This is the homepage for Omar Shehata's independent research work in "applied sociology" / "open-source social engineering".

My work fills the gap between (1) ethical, but passive human population study (academic, government) and (2) active, but hostile culture engineering (propaganda, secret marketing campaigns, hit pieces). This is about active AND transparent social engineering, towards good & wholesome purposes.

Credit

• The core of this work is built on original research by Ronen V & his work on a memetics institution, and funding from OhhShiny and Vitalik
• The open-source methodology is taken from Blaise Aguera's Who Are We Now book
• Working at Snapchat and using their A/B testing dashboards, while talking to my friends who do sociology at Cornell, was one of the things that gave me the spark to try & bridge these two worlds.

TODO / WIP

Document the "portfolio" of work that's been done - includes social norms created, pieces of language successfully engineered & propagated, "memetic origin tracing" theory & practice. And various pieces of theory on how to coordinate social engineering when we're all actively operating on the same shared landscape (it's as if we're all trying to push code to one shared codebase).

Also document the "active work" that is on-going, I was thinking describing it like "minds that we monitor", where "minds" here refers to specific influential individuals, as well as communities. Some of these are "read-only", and some are "read-write".