👩🏽‍🎨🧑🏼‍🔬 Lessons from stewards: the art and science of nurturing healthy digital spaces

Ten months of fellowship, co-design, and stewardship in the Community Stewards Guild

Read the feature article in Nieman Lab about our new focus on local digital spaces

In April, we wrapped the Community Stewards Guild, a ten-month pilot program born out of our vision for, and research into, healthier online community spaces. We set out to learn directly from the people who build and lead those spaces, by engaging five community builders and maintainers of online and offline groups.

These past ten months have been an incredible learning experience for the New_ Public team as we aim to design healthier digital spaces. In particular, we've gratefully learned a lot about the practices that sustain these groups and how co-designing digital tools with moderators, admins, and leaders can support digital community infrastructure. We’re eager to share some learnings about our collaboration with the Community Stewards Guild.

A community steward’s role is multifaceted

For this pilot, we were honored to invite five stewards, across different backgrounds, to join our cohort:

• Teju Ravilochan is a community advocate who supports teams of neighbors in Brownsville, Brooklyn (GatherFor)

• Lennon Flowers creates spaces for people of similar ages to connect over mourning and grief, both online and offline (The Dinner Party)

• Euan Hwang facilitates a queer youth chat platform (Q Chat Space)

• Chris Samuel is a faith leader supporting youth, his local church in Detroit, MI, and religious content creators in a private online group (Bodega Bible Talk)

• Lola Omolola, an online steward, is creating community in a private group for over 2 million women globally (Female IN)

Each of these stewards use different methods to connect with their community, from platforms of their own design, to Facebook groups, to being entirely offline. As we were reminded constantly by our Guild members, there is no playbook that teaches people how to be a steward. Each had either started a group or took over stewarding an existing network. 

Regardless of how or why each steward takes on their role, we learned that community stewards, who are often volunteers, tend to juggle a lot. In addition to tending to families, loved ones, and themselves, stewards work in a digital landscape that does not always recognize how critical their role is in holding some of our most fragile online spaces and communities together. 

Co-design is a spectrum that has to honor the experiences and skills of all involved 

One significant learning emerged through creating a process of virtual co-design with the community stewards. In recent years, co-design has become a reliable antidote to the unidirectional design methods that tech companies have historically used when developing social platforms and features. Instead, this approach recognizes the agency of the people who use these technologies, and gives them a voice in shaping how they work. 

However, there are many ways to approach a collaborative design process. A big takeaway for our team was the importance of getting clarity on which approach we were taking. Then we could proactively structure the facilitation of workshops, have defined roles for ourselves and the stewards, and understand which tools would best serve our goals. We came out of this program recognizing co-design as a spectrum that assigns everyone a specific role and responsibility to each other, and to our mutually desired outcomes.

Inspired by Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation and Victor Udoewa’s Radical Participatory Design practice

In the beginning, we struggled to find our footing in our collaboration with the Guild. We didn’t have a clear understanding of what role we actually wanted the stewards to play, and therefore lacked an ability to define our own roles. Were the stewards consultants to New_ Public’s designers? Or were they partners in our research and design processes? To what extent? We also needed to create a virtual environment that helped the stewards to feel comfortable to participate, and confident in the value of their experiences. Midway through the pilot we pivoted to better address some of these questions.

We invited two of the stewards to join our internal, monthly co-design planning process, so we could craft design workshops better suited to the stewards themselves. We realized, with their input, that our cohort of stewards was more oriented towards first-person storytelling practices (compared to drawing, sketching, or other tactics). As a result, we embedded as many storytelling-adjacent design exercises into our co-design process as possible. With these changes, we experienced co-design sessions that overflowed with exciting ideas, new tools, and an intoxicating energy for building new resources for stewards.

Online community administrators, moderators, and facilitators lack spaces that serve them 

It also became immediately clear to us that we needed to prioritize programming that allowed the stewards to connect with one another: share common challenges, express frustrations, learn from each other’s tactics, and much more.

Many times, stewards start groups or create platforms to develop more connection to their own community. Counter-intuitively, despite seeking connection, we learned that stewards often find themselves  “outside” of the community they’ve built. Support can be hard to find.

In addition to managing all of the logistical work of being a steward (admitting people into a group, scaling up your admin team’s capacity, etc.), there is a lot of emotional labor that comes with moderating a group. Often, this can mean acting as an impromptu social worker, grief counselor, and source of strength for community members.

If people are causing trouble in the group, how do you handle it? Do you talk to them? Do you block them? How can you continue to build towards connection in tough moments? Oftentimes the work of stewarding can be very lonely. With all of these questions surrounding community upkeep — how do stewards get the support they need to properly show up for the spaces they lead? We learned that support of any kind for stewards themselves is very rare. 

Top row from left: Leila Kashani-Sabet, Josh Kramer, Chris Samuel. Middle row: Lola Omolola, Raven Ruffin, Euan Hwang. Bottom: Teju Ravilochan

The Guild became one opportunity for stewards to turn to each other with support catered to their needs. A refrain we often heard from the stewards was, “you all get it.” We created community programming that centered around stewards' health and well-being, such as bringing in Andreas Laszlo Konrath, creator of Shrimp Zine, to lead a zine-making workshop. We also partnered with Olivia Vagelos, founder of Design for Feelings, to facilitate a conversation about what it means to design our lives through abundance and care.

We celebrated the expansive knowledge and creativity of our fellow team members in fun workshops, such as Spencer Chang’s online fridge poetry, that built connection, nourishment, and play. For our digital community infrastructure to be sustainable, community stewards need love too. 

Building a world for healthy online communities isn’t just about the tech, it’s about the practices

A major focus for us as an R&D lab is looking at the features of our current tech platforms to assess whether they help cultivate healthy online spaces for building social connection and trust. During our collaboration with the Guild, we came to understand the abundance of “practices” that stewards use in their groups. In some cases, stewards use technical features for their work, like the kinds of tools we sketched out with Hylo to help make norms visible, as well as the tools developed by huge platforms — like those created for Facebook Groups with help from Lola and other stewards. But these are only one aspect of maintaining healthy groups. 

Stewards, through their work, are constantly developing practices that are key to diffusing conflict, facilitating respectful dialogue, and building trust. For example, Lola’s group FIN has its own ways of keeping things civil: Members use a grumpy cat meme as a soft indication that your comment isn't really following the norms of the community.

It cannot be overstated how much we learned during this journey with the Community Stewards Guild. Listening to the wisdom of the people who are getting their hands dirty, building and caring for a community every day, has grounded our organization more deeply in the necessity of socio-technical design — designing technology informed by human knowledge and practices in addition to technical considerations. 

These learnings have inspired us even further as we begin working towards our focus on local digital spaces. As we consider how to reinforce local community forums and online groups, we now know a lot more about how to empower and support the stewards who keep those spaces alive and thriving. We’re currently piloting the next evolution of this work in our Neighborhood Steward Fellowship, which we’ll be sharing more about soon.

– Ravon Ruffin, Head of Community Initiatives, and Leila Kashani-Sabet, Community Stewardship Facilitator

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Join New_ Public Co-Director Deepti Doshi at the New Media Ventures Summit on July 24-25 at KQED in San Francisco. She'll be part of the panel, Media: New Frontiers for Participation, along with Tori Kyes of Kyes & Co. and Tracy Van Slyke from Pop Culture Collaborative.

Calling all democracy and local media funders: Join New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser on July 24 7/24 for a virtual panel hosted by Media Impact Funders, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, and New_ Public on how local digital forums and groups can boost communities, local journalism, and American democracy.