Content and Community

The rise of community-curated knowledge networks

The Internet put thousands of years of human thought at our fingertips, and enabled billions of people to create content. At least 2.5…

Permissioned Data Shapes: Community-Moderated Content - Nick's Blog

A community can own spaces the way a person does: a club's members post to each other under a dedicated community DID, with a feed space for content, a moderation space for notes, a labels space for filtering, and a single app view as the only window into any of it.

The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences

As brands look to hold onto the internet of the past, the term “community” will become a loaded word.

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.

Modeling communities on permissioned data - Daniel's Leaflets

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

The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane - Read Online

Read The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane online. Explore content strategy’s roots, and quickly learn not only how it’s done, but how you can do it well.

Where Does Community Live?

ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.

A model for nesting connected groups with communities of practice

In the new edition of my book, Building Successful Communities of Practice, I share insights into community size and interactions. I've been using this theory with clients to create nested layers that include communities of practice that serve as a model for their organisation.

The evolution of expert communities

A look at how online forums grow, thrive, and then decay.

ModGov - Governance for online communities

A simple, flexible framework that helps online communities create shared rules, elect representative moderators, and ensure stability.

PubPub · Community Publishing

Collaborative Community Publishing

Custom Feeds Are Not Communities — A Design Theory of Feeds and Commons - Nightflight

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.

Communities are not fungible

There's a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you "lose" one, you can manufacture a replacement; that the value of a group of people who share space and history can be captured

Self-organizing systems: what, how, and why?

I present a personal account of self-organizing systems, framing relevant questions to better understand self-organization, information, complexity, and emergence. With this aim, I start with a notion and examples of self-organizing systems (what?), continue with their properties and related concepts (how?), and close with applications (why?) in physics, chemistry, biology, collective behavior, ecology, communication networks, robotics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, social science, urbanism, philosophy, and engineering.