Computational Public Space

New_ Public

We are researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders working together to create digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect.

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...

New_ Public Invests in Local Online Spaces as Digital Civic Infrastru…

archived 11 Apr 2025 17:34:52 UTC

Digital Spaces Directory | New_ Public

As the social media landscape changes and a new wave of digital spaces emerges, this Directory is meant to be a resource for our field — a jumping-off-point for further exploration and research for anyone who’s interested in studying, building, stewarding, or simply using digital social platforms. We hope this will inspire creative exploration, spark new collaborations, and highlight important progress.

Building Digital Public Spaces for Good

A Conversation with Eli Pariser, Co-Founder and Co-Director of New_ Public

Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Read the free, open access editionBuy: Amazon, Bookshop, Narrow Gauge Book Co-op, UC Press

Manoel Horta Ribeiro (@manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social)

Assistant Professor @ Princeton Previously: EPFL 🇨🇭, UFMG 🇧🇷 Interests: Computational Social Science, Platforms, GenAI, Moderation

Local Lab | New_ Public

Helping local communities create flourishing digital spaces

skysquare (@skysquareapp.bsky.social)

Building a new, universal semantic layer for the public square, via Bluesky • Engage the public discourse in context #OpenWeb #SemanticWeb #FreedomTech

AI and the Future of Digital Public Squares

Two substantial technological advances have reshaped the public square in recent decades: first with the advent of the internet and second with the recent introduction of large language models (LLMs). LLMs offer opportunities for a paradigm shift towards more decentralized, participatory online spaces that can be used to facilitate deliberative dialogues at scale, but also create risks of exacerbating societal schisms. Here, we explore four applications of LLMs to improve digital public squares: collective dialogue systems, bridging systems, community moderation, and proof-of-humanity systems. Building on the input from over 70 civil society experts and technologists, we argue that LLMs both afford promising opportunities to shift the paradigm for conversations at scale and pose distinct risks for digital public squares. We lay out an agenda for future research and investments in AI that will strengthen digital public squares and safeguard against potential misuses of AI.

Orion Reed

My research investigates the intersection of computing, human-system interfaces, and emancipatory politics. I am interested in the potential of computing as a medium for thought, as a tool for collective action, and as a means of emancipation.

Eaten by the Internet

This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?

Modeling communities on permissioned data - Daniel's Leaflets

Arguing against "universal spaces" and raising a couple questions that come up as a result.

ATmosphere technology to support organizing and activism

There has been some good writing by Mosh, Erlend, and Meri about this topic worth pulling in. Permissioned spaces coming to atproto will also unlock a lot of important affordances for crafting protected spaces for organizers. For example, permissioned spaces on semble would turn into community-run search engines. My hope is that atproto is the missing infrastructural piece that enables us to really shape digital spaces around the specific needs organizers and their communities rather the...

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms