What’s the “R0” of a New Community Idea or Behavior?

Creating Scientific Theories with Online Communities using Gut Instinct

People's lived experiences provide intuitions about their health. Can they transform these personal intuitions into scientific theories that inform both science and their lives? My research introduces social computing architectures and system principles for people to brainstorm and test causal scientific theories. These ideas are instantiated in the Gut Instinct system (gutinstinct.ucsd.edu). 344 voluntary online participants from 27 countries created 399 personally-relevant questions about the human microbiome, 75 (19%) of which microbiome experts found potentially scientifically novel. To test their theories, end users design structurally-sound experiments, improve them via community reviews, and run them with other participants. Controlled experiments show that participants create better hypotheses and experimental designs when they have access to procedural training. My research illustrates a novel way to tackle complex, creative tasks online by building expertise in online volunteer communities.

Don’t change the subject

Many creatives know this phenomenon: They start a new project on a promising topic with excitement, but when they can’t come up with an original idea instantly — they lose interest. They come to th…

Artifacts

A Human-Centered Framework for Growing Ideas

RadicalxChange

We are a community of activists, artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars committed to using mechanism design to inspire radical social change.

Connecting Research with Community - Civic Innovation Lab

Welcome to Civic Innovation Lab, where we drive social impact through collaborative solutions and empower communities. Join us in fostering sustainable development, co-creating initiatives, and advancing inclusive governance for a better future.

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.

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.

Civic Action

Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize “the civic” as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex organizations that may span institutional sectors. The authors show how researchers can locate scene styles, and with an extensive literature review, they portray several common styles and suggest that different civic styles often lead to different outcomes.

Denizen / Change from within

Meet our community, attend our events and get our latest ideas delivered

Local Lab | New_ Public

Helping local communities create flourishing digital spaces

Content and Community

The old model for content sprung from geographic communities; the new model for content is to be the organizing principle for virtual communities.

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.

communitycheck/design at main · rosestt/communitycheck

A design specification for attaching representative public opinion data to viral social media posts — correcting the gap between what people think and what they think others think. - rosestt/commun...