Community Platform Design Jam
Community platforms mostly fail to deliver on the needs of communities in terms of connection, engagement, and alignment. Platforms like Discord are popular largely because they are free, but were designed for purposes very different than they’re being used to support now. Open source community tools are mostly just more challenging to use versions of the same text-channel chat apps or Facebook clones in the proprietary platform world.
And as tools like Discord begin to implement high-surveillance tactics, perhaps it’s time for a rethink of what the real jobs-to-be-done and motives-to-be-met are for members and stewards of communities. This is an open jam session to map needs, play with ideas, and imagine together. Instead of repeating patterns from existing platforms, we’ll explore new and experimental ideas and prototypes.
Needless to say, we’re playing in the worlds of open source, open protocols, modular and interoperable approaches, and distributed data ownership.