An alternative to Facebook Groups that can be used by specific local organisations and collectives, and offered to others - to support existing and emergent groups.

These groups exemplify our primary target user organisations. These can shape our evaluation and comparison of alternative platforms.

• Brunswick Tool Library
• Good Karma Network
• Gig Guide
• Radical Socialist Base
• Muslim Women’s association
• Radicle Roots
• Balam Balam
• Library services

We can prioritise these to identify core functionality and non-essential functionality (e.g. MoSCoW prioritisation)

For more detail, see Use cases for digital town squares

In an emergency

• Community emergency announcements
• Organising / coordinating volunteers (e.g. community gardening, food parcel delivery)
• Alerting neighbours and groups to people in need of assistance
• Coordinating community response to requests for assistance

Business as usual

Being used regularly as part of everyday community activities will mean that the platform is familiar and useful to many in an emergency / blackout scenario.

• Advertising events, workshops and groups' initiatives to the community
• Offering and requesting items, services and assistance (per e.g. Freecycle / Good Karma)
• Requesting advice and recommendations regarding local businesses and services
• Seeking social connections with neighbours
• Community organising: including formal groups and adhoc groups e.g. neighbourhood activities
• Discussion of local politics and current affairs ?

These could be provided by the platform itself or by supporting services and capabilities

• Onboarding plan and functionality
• Discoverability: pathways to find things (and the groups and people users new are interested in)
• Ability to manage multiple overlapping circles of community, e.g. micro-locality, specific interests etc.
• Options for sign-up, sign-in and account management (including provisioning and password resets)
  • using email and / or mobile
  • and when email and phone not available
• Initial user experience and visual appearance must be acceptable to non-technical users
• Needs to be FOSS, standards based, interoperable, robust

Beyond these, here are several big categories of issues that need to be addressed for successful community-run digital spaces, including:

• Online vs real-world identities: policies and enforcement
  • mitigating bots, bad actors
  • removing and banning users who behave badly
  • allowing anonymity for stigmatised and sensitive topics
  • allowing anonymity for illegal topics, people who would want to hide identity from police, whistleblowing?
  • meeting U16 social media requirements (legislation and duty of care)
• Ease of signup and sign-on vs security
  • reduce usability barriers for platform signup and sign-on
  • balance with security: password strength, 2FA, password resets
  • requirement to provide validated email address?
  • ability to change email?
• Moderating online discussion
  • establishing enforceable rules that balance community expectations
  • addressing disinformation / misinformation
  • encouraging decent behaviour
  • recruiting, training, retaining volunteer moderators
  • compensating toxicity vs decent behaviour
• Tech skills and capabilities
  • What skills and capabilities are needed of our tech ops teams? admins? community moderators?
  • minimum viable workforce to run things? (assume e.g.
• Ongoing viability and financial considerations
  • potential uptake for Merri-bek residents: ~20% of 180,000 = 36,000 users.
  • Ongoing hosting / data centre needs (balancing with contemporary user expectations)
  • recruiting, training, retaining volunteer mods, admins and tech support ongoing
  • compensation for workers?
  • how many mods / admins needed per 1000 users?
• Long-term user engagement and utility
  • main factors that would drive uptake (signup?)
  • main factors that would drive ongoing use?
  • success factors e.g.
    • Info & comms platform of choice for Merri-bek non-profit groups;
    • Merri-bek residents use as platform of choice for connecting with neighbours (e.g. freecycle / good karma group equivalent; asking for local info or recommendations)
    • platform of choice for Merri-bek Council to inform & engage with community
    • new Merri-bek arrivals sign up as a way to access community info;