody, you know, oh, I'm included in the this custom feed, therefore they value what I have to say. It gives greater exposure, more reach for your content. You're not gonna misbehave, you're gonna behave well, the conversation's gonna be good. And if the people you trust to place in the custom feed, they can bring in the people they trust, it's really easy. They just quote post with the hashtag and bang, that post appears in the custom feed and then the manager of that custom feed can look at this new person and say, oh yeah, okay, so somebody I trusted suggest this post from somebody they trust. I'll add that person to the custom feed too. So the custom feed grows, there's more content in it, it's all high quality content because it's trusted people who introduced the people they trust and it's high quality. And remember, do does anybody still use their bookmarks on the web? Yes. Thank you. Okay. More than one or two, that's good. Um, people used to bookmark a lot and use a lot of bookmarks today. A custom feed which you pin in your app is, is the equivalent When you create a good custom feed, you're creating like a space on the web, which you as an organization has convened and it's valuable. People come back. So you don't need to go viral in blue sky. You need a good custom feed so that people who care about your content have pinned the feed. They'll see your content because your people are in it in the feed and they'll see other peoples as well. So you are convening a community. This is the basis of a community and it's a very, very powerful model. It's also a great way for your organization to insource more expertise. 'cause the people you trust introduce you to people they trust. You discover new people, new knowledge. So it's a way of bringing, increasing your reach but also bringing in more expertise inside your organization. Like I said, that's really valuable for the people managing the custom feed. Less valuable to the social media manager, okay, but that's just blue sky. We're here to talk about 80 protocol and I really saw the value of the whole thing. Um, when I was able to log into white wind, which I think most people know, the first blogging platform on 80 Protocol, I was able to log into this thing with my Blue Sky account and I published a blog post and it was published on my personal that was stored on my personal data server. And I realized I could move that anywhere. That's when I saw there was something to this. This is interesting. But then when Jerry Makowski shared my blog post on Blue Sky and his blog, his Blue Sky post appeared as a comment on my blog post. And then when I commented on my own blog post and I saw little box, I ticked it, my comment on the blog post went out to my Blue Sky followers. This is seamless interoperability between different forms of social media, micro blogging and blogging. It's not called macro blogging. Thank you. Um, and that is incredibly powerful because what it means is this, okay, you've got the global blue sky conversation, 40 million and plus, thank you very much Rose and Co. Um, and within that you create these custom feeds, which are high value, troll free conversations on subjects that you care about, but they're still pretty shallow. I mean, we're talking about micro blogging, right? So you can have your own website. Now I was doing websites, uh, community based websites, uh, the very early years of this century from about 2002 and sort about 2012 these sites rocked. They were great. Then the conversation moved to Twitter and Facebook and it became really hard to build an online community, which was built for what you wanted. Somebody mentioned, I think Ivan mentioned earlier about participative, uh, websites, uh, policy making participation. Uh, the first I've done one of them, uh, the first, uh, community of practice I did in 2002 was designed to bring European research organizations together to form consortia for the European research programs. They were custom built to the needs of the community and of the organization creating the community. They wanted to build partnerships or they wanted stakeholder consultations or they wanted public participation in policy. You need different forms of content. And when the conversation went to Trader and Facebook, I got news for you, they don't share. But in 80 proto you have no choice. It's all public, it's shareable. So what we can do is we can use custom feeds to magnify the impact of your website community. It works like this. You've got your global global blue sky conversation. You build that custom feed I mentioned and you build your community site, ah, join my community site and help give you, give us your views on what European policy should be on X, Y, Z. And somebody joins and in the application form for joining the community, he mentions he has a Blue Sky account and you say, oh great, would you like to be part of the custom feed? And he'll say, yeah, for sure. Um, that means that whenever he publishes something on your community site, he shares it with his network like I did with my white wind post. But what's even better is that that post goes to the custom feed. And so people who pin the custom feed discover your website, your community, some of them join through them, you meet their friends, including people on other apps. So we've got multiple interoperability between different forms of social media, a giant conversation where the conversation is tailored using different lexicons depending on the application required. The challenge of all of this is that this is really hard to organize for most organizations really hard. Like I said, you may have thousands of people in your organization. What happens when somebody sets up a starter pack and somebody leaves the organization? Somebody has