Nonprofit trust and safety support for volunteer social web content moderators
Composable Trust, Part 1: Communities Without Credible Exit - Eclectic Corvine Muses
We guarantee that users aren’t subject to platforms. Yet communities are still subject to their stewards. Can we fix this?
Gathering the Custodians of the Internet: Lessons from the First CivilServant Summit - Citizens and Technology Lab
An agenda for citizen behavioral science to maintain and protect the communities we love online.
Trust & Safety Tycoon
Manage your team, set policies, make investments, and tackle the challenging world of Trust & Safety
SCA - News and views from across our networks
Over the last few years, SCVO has been engaging with organisations across the voluntary sector to collect evidence on the issues and barriers faced around access to funding. The evidence collected clearly demonstrates the urgent need for Fair Funding. We, along with many of our intermediary network members have contributed to this work, providing case studies relating to Government priorities as well as sector wide themes, illustrating why implementing Fair Funding is an investment in Scotland’s essential voluntary sector for a sustainable future.
FediMod FIRES on building better and decentralised social media applications
Continuing our monthly interview series "Building a Free Internet of the Future", we talked to Emelia Smith, who is a software engineer. “Building a Free Internet of the Future" highlights the experiences and perspectives of individuals and communities supported by the NGI Zero (NGI0) grants, funded by the European Commission.
The Local Connection Crisis: New Data on What Communities Need
The Condition of Giving
Why I'm building a gifting community on a network you actually own, and what that has to do with a couch, a geohash, and the open web.
Conflict Systems
The zine contends that many recent sites of community building, especially online, have lacked the tools and norms for the practice of conflict. Many reasonable expectations that go by names like due process, justice, accountability, or mediation are unavailable or not even considered in emerging communities. The platforms that communities rely on treat conflict as a corporate liability, not a chance to strengthen relationships.
in progress works
lightweight accountability community and journal for your side projects
New report on alternative social media
Exploring a transition to alternative social media platforms for social justice organizations in the Majority World
Volunteering and Civic Action: Boundaries Blurring, Boundaries Redrawn
The aim of this introduction to the special issue is to call into question the presumed conceptual divide between volunteering and civic action and suggest an analytical tool and four perspectives that bring to light the varying meanings of popular engagement. Volunteering and civic action are laden with different moral meanings, are associated with different theoretical approaches and, just as important, have been assigned different roles in society. This conceptual divide is reflected in the academic debate. Only rarely, however, has the academic debate explored and discussed how the meaning of volunteering and civic action has changed historically. Therefore, we argue for a contextual and relational interpretation of the different forms of popular engagement instead of the application of essentialist definitions of volunteering and civic action. In order to examine the variety of popular engagement without being caught up in pre-made or taken-for-granted conceptualisations of volunteering and civic action as two separate forms of popular engagement, we propose approaching variations of popular engagement with respect to two criteria: first, to what degree popular engagement is enacted in institutionalised spheres of politics or in social public spheres and, second, to what degree actions of popular engagement are controversial or operating in line with what is widely agreed upon and dominant in public opinion. Moreover, we argue that history, discourses, politics and a relational approach are four crucial perspectives in order to reveal the varying meanings of popular engagement.
DWeb Virtual Meetup — Jan 2025 — Latest in the DWeb Ecosystem
DWeb Virtual Meetup (January 2026) featuring speakers sharing their latest DWeb product releases and community organizing efforts. SPEAKERSmauve signweaver, Awana Digital: Awana Digital supports those working to defend their human and environmental rights, but who lack the tools to do so. Their local partners represent marginalized communities worldwide, including Indigenous Peoples and ethnic minorities. They train local partners to use basic digital tools to gather, share, and manage information about environmental and human rights infractions. mauve presented CoMapeo Abare, an open-source local-first Android app designed with Indigenous communities, to enable non-technical users to easily map and document biodiversity, environmental threats, and human rights abuses.Blaine Cook, New_ Public: New_ Public is a nonprofit focused on building digital public spaces that foster connection, facilitate pluralism, and encourage civic engagement. Blaine presented Roundabout, their new social app and website to improve information sharing in rural and suburban towns, and city neighborhoods — areas with about 10,000-50,000 people.Afri Schoedon, Department of Decentralization (DoD): The Department of Decentralization is a collective of people from Berlin, who first assembled in 2018 to organize ETHBerlin hackathon. They aim to be an agnostic vehicle to drive adoption, educate newcomers, and raise awareness of the challenges and benefits of decentralization and open-source software. Afri shared their experience of previous DoD events and share the technologies and approaches that their collective sees as being on the horizon of network decentralization.Facilitated by DWeb Senior Organizer, mai ishikawa sutton
Gradients of intimacy and creating shelter: An interview with Erin Kissane
How might we use nature as an inspiration for creating online communities?
Composable Trust, Part 3: 1 Community, 3 Sovereigns, No Landlords - Eclectic Corvine Muses
An architectural model to yield members, Rosters, and Venues sovereignty over their own domains, and none over each other’s.