Psyberhood is the flagship psybergroup of Psybervillage, its members are consumer/survivors (people with mental health issues). The members meet in coffeeshops using smartphones to communicate orders to the outing leader, who places the order, pays with a gift card, obtains the receipt, enters the order amounts, tax and total, and shows the receipt to the other members (who verify their order amounts). All members are expected to take turns being outing leaders or deputy leaders. Low-functioning outing leaders are assisted by deputy leaders. Members must have PayPal or a credit card, alternatively, they can use cash to pay their coffeeshop tabs which is handled by a participating mental health organization.
Social Media
The online community of members (which is smartphone-based) is similar to Facebook. Each member has one or more friends who are also members. Members submit posts and comments on other posts/comments. Posts which are friends-only are only visible to friends of the original poster. Public posts are visible to everyone. Posts are moderated by mental health organizations.
Structure of Psyberhood
Psyberhood membership is divided into subgroups. Beneath the top-level group of users, different lower-level groups of users exist for different diagnoses, such as depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia. An example of an even more specialized group of users consists of "schizophrenia" AND "family members", where the "family member" category is a sub-category of "role" located under the nonprofit category. Groups of users exist for organizations which serve consumer/survivors such as CAMH and Progress Place. Large organizations such as CAMH can have separate groups of users for departments and teams. Local groups of users consist of a category associated with a geographic region, combined with another category using the boolean AND operator.
Population Subsets
Every Psyberhood group of users is defined by a given category, or 2 or more categories combined with boolean operators (and, or, not). Categories are organized in a tree of arbitrary depth. Any given category can appear in more than one place in the category tree. What follows is a list of top-level categories and an assortment of their immediate sub-categories:
- Nonprofit (Populations, Organizations, Jobs)
- Mental Health (Job Types, Disorders)
- Geography (Countries, Regions, Cities, Neighbourhoods, Languages, Races)