to manually take that person off the starter pack and off any custom feeds. Now if you don't coordinate it, well this is gonna happen. Everyone in your organization's gonna set up a starter pack anyway and free custom feeds and nobody's gonna know which ones they should actually use. It's just a cacophony. So you need a couple of processes. And one of the processes that when people join your organization, you ask them, do you have a B Blue Sky account? And if they say yes, great, join the program. If not, would you like one? Because if we're gonna give you an email address, we might as well give you a digital ID and a PDS as well and we'll give you some training. And because you're working in this department, we'll add you to that starter pack and this custom feed automatically from the HR software. You don't have to have a separate system. And when you leave, this is the good news for those new employees who don't think you want a Blue Sky account. If you do take a blue Sky account and you're part of our program, you will help our organization get its message out into the Blue Sky conversation and we will help you build your network. The good news is you can take it with you when you leave. Most people don't, you know, start, have a career at one organization for their entire lives here. Their social graph is portable. So the organization basically gives them a career boost. It's a very compelling argument. Most people will join up. The problem is that you've got a lot to organize within your organization. Uh, you've got each pack may have multiple custom feeds. Custom feeds have maybe driven by several lists and labelers and god knows what else. All of these things have managers because the subject matter expertise is distributed across the organization. And so you're gonna need a database, a database of all of this, you know, which pack goes and no which feed goes in which pack, which person goes in which pack, which list is used for which feed, who manages all this stuff. And you're gonna need a process where people can say, oh, we should add this person, we should take this person away. It's complicated. So this is what I, I'm here to talk about at Connect. Uh, this is what AT Connect is gonna build. Um, my partner and I are building a piece of software which sits inside the organization and it interfaces with your HR system and your IT system so that when somebody joins the organization, they want to, they want a digital ID or they already have one. You just include that in their HR profile. And everything flows just in the same way. A new person gets an email address here, a new person gets a digital id, A PDS, they get added to starter packs, they get added to feeds. And all of that is managed where you manage your people. You don't have a separate system. It just interfaces with that. And that is what AT Connect is about. Now, I actually would love to see this model extend a bit further where multiple organizations actually collaborate on custom feeds. I don't think every university in Europe needs to have its own custom feed on physics or philosophy. And in fact, universities have been working together for many years in cross European partnerships. And so you could easily imagine mul multiple universities collaborating in this way. I could imagine the, the newsrooms that Christophe built, uh, over the last 20 years, 10 newsrooms in 10 different countries under the, your active brand all convening a conversation within the global blue sky conversation about, you know, Europe and a particular policy. The reason why this is interesting, I think is that this is what the European online public sphere actually looks like. People and organizations cooperating to have a high quality conversation about the issues they care about. And we need this. You can't have a democracy without a demos and for a demos you need to have a conversation. And we can't build that conversation on these platforms. That's just not possible. But it's a protocol so we can just build it. So I'm here, I've, uh, this is, this is the end. I hope I haven't gone too long. Uh, what I've been talking about with AD Connect is how one, a single management tool could help large organizations exploit greater value out of Blue Sky's unique features and value out of the interconnection between Blue Sky and other at proto ops. There's a lot of other challenges. Alternative infrastructure is one other unique apps, not just copies of the ones we know, but ones which with which may be providing higher value than the extremely low value noise of today's social media. There's a lot of challenges, but I do believe Euro Sky is the right organization to help meet it. So thank you very much for coming us Thank, thank you very much for having me. Thank you so much Matthew.
Our next speaker will actually explore. That's you Matthew. Our next speaker, Matthew, over here from AT Connect, will actually show us a broader application,
how scientific communities, newsroom and public institutions can actually integrate sly into hr. And it equally, Matthew the floor is yours.
Okay. Hey, is this thing on? Okay, great. I'm gonna run really fast through this 'cause we're running a little late
and I've got a train to catch and I really feel bad about kicking the previous guys off the stage.
What they're doing is amazing and I think the economies of scale, that is a brilliant example of infrastructure in the social media space for Europe.
So I'm not here to talk about that at all. Um, my background, and this is not actually the right slide.
Yeah, my, I'm Matthew, uh, I'm an Australian in Brussels and the reason I'm introducing myself mainly is to explain
that I do a lot of work with the European Commission, but these are personal views only. I'm not here representing them.
