💝 Our top finds & faves of 2022.
Plus the year’s best bits from our friends and partners
Two things.
🥳 Celebrating a great year for colleagues, partners, and New_ Public itself.
🙌 The tools, stories, and centers that invigorated our team in 2022.
For your consideration: a year of great performances.
It feels like we were fumbling through the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne” not too long ago, but another new year is already upon us!
2022 was a pivotal year at New_ Public. Our recruitment events fueled our growth from two to ten full-time employees; we published a second edition of our Magazine, The Trust Issue; and we held two sprints on caregiving and the fediverse.
Our professor friends also had an incredible year: Vitalik Buterin and Nathan Schneider released their book, “Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and the Philosophy of Blockchains”; Tressie McMillan Cottom spoke on digital public squares as one of Trevor Noah’s final guests on The Daily Show; Deb Roy joined the board of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; and Ethan Zuckerman got married this year!
Our partner organizations were similarly blessed: RadicalXExchange launched their collaborative book project, “Plurality: Technology for Collaborative Diversity & Democracy”; Unfinished held its second in-person Live; Reboot published their second issue of Kernel; and New Pluralists announced its $1B fundraising initiative at President Biden’s United We Stand Summit.
We’re very proud of ourselves and our colleagues, but enough about us! Let’s talk about you.
Yes, you: the person coding your own site to publish your drawings and poetry; the person dipping their toes into CivicTok for the first time; the person keeping the community vibes alive for folks staying at home; or simply the person double-clicking their way in search of a glimmer of hope and delight.
For this final newsletter of 2022, we want to celebrate you and all the things you do to make the public Internet a healthier place. Here’s how.
Our favorite community links, direct from our Slack.
Whenever we find a new and surprising Internet thing at New_ Public, we share it internally in our Slack workspace. We thought it’d be nice to crack open the vault at the end of the year and stuff your email stocking with our favorite community links from each month of 2022.
We grouped the links into three categories: tools, stories, and centers. It’s all candy, no lumps of coal, we promise! Take a look and let us know what you think in the comments.
Our Top Tools for 2022
From the highly speculative to the fully formed, here are four new Internet tools that we think you should try.
It’s a Small World
Algorithmic filter bubbles govern us all on the Internet. Our co-director, Eli Pariser, wrote an entire book about it. But what if there were subtle systematic ways to retrain the algorithms, to break those bubbles?
Back in January, Josh shared this Chrome extension from Naoki Inoue that suggests alternate search terms in the top navigation of your Google search results page. It’s a clever low-key reminder to check and challenge our biases in small ways, right at the Internet’s front door.
Call Me by Your Plant Name by Maybe Ventures
We have a fair amount of plant parents on our team 🪴 and the ongoing pandemic gave many of us a strong relationship to our house plants. But what about the urban ecology that grows just outside of our windows?
Melanie shared this with the team in May: a spec for a new app and campaign that helps a neighborhood learn the species names of the plants and trees around them. We really liked their accessible approach and proved that sometimes you don’t need to build out the whole tool to make an impact; the proof of concept can work wonders.
Molly White’s Annotate (+ The (Edited) Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto)
Sometimes, it can be hard to think critically about articles, especially from venerable sources. So when tools come to light that allow individuals and groups to respond to information in an organized and civil way, we’re all ears.
Back in March, Deepti and Wilfred shared a pair of resources: a New York Times report on cryptocurrency, and Mollie White’s counter-response to the article using a custom annotation system. Molly made the code public on Github a couple of months ago, so now anyone can give this annotating system a try.
Arc Browser
The last tool we’ll share came to our attention fairly recently, and it’s a big one. Chrome dominates the web browser market, and its closest competitors have really long legacies: Apple, Firefox, Microsoft, Opera, you name it. So it’s exceedingly rare to see a new challenger like Arc from The Browser Company emerge in this market.
Min Li first brought it to our attention in November, and it’s a refreshing take on browsing the internet. Waitlist is here, and let us know if you add your name to it!
Our Top Stories for 2022
We read a lot of articles every day. Like, a LOT. So when stories come along that break the online publishing monotony, we pay close attention. Here are our four favorite bits of storytelling on healthy human connections and public spaces this year.
The Maintainers Coloring Book
We can build spaces all we like, both physical and digital, but if no one takes up the mantle of maintenance, those spaces fall apart quickly. How do we shine a light on the leaders and servants who keep up our spaces?
Sarah shared this with us in October: a coloring book as a tactile sensemaking vehicle to share stories of cultural custodians around the world, a heartfelt way to celebrate the people who take care of us and help us to take care of each other.
The Unlikely Odds of Making It Big on TikTok
A great song tells a story that’s both highly specific and broadly universal, humanity at its best. When we hear a great song, the experience is usually quite intimate: what it inspires in us, in that moment. But how do we track the scalable impact of a song? Or even just one part of a song? Or simply an audio clip that isn’t even a song at all?
I hadn’t joined the team fully yet, but during a New_ Public event in July I shared this resource on the call, and later in Slack: a data-driven “scrollytelling” article from The Pudding and Vox about the power and reach of 2022’s most influential social platform for independent musicians.
One Small Step by StoryCorps
Here’s another take on popping filter bubbles: StoryCorps is a standard bearer of collecting testimonials and insights from real people all over America. But what happens when we get two people with different political perspectives in conversation with each other—not about the issues, but about life?
Meagan shared StoryCorps’ One Small Step with us when she joined the team in August, but there’s been a rush of new content at the end of the year, taking our December slot. Here’s a YouTube playlist of all the 2022 reflections. A lovely reminder that plurality is the key to healing and understanding.
Reminiscing by Josh Kramer
Beginnings and ends of a year are always a good time to reflect. Some keep a journal, while others meditate or paint. But how might we use more of our senses—sight, touch, proximity, even smell—to manifest those reflections of ourselves and others in a digital medium?
Josh released Reminiscing, a Miro-based choose-your-own-adventure comic experiment, on 2/2/22, the most auspicious of Groundhog Days. The writing and illustrations are so heartfelt, and a refreshing disruption of our typical article feed. Well done, Josh! We’re so proud of you!
Our Top Centers for 2022
Our Co-Directors, Deepti and Eli, pay extra close attention to the communities and gathering hubs that are currently being built, as well as the resources that support the builders and moderators of these spaces. Here are four of our favorites.
Connected Camps
Sending kids off to camp is a highly mythologized rite of passage in America. When the pandemic forced many to break with tradition, new “virtual camps” popped up, using the same materials and activities as in-person camp but on Zoom. What if we leaned even further into the virtual camp experience, where the activities are just as technological as the platform itself?
Back in April, Eli linked us to Connected Camps, a gathering spot for remote young campers focusing on uniquely digital building activities like Minecraft, coding, esports, and more. Enrollments are now going year-round, and it’s a brilliant expansion of the camp experience for any kid.
PubHubs
What are the values embedded within the world’s largest social media platforms? The marketing may say one thing, but the behaviors and interactions usually tell a far different tale, largely governed by surveillance capitalism. What if a digital environment had public values embedded into its core from the very beginning of its development?
Eli turned us onto PubHubs in August, a few months after the service was first demonstrated during the PublicSpaces conference in May. (Skip ahead to 17:34 to cut straight to the demo. And heads up, it’s all in Dutch with English subtitles.) It’s an inspiring look at how some of the world’s most renowned scholars and technologists are solving for the digital public good.
The Neighborhood at Central Synagogue
For many religious centers, the need to connect with their local congregation is clear, but the infrastructure is lacking. Existing social platforms fill the gaps—Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube—but the locality gets lost as a result. What if a place of worship had the resources to build a truly independent and thriving online community to complement their real-life space?
Deepti shared The Neighborhood at Central Synagogue with us in June, and what’s remarkable about it is the welcoming and inviting atmosphere of its front-page hub, as well as its emphasis on extending the faith-based calls to action outside of temple.
Reddit Mod Education
Content moderators in digital spaces are the Internet’s first responders: triaging on the front lines, working long hours, exposed to pressing public crises. These protectors often head into their spaces with little protection of their own. How might we gather moderators in one central spot with a training program that will help them succeed in their spaces?
This education and training hub from Reddit got the thumbs-up from Eli when the update was unveiled in September, and it’s a good reminder that moderators often come into their role without an authoritative playbook, and it’s also mindful of the time commitment, scaling up from tips to full courses. Kudos to Reddit for taking this step to build a healthier Internet for all.
And that’s a wrap for 2022! We’ll be back on Sunday January 8, 2023 with a new quarterly themed take on the newsletter. (Hint: get your fancams ready. 🤩)
Until then… Got a tool, a story, or an online gathering place you’d like to recommend? Drop it in the comments, or add to our thread in the all-new Chat in the Substack app on iOS and Android.
Still pulling for Messi,
Paul