Open Source Feeds
July 15, 2017
workshop, software
Sam Hart and I facilitated a workshop at Pioneer Works titled Open Source Feeds, with the following description:
Social feeds are fundamental to how we communicate on the web. Private companies host these services in exchange for our time, but this model often results in misalignment between platform and user.
This Fact Craft workshop provides tools and guidance for you to download your social graph and then create new feeds however you like. After migrating data from a privately held platform into an open format, participants will experiment by viewing information through feeds of their own design.
The tools introduced are part of a larger project of instructors Max Fowler and Sam Hart that will manage collections of personal data across social platforms and provide an interface for developing user-owned discovery applications that can be used beyond the class.
After trying out some alternative feeds, we will invite a group discussion about the role of digital platforms in the production of knowledge.
The project included the creation of a piece of software which used browser automation to collect facebook posts but the software is no longer maintained.
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