The Rhizome team developed the Autistic.zone platform in 2016 as a home for the autistic rights movement. This platform allows participants to collaboratively manage documents, conversations, projects, in-person events, and the resources pertinent to the effort by autistic people to collectively determine our future. As a social media platform like Facebook, it promotes getting to know each other, co-creating our culture, and developing leadership.
There are big differences between this and the commercial alternatives, however. It is not actively managed by any single organization or by anyone having higher privileges than others; it is purely democratic at the top level. Therefore it can be used by different organizations that may have conflicts between them. Community control and respect for privacy are principles in the design. So for example, it does not have features of “big data” like advertising harvesting of data on friends and tastes.
Key features
- Movement Agenda – One of the documents stored by the system is the movement agenda – the organizational framework of the movement, its principles, and an explanation of what kind of world we want to live in. This document can be literally edited by anyone, like a Wikipedia page, but each change has to be voted on by the entire membership, so as it evolves, it represents the will of a growing set of autistic people everywhere.
- Projects – A project is a container for an effort by an organization or loosely organized set of people, to achieve some actionable goal. Projects may be democratic, so the leadership can shift over time. Similar to a Facebook “page”, a project can house multiple conversation threads. There are a variety of project types and ways people can participate.
- Conversations – Each conversation is a sequence of posts like an email exchange or a thread on a web forum. There are techniques to prevent take-over and throttle the inevitable trolls and other abuses of “netiquette”. Autism-friendly features include trigger warnings and a system to ensure that the user doesn’t miss posts or see them multiple times.
- Resources – The books, blogs and other resource material important to the movement is organized by the site into a common category outline, with quality ranking. Top resources float to the top of the lists. Therefore users can browse resources by topic and be sure to see the ones most respected by the autistic community, rather than the ones most heavily promoted by the industry.
- In-person events – Support groups and other meet-ups can use the system to promote events. Users can pinpoint the event location on a map and search by geographical distance.
- Voting – A system of collaboration by voting is an integral part of the system. Changes to the site-wide documents, changes to the operation of the system itself, and project-level polls are structured as proposals with a discrete voting period managed by the system.
The work on this project was initiated in the spring of 2016 and the first phase was completed in the fall. As of 11/20/16 by decision of the board the site is approved for deployment and will welcome new participants. To join go to autistic.zone.