Scholars: what you trying in order to organize & support networks of community among emerging scholars?
Today across the extended CAT Lab network, we had a revealing conversation; gradstudents reported that microblogging platforms exposed them to risk/harassment with little reward, and that they were unsure how to find peers & community elsewhere, aside from becoming an "influencer," which only some found palatable.
Are you seeing the same? What can we do about this?
@natematias @icymi_law what you’re reporting Nate, aligns with my own experience, but I often find myself struggling to convince others of this, I suspect partly due to “survivor bias”- people online who are interested in shaping digital spaces are, by definition, the ones who are comfortable online, not the ones who dropped out or never started.
It would be really helpful to conduct an actual empirical study of these issues that recruited a representative sample of potential users
@natematias mechanism design for social good was really great for bringing people (grad students) together via reading groups, at least for disaffected students of algorithms/CS/OR/ML interested in other topics besides "typical" flagship commercial applications
-- now it's called EAAMO Bridges & incorporated into a nonprofit
There's always a hard thing about sustaining reading groups, getting presenters, attending often; but most of my network tbh has come via organizing around shared values
@gdb @angelamczhou EAAMO is distributed and online, and also has an annual conference:
And here's the list of working groups:
J. Nathan Matias 🦣
Ulrike Hahn
Nicole Rust
angela zhou
Gary Belvin 🔒
Phoebe Sengers