Model and Strategy
New_Public is a nonprofit R&D lab. An organization of researchers, designers, engineers, and community programmers, New_Public builds tools and resources for a new generation of public spirited digital social spaces.
New_Public’s flagship international initiative is the Public Spaces Incubator: a three-year partnership with a consortium of four global public service media entities – CBC Radio Canada, ZDF Germany, RTBF Belgium and SRG SSR Switzerland – to research, co-design, prototype and test features that enable participatory and productive public conversation online.
In the United States, New_Public’s flagship initiative is The Local Lab: an effort to reinvent the online local community forum. Why the humble forum? For decades, community-strengthening interactions took place in town hall meetings, public parks and libraries, and the op-ed sections of local newspapers. Today, as people’s attention has moved to digital contexts, as existing institutions have lost relevance or trust, and as local journalism continues to struggle, these interactions now occur in digital public spaces – email listservs, Whatsapp groups, Subreddits, Discord servers, Facebook Groups, Nextdoor.
At same time, for-profit platforms are falling short of the social weight they are being asked to carry. Many of these platforms were originally created for needs other than local and civic needs. Local stewards and their communities often have to devise creative “hacks” to make these platforms work well for their needs, and support for the people who steward these bridge-building spaces is woefully limited.
The Local Lab seeks to answer two questions: what would it take for local digital groups to become vital civic institutions? And what needs to be upgraded for them to do this work better? The next 12-18 months will be the Lab’s pilot phase, where New_Public aims to arrive at three outcomes:
- To gain a comprehensive understanding of the most pressing needs, pain points, and opportunities around digital spaces for local communities through rapid co-design and pilot testing in collaboration with local digital stewards.
- The stewards of local-oriented digital spaces have more support and new venues in which they’re able to share with, and learn from, peers.
- Their prototyping, exploration, and co-design partnerships lead to at least one new tool or product that demonstrates promise in improving cohesion, resilience, and belonging in communities around the country.
In 2025 and beyond, New_Public will take the most successful models and products from its pilots and bring them to other communities around the country. A number of cities have expressed interest, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Miami-Dade County, and New_Public is in conversation with peer organizations in suburban and rural areas across North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Colorado.
Impact
Learning itself, and disseminating learning, is a key metric of success for New_Public. One of its core principles is open sourcing all learnings to as wide and deep a field as possible. This approach is exemplified by Civic Signals: a 20-country, 20,000-participant research project that identified the qualities of flourishing public or semi-public spaces, and recommended specific research techniques for measuring metrics like a sense of belonging. In 2021, New_Public built a three-day virtual festival around the Civic Signals Report that had 2000+ attendees spanning engineers, product managers and designers, academic research labs, think tanks, peer organizations and policy analysts.
The Civic Signals event also brought in underrepresented perspectives from outside the tech field – another core area of impact for the organization. New_Public’s is committed to co-design relationships with community leaders, as exemplified by its Community Stewards Guild: a pilot cohort of online stewards convened to discuss common issues and to run co-design sessions to surface opportunities and challenges of radically participatory design.
New_Public continues to engage with organizations in the growing social technology movement through convenings and through its 10,000-subscriber Substack. Most recently, they presented research and findings on the Community Stewards Guild at Stanford’s Beyond Moderation convening, a gathering of academic groups and organizations thinking about pro-social design. The presentation resulted in inbound interest from research labs including the Social Futures Lab at the University of Washington and the Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making at USC. Showcasing the work of others in the movement is a part of New_Public’s mandate. Last year they created the Digital Spaces Directory for startups that are creating new products for social platforms and individuals who are creating social spaces.
Since early 2023, New_Public and its partners in the Public Spaces Incubator have created over 100 working design tools and patterns for better public conversations. Having moved through the research, discovery and design phases, the partners are now curating a portfolio of products, implementing alpha and beta versions, and bringing them live.
Our Local Lab is focused on improving social trust and belonging in local communities. We believe that these metrics are critical for healthy democratic societies. As we roll out pilot programs for our locally-focused work, we’ll set up longitudinal studies to track changes in these metrics over time that are grounded in our research on Dynamic Polycentricism. We’ll also use indicator metrics (as sketched here) that signal we are moving in the right direction with our pilot studies.
Leadership
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Deepti Doshi
Co-Director
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Eli Pariser
Co-Director
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Ravon Ruffin
Community Initiatives
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Adriana Ruffatti
Head of Design
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Angelica Quicksley
Head of Research and Co-Design