Uh, in my background I've done a lot of work in building communities. My background is in science. I became a science journalist doing a lot
of work in the public sector. So that's why I'm here to talk about how you can build communities in at proto,
which can be really bene beneficial for newsrooms, scientific organizations and governments. 'cause those are the three sectors I know,
but it probably will help for other sectors. So if so, do reach out to me. Okay. I'd love to know about it. Um, I've been trying
to convince people, particularly in Brussels to adopt Blue Sky for a while now. And it's okay, when you talk
to an individual you can appeal to their better nature. But when you talk to a social media manager at a large
organization, they'll say, listen, I know what you're talking about, but I've got targets, right? I use an X account which my organization had 15 years ago.
to an individual you can appeal to their better nature. But when you talk to a social media manager at a large
organization, they'll say, listen, I know what you're talking about, but I've got targets, right? I use an X account which my organization had 15 years ago.
We've now got 12 million followers and you want me to start up something on blue sky and I've got no followers, it will take me forever.
I've got targets, I've got limited time. I'm sorry, can't do it. Some of the narratives that do work is when you start
pointing out to them though that the actual quality and value of their followers on X isn't that high. After all half of them are bots anyway
and every time they do anything other than broadcaster press release, although they can't do that anymore because if you share a link, nobody sees it.
So you're down to, they're reduced to publishing memes as if that convinced anyone of anything. Um, they do admit that in fact what they have is
of reasonably low value. So what you can say perhaps is that you can do quite a lot. You can get quite a lot more value out
of a smaller blue sky audience. And some of the speakers before have pointed out that this is already being demonstrated today, notably
by the media themselves who are reporting that, you know, they're getting a lot more engagement, a lot more traffic,
you know, clickthroughs and subscriptions through smaller blue sky audiences than they are with their large X audiences. The other sector that I referred to earlier is science.
and labelers and god knows what else. All of these things have managers because the subject matter expertise is distributed
across the organization. And so you're gonna need a database, a database of all of this, you know, which pack goes
and no which feed goes in which pack, which person goes in which pack, which list is used for which feed, who manages all this stuff.
And you're gonna need a process where people can say, oh, we should add this person, we should take this person away.
It's complicated. So this is what I, I'm here to talk about at Connect. Uh, this is what AT Connect is gonna build.
Um, my partner and I are building a piece of software which sits inside the organization and it interfaces with your HR system
and your IT system so that when somebody joins the organization, they want to, they want a digital ID or they already have one.
You just include that in their HR profile. And everything flows just in the same way. A new person gets an email address here,
a new person gets a digital id, A PDS, they get added to starter packs, they get added to feeds.
And all of that is managed where you manage your people. You don't have a separate system. It just interfaces with that.
And that is what AT Connect is about. Now, I actually would love to see this model extend a bit further
where multiple organizations actually collaborate on custom feeds. I don't think every university in Europe needs to have its own custom feed on physics or philosophy.
And in fact, universities have been working together for many years in cross European partnerships. And so you could easily imagine mul multiple
universities collaborating in this way. I could imagine the, the newsrooms that Christophe built, uh, over the last 20 years,
10 newsrooms in 10 different countries under the, your active brand all convening a conversation within the global blue sky conversation about, you know, Europe
and a particular policy. The reason why this is interesting, I think is that this is what the European online public sphere actually looks like.
People and organizations cooperating to have a high quality conversation about the issues they care about. And we need this. You can't have a democracy without a demos
and for a demos you need to have a conversation. And we can't build that conversation on these platforms. That's just not possible.
But it's a protocol so we can just build it. So I'm here, I've, uh, this is, this is the end.
I hope I haven't gone too long. Uh, what I've been talking about with AD Connect is how one, a single management tool could help large organizations
exploit greater value out of Blue Sky's unique features and value out of the interconnection between Blue Sky and other at proto ops.
There's a lot of other challenges. Alternative infrastructure is one other unique apps, not just copies of the ones we know,
but ones which with which may be providing higher value than the extremely low value noise of today's social media.
There's a lot of challenges, but I do believe Euro Sky is the right organization to help meet it. So thank you very much for coming us Thank,
thank you very much for having me. Thank you so much Matthew.