I've Joined New Public
Let's build better digital public spaces.
A bit of a personal announcement this time: I’ve just started a new job at New Public, a non-profit that is leading efforts to build better digital public spaces.
Until recently, New Public had focused on doing (excellent) research into what makes public spaces healthy. I'm helping start up a new engineering competency so New Public can also build better public spaces itself. We have several new projects starting up right now:
Community by Design - A public database of digital spaces, features, and practices that have been shown to lead to healthy communities. Everyone is invited to submit.
Community Lab - Inspired by practices identified by Community by Design, we will build new open source tools, features and design patterns that help communities and platform entrepreneurs create healthy communities more easily.
Public Spaces Incubator - Working with public broadcasters to explore what role they might play in building better conversations online.
Please reach out to me if you or your org would be interested in being involved in any of these projects.
One thing I love about New Public is how positive their vision is. Their focus isn’t on finding things that are bad and complaining about them, but on finding things that are good and building tools to amplify them. I’m inclined to think this is more effective, and it’s definitely more fun. Better to be “the man in the arena” and all that.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop blogging. In fact a big part of the reason New Public asked me to join them was that they liked the stuff I’d been saying on my blog.
I plan to keep publishing posts on this blog, with maybe some posts also going to the New Public blog.
I know it’s been over a month since my last blog post, and this one doesn’t really count as a proper post, but I’ve got a couple more in the pipeline right now. My reason for silence recently is mostly that I’ve been on vacation.
Congrats Rob!