What if social media were not commercially driven but had public values at its core?
The Civic Social Media project focuses on researching, designing, and advocating for digital platforms that enable community members to communicate, collaborate, and exchange information safely and securely. These platforms are built on public values and are transparently developed and managed by organizations and initiatives with a social purpose.
The debate about the need for a digital public infrastructure and public value-based online spaces has gained considerable momentum in recent years. Governments and funding bodies have issued various calls and manifestos on this topic, and it is increasingly appearing on national and European policy agendas. Several initiatives have also emerged in this space, such as the Facebook alternative Mastodon, technical protocols like ActivityPub and Matrix for decentralized (federated) social networks, and the open-source initiative Decidim for participatory processes.
Civic social media are not optimized for individual users but are designed for collaboration, dialogue, and communication within collectives and communities. As such, they are navigating relatively uncharted territory. The development of civic social media and the underlying digital public infrastructure that supports it poses numerous challenging questions, which we will explore and reflect on here.
These questions range from broad issues—such as why civic social media are important and what legal and policy frameworks are needed—to more practical concerns, including how to design, code, finance, steward, and promote civic social media initiatives.
At the moment, we are working on PubHubs as a case study to further investigate such issues. PubHubs is a platform which aims to offer a trusted, non-commercial digital environment for moderated conversations and digital identity management. Recent discussions with stakeholders at PubHubs, PublicSpaces and the City of Amsterdam, highlighted the need for further research into Pubhubs’ user interface design and usability—particularly balancing privacy with ease of use. Municipalities support the concept but need clearer examples of how it could work in practice. The next phase of the project will focus on developing use cases and prototypes with public institutions, envisioning how PubHubs can be successfully deployed in practice.
PubHubs is an initiative of Professors José van Dijck (Utrecht University) and Bart Jacobs (Radboud University), in collaboration with PublicSpaces.
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SIDN Fonds interviews Martijn de Waal about Pubhubs (Sept | 2024)