Featured image: Emergence by Paul Lewin
Home Page
We are an international community of communities bound by a common interest in persistent infrastructure. So far, we have welcomed agencies that manage communities spanning entertainment, standards, the built environment, natural history collections, scholarly communications, and research data.
How Instagram's moderation rules are made
Creating a Flourishing Digital Public Space for Your Local Area | Notion
A how-to guide for admins and moderators of inclusive, uplifting, and public-spirited local Facebook groups, Discord servers, subreddits, and more...
Trails and public spaces — Rafael M. Batista
A reply to Kenny Peng and colleagues on designing social media around trails — and why the campground or the piazza may be the better analogy.
👋 Introducing Roundabout: built for neighbors, with neighbors
New_ Public’s app for local communities enters closed beta in five pilot communities
👋 Introducing Roundabout: built for neighbors, with neighbors
New_ Public’s app for local communities enters closed beta in five pilot communities
Neighborhood Steward Fellowship | New_ Public
An eight-week program bringing together leaders of local-oriented online spaces to experiment with fun new practices and ideas
Community by Design
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that includes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party's algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g. X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms.
Toward Wayfinding Infrastructure for the Living Web · Atlas Research Group
Our world is getting crazier by the day. Our old maps and compasses weren’t made for this complexity. While new tools may open up amazing possibilities, they also make it easier to lose ourselves – especially when they don’t belong to us, and make us vulnerable to other people’s hidden choices and unsavory intentions about what is worth attending to.
The Local Connection Crisis: New Data on What Communities Need
The virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier
Howard Rheingold tours the "virtual community" of onlin…
New_ Public
We are researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders working together to create digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect.
Social Media Should Be Public Infrastructure (with Ben Cerveny)
Grain Social Explorer
Explore photo galleries and collections from Grain.social - an Instagram-style viewer for the AT Protocol
Experimenting with the idea of a fully skeuomorphic @lexicon.community events client that focuses on flyers & posters instead of thumbnails/icons and will be aimed at local groups and venues. Just had fun with procedural-generation of the corkboard background.
