PARIWO is designed as an experiment to answer the question: what happens when the social networking platforms and algorithms are designed to amplify marginalized voices? To help answer this question, we needed to first create a database of stories and a set of interfaces for getting stories in and out of that database. This platform is the first of many interfaces to the PARIWO story database.
As the Big Tech platforms become increasingly hostile to Black, indigenous, and Global South stories, to the stories of disabled people, to the stories of people of marginalized genders and everyone in the intersections of those identities, it becomes even more crucial that independent and decentralized social networks allow for our voices to be heard.
The Social Network
At its core, the PARIWO platform is a social network of stories and storytellers. Whether it's just a small update about what you had for lunch, or an interactive deep dive into the rising risks of climate change in the global south, PARIWO creates space for you to make noise with your stories.
The PARIWO story database—or the "storybase"—needed to be independent of any existing social network platform, including all of the Big Tech ones and any other open source ones that have sprung up in recent years.
This is because the Storybase needed to be designed with the margins at the center, something none of the other social networks can say. And also something I don't expect them to consider. In fact this experiment requires their inconsideration of marginalized voices.
Those networks function as a de facto control for this experiment because I expect that there will come a point in time that when you publish the same stories to your PARIWO audience as one of the mainstream ones, you and your audience will experience a remarkably different impact.
You can publish to PARIWO, or just to your own blog, or both. It's your content, so it's all up to you.
The Fourth Interface
The Storybase is a tool we created and used to design eleven (11) digital, web-based interfaces. PARIWO is the fourth interface, a story-based social network designed to help people tell stories, share stories, and build power through those stories.
See, we believe that stories have the ability to change the world, but the web has been making it difficult for people to tell and share those stories without the platforms hijacking the stories for advertisers, artificial intelligence, and other surveillance tools.
With the PARIWO social network, we have designed the algorithms to be responsive to users and their stories, not to surveillance and their needs. We can't promise that we'll get everything right, but we can work together to make sure we try our best.
The Crowdfunding Campaign
Me and my tiny, mighty team have been building PARIWO for some years now. You've probably seen a thread or three about the process on one of my many twitter accounts! This is the year we're finally bringing it to a beta release, and we need cash.
We're raising $20,000 to finish the second phase of development so that we can bring video to the platform and open it up to the public this year. Your donation will go to server costs, developer costs, and user experience engineering costs to bring the full video experience to the platform.
The team is located in the West and East Africas and in the United States of America. They are all excited about what this platform is capable of doing for world wide web and so am I!
I hope you join us for this project. I really can't wait to hear your stories!
-Ann