This coming week, the New Public Festival will kick off with a phenomenal group of participants examining better, less commercialized, public spaces on the internet. “We believe that the reckless design of our current, privately-owned digital spaces is tearing at our social fabric and poses a grave danger to our ability to collectively identify and solve social problems,” they wrote.
For the past 15 years, non-profit tech projects that have libre software licenses, build open-source code, and liberate open data offerings have shared many of the same principles. While many civic-commons technology projects have achieved traction, they have not received funding support that help them reach modest sustainability. But compared with other public-benefit investments, these projects have the ability to engage more new people, who can use the below tools to meet their information needs and start participating.
Here are five existing tech projects, non-profit and open-source, designed to enhance digital public spaces. They are libre to be remixed by communities for their goals, a fundamental difference from for-profit & closed platforms like Facebook and Nextdoor.
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