Overview: Online Community Management

The same amazing tech that enables people to forge deeper relationships, foster closer communities and give everyone a voice can also breed isolation, embolden racists, and empower digital bullies and nefarious actors.... used with great accuracy and potency “to assault... truth and trust... our personal foundations — our privacy and sense of ide…

Let’s take a look at the Trusting News approach to measurement.... partner newsrooms selected two to five strategies ... a good fit for their mission, goals and audience. They also selected which platforms, mediums or methods of communication ... Anywhere journalists communicate with their audience, we want to inject trust-building messages... …

"“Policymakers seem to need answers yesterday,” reflected the young scientist from Italy. “That’s the direct opposite of how science works.”" - first report from the K4P audience research.The key finding from me was that scientists want to see their work taken up by policy, but seem at a loss on how. A platform which was explicitly built around ma…

Managing a Medium Publication to share our the journey as we build Knowledge4Policy: "share our experiences … as transparently as possible, and invite ideas and perspectives from experts in evidence-based policymaking around the world"

the capacity to spread ideas ... no longer limited by access to expensive... infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured... by just a few digital platforms:... tincreasingly stand in for the public sphere itself... at their core... They’re …

a similar kind of rumor kept showing up... after each of the man-made crisis events — a conspiracy theory or 'alternative narrative' ... claimed it either didn't happen or that it was perpetrated by someone other than the current suspects... the role that botnets play in disseminating alternative narratives ... What's different about the Parkland …

The record is incorruptible... this sort of recordkeeping is valuable for journalism: it allows us to maintain archives that can’t be censored or altered after the fact... an ad-free publishing economy on Civil’s Ethereum-based platform... Popula is accountable to its readers alone, and is impervious to the interests and agendas of advertisers or…

Which did the ad industry choose?... It tried to ignore technology and automation... when that didn’t work, it bought the machines.... It didn’t invest in research, development, innovation... develop new services, new ways, new formats, new ideas, whole new ways of helping institutions and people relate, connect, and bond... So the broken relatio…

the solution to both crises facing journalism may come from the same technological root: blockchain... An ecosystem of micropayments... as the holy grail for online journalism... Blockchain technology can create both chains of authenticity and a level of security... Sludge is one of the “first fleet” of around 20 newsrooms ... on a new blockchai…

“We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine... And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.”... a slew of slick, easy-to-use, and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality... They’re running war game–style disaster scenarios based on technologies that have begun …

crowdsourced trustworthiness ratings are actually much less effective if they exclude the ratings from people who are unfamiliar with a given site. Which is what Facebook plans to do.. “a lack of familiarity is an important cue for untrustworthiness... Excluding ratings from participants who aren’t familiar with a given news source ... “dramatical…

time to deliberately focus on design for interconnectedness and relationships ... customer (user) centric design created a narrative of isolation: the customer is ... someone that is provided with a solution ... to get the job done... [but] research ... explained that customers (users) may often look to engage more deeply with products... relat…

Americans believe that the media have an important role to play in our democracy — yet they don’t see that role being fulfilled... Here are 10 findings that stood out to us:

Facebook will rely on users to rate how trustworthy groups, organizations and media outlets are... Leaving trustworthiness ratings to users without addressing online political polarization risks making civic discourse even more divided and extreme... Facebook needs to take responsibility for the content it publishes and republishes. It can combine…

it will rank news organizations by credibility based on user feedback... trust rankings will emerge from surveys ... Google announced it would cancel a two-month-old experiment, called Knowledge Panel, that informed its users that a news article had been disputed by independent fact-checking organizations... Facebook learned the wrong lesson fro…

I read much faster than people talk, so they’re not a good way for me to learn things... the actual goal... is to reify the importance and social status of the conference organizers and speakers... There seems to be a widespread mindset that all you really need to succeed is insight... what separates success from failure is a sufficiency of sage a…

Wales wants to bring the power of the Wiki community and the wisdom of crowds to bear on the media business by creating a hybrid model... local community members can help direct the work of WikiTribune journalists when such events occur, suggesting avenues to explore and co-creating a more permanent news resource that will serve a longer-term comm…

Over the coming years, we’ll see the BBC develop and roll-out more and more machine learning algorithms for storing, retrieving, tagging and possibly even creating content.... What if we lock our audiences in to what they just want to hear, never challenging them? ... Should the algorithms we use be open to public scrutiny?... inform our own thin…

In 2018, we will prioritize News from publications that the community rates as trustworthy... that people find informative... relevant to people’s local community... We surveyed ... people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources ...

organic, authentic voices in the public debate — more than 99% of which are in favor of keeping net neutrality — are being drowned out by a chorus of spambots.

Third of several posts written in reaction to Luc van den Brande’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity. Sets out the public policy participation model first presented at EWRC 2017, and sets up the fourth.

I’ve recently published five posts on three interrelated ideas, two projects one report and a workshop. That happened because the competition brought a Brussels Bubble Outsider to Brussels. Which happens to be one principle of the participation model I presented at the EWRC workshop. Full circle.

Even in a world where people increasingly get news from social media, the professional news media is still seen as largely to blame for low trust... Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism examines the underlying reasons for trust and distrust ...Bias, spin and hidden agendas come across as the main reasons...perceived decline in journalisti…

Engaging Europeans with the EU requires a new Brussels Bubble culture - fourth of several posts written in reaction to Luc van den Brand’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity.

Chatbots are the digital democratizer of our day... natural, conversational interaction ... enabling participation ... for everyone... At the heart of creating chatbot ease of use is language design...

CFPs also have the capacity to help foster and strengthen non-parliamentary democratic structures and practices. As such, they should be supported and encouraged as part of a framework of further European democratization and civic integration.

give ourselves the following assignment: Government engagement must contribute to the quality of democracy.... provides a solid foundation for the design and execution of ... communication and participation forms and processes... an angle to critically review ... collaboration formats and tools. Participation is not an end in itself; reinforcing …

“Governments in Europe have been spending money for years on improving the availability of services online, and uptake was always below expectations... citizens didn’t want to use the online platform. The idea was to digitise a process without improving it.”... there is a much bigger prize ... an opportunity to use the internet as a platform for…

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

Resources and first thoughts from my recent ‘EU communities & policy participation’ workshop at the European Week of Regions and Cities (EWRC).