🚀 📒 Just launched: Your essential guide to local digital community building

Best practices for creating and maintaining a public-spirited online space for your neighborhood, town, or city

Ever since we started exploring local digital spaces, things like town-wide Facebook groups and Nextdoor neighborhoods, we’ve been focused on figuring out the best ways to assist the community stewards caring for them — the creators, admins, and day-to-day moderators. As New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser wrote, “just like journalists and librarians, the best moderators should have a range of proven practices, ethics, and approaches to inform their work.”

This week, Sam Liebeskind and Ravon Ruffin Feliz from New_ Public’s Local Lab are here to share our first significant resource for helping stewards. Below, they’ll describe why and how we created our new guide and how you can not only use it, but also help us improve it.

– Josh Kramer, New_ Public Head of Editorial

Over the last several months, we’ve focused on the critical role that local digital spaces play. As we’ve begun to identify the challenges that go into operating them, one thing has become clear: while most of the people stewarding these spaces are volunteers putting in enormous efforts to make them inclusive and public-spirited, they're largely left to figure things out on their own as they go.

Even as many grapple with similar challenges like What rules should I put in place? and How can I structure my space to encourage positive participation? almost everyone is learning by independent trial and error. The leaders we spoke with repeatedly told us that the guides and resources they could find were either too abstract or too technical, or focused on totally different types of online communities. So we set out to see if we could help.

Today, after months of collaboration with local digital stewards from across the United States, we're excited to officially introduce Creating a Flourishing Digital Public Space for Your Local Area — a guide for anyone who already leads or is considering starting a group like this. If you’re thinking about a Facebook group for your neighborhood, a Discord server for your city, or anything else along those lines, you’re going to want to check this out.

A screenshot of the different sections of our new guide for local digital stewards.

The resource provides practical advice around a range of important topics, including things to consider when starting a new space and different approaches for setting guidelines and navigating conflict. To ground the insights, the guide also includes personal stories from local stewards and real-world examples of practices they've used to deepen social trust, connection, and belonging.

To create the guide, we collaborated for eight weeks this summer with five passionate local digital community stewards. The group included leaders from across the US, representing a range of different types of spaces and scales:

• A 55,000+ member bulletin-board style Facebook group in Santa Fe, one of the largest in the area

• A Nextdoor group affiliated with a recently revitalized civic association in Chicago

• A 2,000-member digitally-native social club in Jersey City, built on Discord

• A small but longstanding Facebook group for a neighborhood in Georgia

• A Discord server run by a local public radio station in the Bay Area

Check out the guide for in-depth stories of different kinds of local digital spaces, and the people who steward them.

Throughout the program, the group of stewards spent time not only reflecting on things they’d tried in the past (both successfully and unsuccessfully!), but also experimenting with new practices that they thought would improve the dynamics of their spaces. Once a week for four weeks, each of the stewards tried a different practice, journaled about the experience, and then shared their initial reflections and results back with the group.

This led to one of our favorite sections of the guide: a cookbook-style gallery with recipes for practices designed to deepen trust among members and create a stronger sense of community. The practices are organized into different themes, from “getting to know your neighbors” to “celebrating local places and history” to “models for leadership and online norms”. Each includes step-by-step instructions, as well as ratings from the stewards on how easy it is to implement and how strongly they’d recommend it to others. 

In one example, Francesca, a steward of the Discord server for San Francisco public radio station KQED, suggests the practice of formalizing “Community Roles” to invite others to help maintain your community. She explains,

Remember that this is a recreational, fun thing for most people. Meet your potential community leaders where they’re at — and find ways to delegate digital community management wherever possible. Even if the tasks are small.

A screenshot of the practices for stewards in the guide.

Ultimately, we’re thinking about this guide not as a one-off report, but as the birth of a new “living” resource that’ll continue to evolve as we meet more people, hear more stories, and learn about new practices and approaches. If you’re already stewarding a local digital space for people in your area, we’d love for you to get in touch and share more about how you got it started and what kinds of things you do to keep it positive, friendly, and fun.

And if you use this playbook to start something new or try out one of the practices, we’d love to hear about that experience too — even if (or especially if!) it doesn’t go exactly as planned. The more people use and contribute to the guide, the more we can collectively improve it. 

We’ve already started sending it to local stewards in our network. Kevin Foster, a school teacher in Nashville, TN, read the guide while in the early-stages of starting a Discord server with his neighborhood association and told us:

There were definitely things on this list that I had not thought about … I was literally looking at this over the weekend and making changes to my plan for what we're gonna talk about in a meeting tonight. That was really, really helpful. 

We suspect Kevin’s not the only one who would find this guide useful, so we’d really appreciate your help spreading the word. If you’re part of an organization of neighbors like a community board, consider sharing this with its leaders to help start a conversation. And if you’re a member of an already existing local digital space, please consider passing the guide along to the admin(s) with a friendly note about how much you see and appreciate everything they do for the community.

While this guide certainly isn’t a silver bullet, and factors like platform design and monetization continue to present challenges, we hope it can play a small part in helping every local community in America create a thriving digital space, where people connect across lines of difference and deepen their sense of belonging to wherever they call home.  

– Sam Liebeskind and Ravon Ruffin Feliz 

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Thanks Sam and Ravon!

Reminding myself to get my flu shot and COVID booster,

— Josh