🧭🏘️📲 Exploring a new social product for local communities

We’re seeking local partners for collaboration as we pilot new concepts and designs

We are seeking an Open Source Developer for Public Spaces Incubator

Earlier this year, our Local Lab started exploring the idea of building something brand-new for local communities. Though we’re still in the very early stages of this process, we wanted to take a moment to share how we got here, why we think this project is so critical, and some of our early hypotheses about where this work might go. Below, New_ Public’s Sam Liebeskind, Product Strategy Lead for Local, will take you through the details.

We’re also actively looking for a small number of local communities that might be interested in experimenting with us. If you think where you live might be a good fit, and you want to learn more about bringing something like this to your area, you can get in touch here.

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Responses from community members and local digital stewards in surveys and concept testing conducted by New_ Public

Online public spaces for local communities — things like Nextdoor, email listservs, and town-wide Facebook groups — are a core focus of New_ Public. As our Co-Director Eli Pariser explained in a piece last summer: ”According to Pew, ‘about half of US adults say they get their local news from online groups or forums,’ more even than from newspapers. If they were strengthened into resilient, flourishing spaces, they could be crucial to reinforcing American democracy.” We’re convinced that these sorts of collective settings, where people get the information and connections that help them live a better life in their local community, are critical pieces of public infrastructure and deserve significantly more attention and investment.

Today, many of these spaces are dominated by negativity, bickering, and noise, and many of the people and organizations working hard to sustain them are struggling to keep up. This is often a direct result of the way that current tools and platforms are designed.

But what is the best way to help improve these spaces? When we started exploring the idea last year, our first thought was: could we have an impact without building an entirely new platform? But as we worked with local leaders as part of our Neighborhood Steward Fellowship and Newsletter Summary pilot, and we heard from both community members and leaders who are frustrated by Nextdoor and actively looking to move away from Facebook Groups, we slowly but surely started to get the sense that small tweaks around the edges weren’t going to be enough.

The current set of tools available to people looking to bring their local community together online are, at best, not ideal, and at worst, actively working against their goals. Very briefly, people told us:

• Email listservs and chat apps like WhatsApp are great for small groups of neighbors, but get overwhelming with more than, say, 50 people. Discord offers a bit more flexibility, but faces similar dynamics as everyone feels pressure to keep up.

• Nextdoor and Facebook prioritize engagement and profits over the wellbeing of people and communities. These products amplify controversy and end up full of spammers, scammers, bickering, and self-promotion.

• General purpose forum tools are great for many kinds of online interest groups, but they’re not designed for local communities and are often not a good fit.

So to fill the gap, we’re building something new.

For the last couple of months, we’ve been sketching, researching, and co-designing with community leaders and members across the country as we begin to imagine what better online spaces for local communities might look like. While we’re still early in the process, here are some of our working hypotheses.

Supporting local leaders

Public online spaces for towns and cities would be healthier with dedicated local community stewards who are celebrated, supported, and paid for the valuable work they do.

For small-scale online spaces like a block or small neighborhood’s WhatsApp group, having volunteers take care of the group can work pretty well. But spaces for larger populations, like an entire town or small city, require much more maintenance. It’s a bit like the difference between a Little Free Library and a full-scale public library — the former makes sense as a casual side project for volunteers, while the latter needs a more serious investment of time, resources, and professional expertise.

Despite this fact, today’s big tech platforms offer no real way for the admins and moderators of larger local spaces to make this work financially sustainable. We’re excited to explore a different model, one that more fairly rewards all of the different kinds of people who make these spaces possible.

But this is about more than money. Stewards have told us that they’re also eager for other kinds of support, including better tools, peer-networks, training, and access to best practices and guidance. So in addition to developing software, a big part of our work moving forward will continue to focus on supporting, training, and connecting the local stewards at the heart of this movement.

Our vision is a world where being the “steward” of the local online space is an important job in every community — not only paid and well-supported, but as celebrated as local librarians and teachers. We’re well past the days where just because something’s online doesn’t mean it’s not real or important.

Better equipping stewards

Local stewards, along with their communities, should be empowered to shape the rules, norms, and dynamics of their spaces — and equipped with the tools needed to do so.

As Friends of New_ Public Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci have written:

Nextdoor and Facebook have taken an approach that was forged in one context—running global social media platforms with billions of users—and are applying it to local networks with hundreds or thousands of members, imposing the same structure on counties in rural Kansas as they do to city blocks in New York City.

On these apps, there’s no real sense of local identity and users are ultimately at the mercy of the platform’s centralized algorithmic feed. Instead, we think the ideal product for local online spaces is something that empowers local leaders to set up their own spaces with their own rules and norms.

