Digital Public Square 

Banyan’s publishing platform will put a digital public square at the heart of each news co-op that uses its model, inviting conversations about issues among readers and sparking all kinds of community efforts.  This is the Banyan model’s most novel feature — and the civic engagement it generates is designed to inspire people who value their community’s civic health to enroll as paying co-op members. 

The digital public squares offer a welcoming and trustworthy environment for readers to find others who care about the same issues, learn from each other and other resources, and even organize for constructive community change; a co-op’s original reporting will nourish these conversations.  Further, the square will offer digital tools for people to invent ways to help one another — a tool library, perhaps, or a forum for swapping job leads. The possibilities are limited only by a co-op membership’s imagination.  The digital public squares help make Banyan-model news co-ops into grass-roots community institutions — not just news websites.

These spaces will also be a petri dish to grow co-op membership: Many who find value in news co-ops’ journalism will use the platform’s forums and handy tools to invite their friends to join in. The more deeply readers get engaged the likelier they are to become co-op members — a huge incentive for news co-ops to create the most welcoming, most trustworthy and easiest-to-use digital community possible.  In this time of rockbottom trust in journalism, trustworthiness is the key to inviting people to share and collaborate voluntarily with others — people withdraw their voluntary energy if they don’t trust the environment.

So to leave comments or otherwise engage in the community, readers must agree to conform to a pledge of constructive behavior, including use of real names, as people do at in-person civic gatherings. The software will include a system for flagging offensive behavior that editors can review. The goal is to ensure that readers’ full range of experiences with the sites — not just with the journalism — fit the value proposition of relevance, respect and trustworthiness.