📢 ⚙️ 💻 We're working with public broadcasters to reinvent public conversation online

A sneak peek into prototypes from Public Spaces Incubator

Apply for our new Neighborhood Steward Fellowship: an 8-week program bringing together leaders of local-oriented online spaces to share best practices and explore fun new ideas that might improve social trust and community connection.

We’re offering each participant a $1,000 honorarium to help us shape the future of this work. Deadline May 20.

Take a look at the state of public conversation on the internet, and it’s easy to feel defeated: overwhelming toxicity, chaos, a growing aversion to politics. We tend to think of this as an American problem, but this is true nearly everywhere. 

In Canada, for example, the federal government passed a law requiring the largest digital platforms to compensate media organizations for sharing their news articles. In return Meta decided to block news sharing on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Even during emergencies, Canadians have no access to reliable news on these platforms. We’ve seen again and again that growth, engagement, and profit trump public service. Unfortunately for us, this makes sense for for-profit companies.

But not every source of information or space for discussion online is ruled by revenue. Public media organizations around the world, supported by the public, have a mandate to serve and represent the people. These institutions are naturally suited to facilitating the kinds of discourse that matters. Not to say it’s easy: While some public media orgs, like NPR, have decided to get rid of comment sections entirely, those that have managed to keep them have seen those spaces trashed again and again by a small number of commenters posting unconstructive, uncivil, or intolerant content.

That’s where the Public Spaces Incubator comes in. Last year, we announced our collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada (Canada), ZDF (Germany), RTBF (Belgium), and SRG SSR (Switzerland) — a creative partnership among public media institutions formed to uphold meaningful reporting and our collective ability to talk about it. 

Speaking to audiences in different countries — with different histories, funding mechanisms, and feelings about public media — we kept expecting to hear different dynamics. But in fact, there was much more in common. Public discourse, with the existing platforms at our disposal, is hard everywhere — and never more fragile. Our public media institutions need new ways to lead our civic discourse.

How can public broadcasters steward productive conversation about the issues that matter most to their communities? What might those forums look like and what features would they need to thrive?

That’s exactly what we’ve been working on, and what I’m excited to preview for you below.

A year of collaboration and design

Through the Incubator, we engaged hundreds of folks in brainstorming and design, across many regions, countries, continents, languages, and cultures. Here are some numbers:

• 200+ Participants engaged, ranging from external experts, team members, and users in all four countries

• 15+ Convenings from small group audience- or stakeholder-specific workshops and large combined co-creation sessions to virtual build-a-thons, and multi-day in-person, international partner workshops

• 100+ Prototypes developed to enable civic discourse for many voices and shape conversational cultures

This last point is key. We prototyped, imagined, sketched, and white-boarded, and then prototyped some more. Now, finally, we can share some of these test concepts publically.

One, Comments Slider, takes on the issue of community-members posting extreme opinions in online discussions. It turns out, in real life, there’s more to say than a thumbs up or thumbs down. In fact, there’s a lot of nuance to real conversation. But how do you do that in a comment section? That’s what the Comments Slider tries to do. It allows for a range of responses and visually represents a continuum of opinions. 

Many of these are just ideas, and they’ll stay on the whiteboard. But some will move on to more rigorous development, and we’re just beginning that process now. Over the course of the next year, we’ll continue to work with our broadcaster partners and deliver design features that our public media partners can — if they choose — implement and scale on their websites, apps, and platforms. The idea is to make everything open source and shareable, so what works can be adopted far and wide.

In future newsletters, we’ll look under the hood of the tools we’re developing and the sociotechnical research and product findings that anchor them. We’ll explore some of the underlying motivations that move people to comment, and offer a few more of the 100+ conversational features we’ve prototyped. 

We’re so grateful for the trust and enthusiasm our partners have granted in us as we have experimented and collaborated together. Thanks to them, and thank you for following along. Stay tuned for much more to come.

– Corey Chao, New_ Public Head of Public Spaces Incubator

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See us at VivaTech in Paris! New_ Public Co-Director Deepti Doshi joins NYU professor Josh Tucker in conversation for a panel called “Polarization or Conversation: Can We Still Fix Social Networks?” at VivaTech in Paris on May 23. Use code VIVATECH20 to receive 20% off a ticket.

Join us in Berlin for re:publica! On May 27, New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser will join a panel on the progress and potential impact of the Public Spaces Incubator at re:publica 2024 Berlin. In addition to moderator Jana Pareigis, Eli will be joined on stage by Catherine Tait, President and CEO, CBC/Radio-Canada; Norbert Himmler, Director General, ZDF; and Jean-Paul Philippot, Administrator General, RTBF.