Peers discovery question

Great question. We've been asked for this before and understand how useful it could be - particularly in large networks - people want to know who's physically near them, eg: in the same city or where on the map. They also want to know skills, hobbies, interests, and requests.

I'd like to bring in support for a member directory, where you can search or browse through members on these fields and make contact.

Hi Robert, sounds interesting. Have you thought about implementation details? For example, would you like to implement it within Loomio code base or happy to consider separate service which can be reused by other third-party systems (Loomio including) ? Do you or someone around have capacity/interested in discussion of requirements for such a system?

It would be great if users could link to their profiles on social networks. And these​ links would be visible in profiles in Loomio.

Employing existing sources would be a good start. Related things to think about are:
* Social networks APIs integration require efforts should be accounted
* Some networks might not provide free API or might not provide required data
* Should third-party profiles be cached or pulled by request each time?
* Each third-party data source (external social network) might require specific converter to turn data to internal representation of the consumer (Loomio).

@dmitryparamzin
I look at this question from a slightly different position. Not from the position of "individuals with similar interests", but from the position of "can I trust to this account" (this and the next slide).

From this point of view (the plus - Loomio has this feature now):
- photo - I'm a real person (+)
- description - what I want to tell you about myself (+)
- links to profiles in social networks - what you can find out about me, besides what I have already said (-)
- my areas of interest - tags (-)
- address - how close I am geographically (+)
- language - it would be more convenient for me to speak in ... (+)

Maybe the next step is to build a social graph about the roles people already play in Loomio network.

@dmitryparamzin maybe this is what you write about https://www.go.kred

from the position of "can I trust to this account"

So looks like we not only need collaborators registry but also somehow track how much initial trust we can give to a stranger at acceptable risk.
That raises other interesting question like what such a trust can be based on? How it can be tracked?

I have no answers. You might find something among:
Why Networks for Social Change? and links under this article
Principles for Network Thinking and Action and other posts from the Networks section of Kumu`s blog.

It seems to me promising the works in the direction of building social graphs. I can recommend Kumu as the instrument and its team as specialists in this area.

Mastodon instances are often themed around shared interests, and a few, including social.coop and sunbeam.social, use Loomio for instance governance, so it would be interesting to think about approaching that from the opposite direction; a Loomio group that needs a social space spinning up an instance vs. a social space that needs governance going to Loomio.

I'm not very familiar with Mastodon but I guess it has both weakness and benefit in decentralisation: weakness because it complicates 'right' instance discovery. Benefit because 'broadcast' messages can be delivered to more-or-less appropriate audience. But what happen with message after it is 'tooted'? Should message even be textual? Can it be art object or action? I guess any interpretable information can be perceived as a message. Taking that, it would be interesting to see an abstract conversation process as sort of a game. In that game players would emit own messages and transform messages received from others. For example, idea stated by one participant could be transformed or complemented by someone else - pretty much like what we're doing here right now. In some sense humanity progress can be seen as continuous messages transformation process: 'invention' is also sort of message and every modern invention based on earlier discoveries of many people. Nowadays we can get access to inspiring ideas and required information much easier then last century. But I guess we still have the problem with information discovery and delivery. How can I easily broadcast information about some wonderful microservice I've created for fun to potential users? How can I easily figure out if something I need is already done, up and running? How can I easily get together enthusiasts to build a spaceship? The keyword I used in these examples is 'easily'. In other words, how intelligent persons on Earth can maximise value of their short lives?

This is a great discussion. Really useful for thinking about Loomio user profiles and how to leverage other sources. Thanks everyone.