Roundabout

How 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

Have 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. 🙄

How 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.substack.com/p/your-towns...

Next up: we’re bringing Roundabout to Chicago through chicago.com, our partnership with Chicago Public Media newpublic.org/chicago

How 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.substack.com/p/your-towns...

Not long after that, we had an MVP product and began testing our hypotheses in pilots throughout the country 🎉 newpublic.substack.com/p/introducin...

How 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.substack.com/p/your-towns...

Eventually, we realized we might have to build our own app, and we started to articulate the underlying core principles for what we would build: newpublic.substack.com/p/exploring-...

How 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.substack.com/p/your-towns...

An 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 👇

The “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”. newpublic.org/building-blo...

For 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:

For 50 years, we’ve had public media as a non-commercial alternative to what Newton Minow called the “vast wasteland” of for-profit media. Look at social media: slop, lies, fighting. The internet is also a vast wasteland. Once again, we need public media. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHSj...

Chicago.com, a new partnership between Roundabout and Chicago Public Media is really something special. It’s a fusion, a symbiosis, of one of the largest public media orgs in the U.S., and a project created by a tech nonprofit. This is greater than the sum of its parts.

Roundabout, our local community app, is going to power chicago.org, allowing millions of Chicagoans to connect and share with each other. Here’s more about what we’re up to, including what sets this apart from messy, noisy, profit-driven social media apps: newpublic.org/chicago

Each community will be led by a trained & dedicated local community steward, and that makes all the difference in keeping these spaces respectful and healthy. These folks are actively involved in curating content, helping people find answers and connections, and shaping and building the community.

Roundabout, our local community app, is going to power chicago.org, allowing millions of Chicagoans to connect and share with each other. Here’s more about what we’re up to, including what sets this apart from messy, noisy, profit-driven social media apps: newpublic.org/chicago

In a lot of towns and neighborhoods, people are lonely. They haven’t met any of their neighbors. They have nowhere to go to find good, useful info about what’s nearby. We know this from years of research and from piloting with thousands of people. That’s why this news is a really big deal:

We’re taking our app, which lets you find what you need locally, connect with your neighbors, and uplift the good in your community, and we’re bringing it to Chicago, one of the largest cities in the country, with our partners Chicago Public Media.

Hi Bluesky! We’re the team making Roundabout, an app built to help people live a flourishing life in their local town or neighborhood. Find resources, connect with neighbors, celebrate your community.

Roundabout is based on rigorous research and optimized for trust. It’s being built for the public by @newpublic.org and local stewards in the places we’re serving — not for investors and venture capitalists. No doomscrolling, no polarizing algorithm, just your neighbors.