Digital Public Square

Banyan’s publishing platform will enable affiliated news co-ops to provide distinctive digital forums that are a welcoming and trustworthy environment for readers to find others in their community who care about the same issues, learn from each other and from other resources, and organize for constructive community change.  These networking spaces, in short, will be a digital public square whose conversations are nourished by a co-op’s journalism — and a virtual space where people can come together not only to explore issues but also to organize for constructive community change, find ways to help one another, and meet other community needs. These forums, along with other civic-engagement tools built into the platform, help make Banyan-model news co-ops into community institutions and not just news websites.

These spaces will also be a petri dish to grow the spread of co-op membership: Many who find value in news co-ops’ journalism will use the platform’s handy tools to tell invite their friends to join them. The more deeply readers get engaged the likelier they are to become co-op members — a huge incentive for affiliated co-ops to create the most welcoming, safest and easiest-to-use digital community possible: 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, such as use of real names, as people do in real-world 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.

The platform will harness up-to-date best practices of high-functioning and engaged Web communities — and Banyan will strive always to improve on this. The aim will be to deal not just with digital sophisticates but with a huge population of regular folks, so its platform must offer 99th-percentile ease of use.