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.

Materials: A limited number of computers will be available on site; participants are invited to bring their own personal laptops.

Audience: This workshop is intended for beginners with little technological experience, but it is also able to be scaled for more advanced students.

Price: $25.00

Max Fowler is a programmer and artist based in Brooklyn. He builds open source software and interactive installations, and is currently working on a civic tech collaboration http://callparty.org, participating in Cyborg Futures, and developing Open Source Feeds, a framework for creating feeds which use Facebook and other platforms as source data.

Sam Hart is a scientist, publisher, and artist living in New York. As a bioinformatician at the Sloan Kettering Institute, Sam works across cancer genomics and cellular engineering. He is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Avant.org, a distributed project space for research and practice, and curator of the online technical catalog, Research Tactics.