CommonPlace

In 2009, I co-founded CommonPlace, an online town bulletin platform for local community engagement. The civic tool made it super easy for neighbors and civic leaders to share and connect with their town. It had the inverse goal of most 2000s social media sites: instead of connecting you in shallow ways to people around the world, it was trying to connect you in deep ways to the neighbors right next to you.

In January 2011, we built the first CommonPlace prototype and launched in my hometown of Falls Church, Virginia. Within 12 weeks, 20% of the households in Falls Church had signed up to the network and hundreds of needs, events, announcements and private messages were sent and responded to across the network.

Given the engagement in Falls Church, we hired a full-time designer and developer to update the platform. The following summer, we hired and trained seven community organizers and launched five more communities around the country: Marquette, MI; Fayetteville, AR; Warwick, NY; Vienna, VA; and Harrisonburg, VA. By the end of 2011, there were 5,300 neighbors signed up across six CommonPlaces, and over 100 local organizations signed up with pages.

By 2012, our top three towns had about a quarter of households participating in their CommonPlaces, with 8 posts a day and 11,000 monthly visits. By the end of our first wave of organizing, we averaged 4-10 posts per day in each network and had over 70% of our network engage with CommonPlace on a given day. Even after the community organizers left, the CommonPlace populations grew steadily.

But what made us most excited about CommonPlace was not the number of online interactions it generated — rather, it was the way it generated, offline, face-to-face interactions between neighbors:

The original expansion of our pilot was structured as a for-profit startup. We soon discovered this would not work: first, our devotion to deep community organizing did not fit the rapid growth models that Silicon Valley investors demanded; second, the idea of building civic life online inside of a for-profit entity did not sit well with us.

We shut down in 2013, but I hope to relaunch CommonPlace one day as a non-profit, open-source project. You can view our archive of this effort — and hopes for a future CommonPlace at CivicTech.us.

Here is some miscellaneous writing from and coverage of CommonPlace:

The launch article in The Falls Church Times is here, in the Falls Church News-Press is here, and on the Saguaro Seminar blog here. And here is the original pitch to the Falls Church city council:

Throughout 2011, we sent community organizers into eight cities to organize neighbors onto CommonPlace. Below are some of the TV spots on their efforts:

Below are some of the later mockups of the CommonPlace design, by Mark Malazarte. You can also interact with a demo here.