To help stewards in this process, we’re excited about AI-assisted systems, with a human-in-the-loop, that can support important tasks like facilitation, organization, and moderation. Fundamentally, we believe that if AI is involved, it should support human connection and community, not replace it. At the same time, there are some important questions to work through in regards to who owns the training data, what kinds of bias has been incorporated into the model, and more. We remain both cautious and optimistic about incorporating this evolving, powerful technology.

Moving beyond the feed

There are huge design opportunities beyond the typical, mysterious single stream algorithmic feed.

In our last survey, when we asked you all, our newsletter readers, “How do you connect with your neighbors online?” someone responded: “The biggest problem [with Nextdoor] is that it’s a firehose of data rather than a source of information. There are lots of great nuggets on [the platform] but they are not organized in a way that makes them either as useful as they could be or in a way that helps build a sense of local community.” We think this is spot on.

We’re inspired by small-town newspapers, roundup-style email newsletters that link out to the best local sources of information, and platforms like Front Porch Forum that present information in different ways. Some of the questions we’re asking ourselves include…

What would it look like if local stewards weren’t just “moderators” responsible for stopping bad things from happening, but they also took on a more proactive role? Could the future of local digital stewardship be something more akin to digital gardening, where leaders are creating, organizing, curating, writing, and more?

How might content and conversations that start in the online space get shared outside of an app? Could things like well-organized email summaries help increase access and reach people where they are? We started to explore this in our Newsletter Summary pilot last summer, and think there’s huge potential here.

In what ways might individual community members have more ability to shape their own experience in the space? Increasingly, users are at the mercy of powerful algorithms analyzing implicit signals, like how long they watch a TikTok video or which links they hover over. We’re excited to explore what it might look like to give weight to explicit signals from users — an approach advocated for in the Neely Center’s Design Code for Social Media — giving people more say about what kinds of things they’re interested in seeing.

Adding depth and substance

Bringing high quality local content into online spaces will make them more vibrant and more valuable to community members.

Folks we surveyed have described a hunger for higher quality local information in their online spaces. One respondent explained, “I stopped following [Nextdoor] because it lacked substance.” Another lamented the lack of quality information sources: “There are a couple of local 'news' sites that are increasingly just luxury real estate listings and sponcon.” Research from The Civic News Company and others has shown significant gaps between the kinds of information people are looking for and what they’re currently getting — a dynamic that’s worsening as more and more local newspapers shut down.

We’re excited to explore ways to make it easy for stewards and community members to create or bring in high-quality, relevant local content in a sustainable way. Could part of the revenue generated go towards embedding local journalists to investigate the community’s most pressing questions? Could a local digital space link up with tools like Civic Sunlight that summarize long town hall meetings into bullet point takeaways? Could we make it easy for stewards to aggregate announcements and upcoming events from websites, newsletters, or other social feeds of local community organizations?

Making this all sustainable

Local online spaces — and the technologies that power them — need to be financially sustainable, but they should prioritize social impact over extracting profit.

We believe that innovation and experimentation around the business model and ownership structure is as important as — and arguably, a critical un-blocker for — more prosocial product UX design.

While platforms like Nextdoor and Facebook are designed to maximize engagement, ad revenue, and profit, we’re taking a different approach in two critical ways:

A mission-driven organizational structure: A product like this cannot be funded by traditional venture capital, the typical pipeline for many new digital products. Instead, we’re incubating this product within the non-profit structure of New_ Public and will ultimately determine whether this makes the most sense to be a non-profit like Signal or Mastodon, a cooperative ownership structure like Gebeidonline in the Netherlands, a public benefit corporation like Front Porch Forum or Bluesky, or something else. Funding models like capped returns and philosophies like this one show promise here too.

A diverse and balanced set of revenue sources: We’re also inspired by the way public institutions like libraries, parks, and transit systems often receive a mix of funding from member donations or pay-what-you-can models, local foundation philanthropy or government grants, and sometimes advertising. We believe that the best revenue models are ones that are directly aligned to the value being provided to community members, including local business owners, and that a model with a combination of revenue sources will be better positioned to serve the whole community.

Getting this right means a new breed of online spaces that have the potential to become resilient, local institutions that keep the public interest front and center for the long term.

Want to explore this with us in your local area?

While we’re moving forward with these initial hypotheses, we know we don’t yet have all the answers. To that end, we’re now actively looking to co-design and create the first couple of pilot spaces with local leaders and communities across the United States, especially those in rural areas, suburban towns, and small-to-mid-sized cities.

If you’re interested in collaborating with us and helping to bring something like this to your local area — whether you’re a local funder, an individual or organization who wants to steward a space, or something else — let’s talk! You can get in touch with us here.

–Sam Liebeskind, Product Strategy Lead, Local, New_ Public

Thanks Sam!

Visiting the Southwest and enjoying the rocks,

–Josh