🤝💫 How Roundabout is helping neighbors show up for each other

Insights from building a local app that’s deliberate and human

On May 12, at 1pm ET, join Eli Pariser, as well as special guests Ben Smith and Jasmine Sun, for an event on how AI will shape the future of how we connect online. RSVP here.

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It’s been a minute since we announced Roundabout, our local community app, now in private testing in five communities throughout the US.

These have been busy months! Below, along with my colleague Sam Liebeskind, I’ll share some updates that the team is really excited about, including how people have been using Roundabout and what we’ve been building for it recently.

Why build Roundabout?

We know that half of American adults already use local digital spaces — online groups for their town or neighborhood — to find local news and info. There are some existing options, including Facebook Groups, which is used for the vast majority of local digital spaces.

So why make an app at all? We continue to hear that people want a healthy, useful local digital space, but the existing options aren’t meeting their needs. (Read more about the origin of Roundabout here.)

Our recent conversations with Roundabout members have confirmed this. We’ve spoken with folks like the busy doctor who’s new to town and interested in local community events, but struggling to keep up with the flow and chaos of a Discord where he was looking previously. Or the long-time resident looking for local news that’s more “comprehensive and informative” than what the local newspaper has to offer. Or the highly-skilled young person who can’t find a place to volunteer, even after actively searching with Google and ChatGPT and digging through church websites.

We think Roundabout, full of conversation between neighbors and curated by stewards, can make a real difference.

As a reminder, Roundabout is:

• For building real relationships in your community, online and off

• Easy, useful, helpful, and fun

• Shaped and run by neighbors, including trained, local community stewards

• Informed by years of research

• Built by a team with deep experience building prosocial technology

It’s not: optimized for growth and surveillance, owned by a billionaire, or a top-down, one-size fits all platform being imposed on people.

The people using Roundabout

To keep things manageable and focused, we’ve started with pilots in five local communities. (Our colleague Hays Witt describes them each here.) As of now, more than 800 people have accounts, ranging from pastors to firefighters to student newspaper reporters. It’s been really fun to see the ways people are starting to use these spaces, some of which we expected, but with some surprises too.

Here’s just a sampling:

Neighbors are turning to Roundabout for important resources, like where to shelter during a tornado warning, and where to recycle tricky items. We’ve seen communities create all kinds of guides, including a great one in Burlington that brings together women’s care, support, and community resources in one trusted place. These aren’t necessarily the kinds of posts that go viral, but they really help people.

People are also using Roundabout to quietly share needed local info and news with one another: Stewards are summarizing local government meetings so neighbors can follow decisions that affect their lives. Community members can follow along with municipal issues and participate in shaping them, like proposed roadway changes and local elections, from school board to mayor.

And when folks need a recommendation for a trusted carpenter, a dentist, or someone who alters clothes, Roundabout is becoming a place they can turn, knowing that the people there are local and trustworthy. Bagel shops, coffee shops, perfumeries — the small businesses and third spaces that make a neighborhood worth living in — are getting spotlighted and supported. Neighbors are elevating each other’s service and generosity. On Roundabout, people show up for each other. One user summed it up pretty perfectly: “good for local info … without the drama of Nextdoor.”

Some early insights and iteration

We’re continuing to work to make Roundabout both a valuable part of people’s local lives, and a joy to use. Because we believe in sharing our progress and building this growing field of alternatives to Big Tech social media, we want to share what we can.

Let’s stop and take a closer look at some new, specific features:

Magic calendar and events imports

What we’re seeing: Equipping people with AI-tools that help remove some of the tedious busy work of sharing information about local events is enabling communities to co-create vibrant, well-rounded community calendars.

Finding out about events near you is something we’ve identified in our research that people really want, and we’ve heard from early users that this is a major draw for Roundabout. But for people who are looking to share events, entering all the details into a form (the location, the date, who’s invited, etc.) can be a drag.

To help lower the lift, we’ve developed an AI-powered system where users can now just paste in a URL, upload an image or screenshot, or take a photo of a flyer around town and Roundabout magically imports all the relevant data for quick editing and posting.

