@roundabout.town
Bring your town or neighborhood together online, without the noise or toxicity — joinroundabout.com
@roundabout.townWith Direct Replies, community members can choose to respond to a post or thread without it being visible to everyone in the space.
As more and more people try out Roundabout, the team continues to evolve the platform.🔧
Read about Direct Replies in the latest @newpublic.org newsletter:
@roundabout.townHow do you allow people to connect one-on-one, for things like coordinating coffee chats and free item pickups, without creating a vector for spam and abuse?: In response to community member requests, our team came up with an elegant solution: Direct Replies
@roundabout.townRepeat after us: Public media CAN be cutting-edge! 😎
Chicago.com, our partnership with
@wbez.org & @chicago.suntimes.com, is part of a new wave, where public media organizations are meeting newer audiences where they’re at (online) and building BETTER digital spaces for them to gather.
@roundabout.townIn developing Roundabout, a local community app for your town or neighborhood, we’re taking inspiration from, among other things, your household teapot. We want this new platform to be as useful, helpful, and reliable as possible. More soon! 🫖
@roundabout.townHave you ever heard of “calm technology”? Think about how a teapot never competes for your attention until the exact moment you need it — when the water is boiling. Unlike social media apps, your teapot isn’t sending push notifications to your teenager at 3AM, trying to coax them back online. 🙄
@roundabout.townAnd we’re nowhere near done!
If you want to help us bring Roundabout to your local area, or are in a position to support this work, you can find more at…
@roundabout.townNext up: we’re bringing Roundabout to Chicago through chicago.com, our partnership with Chicago Public Media
@roundabout.townRoundabout users and stewards — the neighbors that nurture and moderate local Roundabout spaces — shared what they actually want and need from the platform as we continue to evolve Roundabout to be as useful, fun, and helpful as possible.
@roundabout.townNot long after that, we had an MVP product and began testing our hypotheses in pilots throughout the country 🎉
@roundabout.townBefore you knew it, Entrepreneur in Residence @clockwerks.bsky.social came on to lead this project, drawing on experience scaling tech products for the public good.
newpublic.substack.com/p/building-t...
And the team kept growing, including Principal Software Engineer @blaine.bsky.social:
@roundabout.townEventually, we realized we might have to build our own app, and we started to articulate the underlying core principles for what we would build:
@roundabout.townWe did months of research of exploration, putting together resources and exploring email newsletters for local stewards with existing communities on other platforms.
@roundabout.townHow did Roundabout go from a well-researched idea to an app piloting in communities across the US?
It all starts with @newpublic.org Co-Director @eli.bsky.social sharing how we realized that reliable local info is a real need for many people and communities:
@newpublic.orgReposted by @roundabout.townRecipe for a fantastic dinner party vibe: ✉️ send the invites 🎵 curate tunes 🍝🍹provide vittles and libations 💡 set an intention for the evening 🚪 make sure no one overstays their welcome Doing this every day is what separates great online community stewards from simply “moderators”.
@roundabout.townMost of us want to be good neighbors and better citizens, and the Civic Signals show that it’s easier to get involved in your community, or even take the first steps, like finding out where to vote, once you know your neighbors and feel connected to them 🩵
@roundabout.townThe “Act” signals, which focus on digital spaces that support offline actions benefitting the community, are the final building blocks for a healthy digital space, after creating a strong foundation through “Welcome,” “Connection,” and “Understand”.
@roundabout.townAn important milestone with Roundabout:
Promising signs of civic participation in our North Chattanooga, TN, Roundabout community, where the most-clicked link in a recent newsletter was a local voter lookup tool 🗳️
This is a great example of @newpublic.org’s Civic Signals 👇
@roundabout.townImagine if an app was all about getting you to put down your phone and get involved in your community✨
Chicagoans, join us alongside @wbez.org and the @chicago.suntimes.com at chicago.com!
Here’s Chicago Public Media CEO Melissa Bell in @niemanlab.org 👀:
![This is a digital platform designed to ultimately bring people together at local in-person events. “Our top priority is that people can find what they need and then take that info out into their community,” Bell said. She noted that corporate-owned social media platforms “are typically trying to keep [users] on there as long as possible, in order to show them as many ads as possible. We do not have that incentive for chicago.com.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:tqjpdhcxlnhjpv3byqjpz4l3/bafkreiaeqonanhzyivg6eyt5zzdlh5kcnpwrbjs4vgfjuhu6g47r4ivgiq@jpeg)
@roundabout.townRead the full story here:
@roundabout.townFor thriving online groups, finding the right community stewards is everything. These aren’t just moderators — they’re unicorns 🦄 Stewards need to be entrepreneurial, emotionally intelligent, and discerning. @clockwerks.bsky.social, leading Roundabout @newpublic.org, lays it out in @niemanlab.org:
