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What is social infrastructure? • Logan Graves

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Iuse social infrastructure to refer to a process or institution that connects people in ways they otherwise wouldn't be connected. It's jargon that hopefully makes intuitive sense, but it's important enough of an idea to me that I think it's worth giving a much deeper account of what I mean by it, and what I think of the concept. This post by Duncan Sabien might explain what's going on here if you're wondering. (See the last section of this post for info on how I want to actually do this.) I started using this term to denote the institutions, processes, communities, events, etc. that connect our social graphs together. You can think of people as nodes in a network, and relationships as connections between those nodes; social infrastructure is something that systematically supports interactions that create and strengthen those connections. It's a really wide-ranging concept. Lots of things act as social infrastructure: schools, summer programs, companies, neighborhoods, social media sit

ⓘ This post is more than 2 years old. I use social infrastructure to refer to a process or institution that connects people in ways they otherwise wouldn't be connected. It's jargon that hopefully makes intuitive sense, but it's important enough of an idea to me that I think it's worth giving a much deeper account of what I mean by it, and what I think of the concept. This post by Duncan Sabien might explain what's going on here if you're wondering. TL;DR Finding people, at scale, with specific personal characteristics is really difficult, because quantifiable measures (like test scores) are v

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