Logan, the steward of Roundabout North Chatt, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, says, “What usually took about 1-2 minutes per event from going back and forth now allowed me to blow through all of the events within five minutes!”

So far, users have added 910 events to calendars in Roundabout spaces — this comes to roughly 182 events per month, or more than one per day per community, and the pace is increasing.

Now, with a greater volume of events, we’re also exploring some ideas around filtering by topic or theme that would help people more easily find the kinds of things they’re most interested in.

Content-oriented emails

What we’re seeing: Digest emails are becoming helpful social infrastructure for anyone who wants to know what’s going on nearby.

We know that not everyone is going to automatically open the app regularly, and that’s ok! To help make the information being shared in Roundabout spaces more accessible, we’ve added a cadence of weekly emails with real, informative, timely content that’s valuable to members. We’ve found that folks who receive them really appreciate the highlights and often come back into the Roundabout spaces themselves, where they can get more info and participate further.

Sending digest emails is a tried and true engagement tactic for social platforms, but you can see for yourself the contrast between the event roundup email below with the absolutely chilling emails that Nextdoor sends you. We have a high bar for what we send to people.

So far, more than half of email recipients open the email, and about 15% click on a link — way higher than industry averages, but with smaller sample sizes. And some folks are even asking us for a daily digest. We’re not sure where we’ll land on this, but we want to give members control over what kinds of things they want to be notified about and how frequently. We’re already starting to dream about a future where other people within a community could curate and remix what’s being shared in the space into other formats too.

AI-powered moderation assistance

What we’re seeing: AI-supported moderation tools are helping keep Roundabout free of toxic arguments and spam, and giving stewards more time for what they signed up for — care and connection.

We’ve long been interested in the potential for AI systems to support the work of stewards and reduce their workload, especially when it comes to monitoring the quality of the conversation. We’re focused on deploying these tools in an ethical, responsible way, in accordance with our AI policy, that always keeps a human in the driver’s seat.

Currently, when a user composes a post on Roundabout, a “small language model” from Zentropi compares the text of the message against the community’s agreements. Based on our co-design with stewards and years of research into prosocial design, we know that communicating the rules and expectations up front is really important, and sometimes a reminder is all it takes to get someone back on track.

While we haven’t (yet!) seen many attempts to violate the spaces’ community agreements, we know that as Roundabout spaces get larger this will become more of a challenge. To anticipate this, we’ve been building out this system further, including adding support for the pre-moderation of images. We’ve also shifted some of the language in the system, from a pretty formal message:

Our automated system thinks this post may not meet our {agreement name} community agreement

To a more friendly, humble one that doesn’t feel as definitive or accusatory:

Before this post goes live, we’d like to review it to make sure it’s aligned with our {agreement name} community agreement. Want one of our community stewards to take a look or would you rather make some edits first?

If the system thinks a user’s message may not meet community standards, like it’s inflammatory or obscene, they can’t post it right away. However, users always have the ability to go around the automation and have a local human steward review their message. This is important because the AI might not be correct, and it gives appropriate agency to users and stewards.

Where Roundabout fits in

We’re seeing, already, that people are finding what they’ve been missing on Roundabout. One Roundabout Richmond user told us:

There’s the bookshop, maybe close to a year old. I live on the other side of town, so I just haven’t been … but what got me over there is that [Richmond’s steward] Liza had posted that there was going to be a new free [community] newspaper there. That’s actually what brought me over there. It had been on my list forever to go to the bookstore, but now that I had a reason and a free Saturday, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll actually go over there.’

This is the kind of symbiosis we are building with Roundabout: deliberate, beneficial, human. And still definitely a work in progress. Thank you for coming along on this journey.

We are building this slowly and carefully, but always with an eye towards thoughtful expansion. If you want to help bring Roundabout to your town or neighborhood, please go ahead and sign up at JoinRoundabout.com.

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Signing off from DC and Amsterdam,

–Josh and Sam