Building Community Online

I have a long-standing obsession with how we could use information technology to promote peacebuilding and the other forms of large-scale social change I am also obsessed with.

I emphasized the world could in the previous sentence because the promise so many saw saw in that regard as recently as the late 2010s has largely gone unmet. If anything, social media and other information technology platforms have done more to promote the social change I oppose instead.

I don’t have anything to add to the research that has been done on why that’s been the case.

But, I now do have something to add to my obsessional desire to find ways of using IT for constructive social change. I’ve been presented with two use cases which have given me a real incentive to figure out how to use these new and remarkable tools to help the communities I work with grow and do so exponentially.

A Long Standing Obsession

Mine obsession goes back a long time. During college, grad school, and my first years teaching at Colby, it largely revolved around coding (which we called programming in those good old days) and using user-hostile maineframe computers to do quantitative political analysis. I started using email and the Internet with the Beyond War movement in the early 1980s, a full decade before Marc Andreesen and his colleagues introduced Mosaic, the first graphic browser in 1993. (To make certain that you don’t think that I was some omniscient wizard, I gave a talk to AP government exam graders that year in which I argued that no one would ever want to use those fancy tools; the text-based Lynx would always be good enough).

Notwithstanding that one glaring mistake, I began experimenting with what could be done using the remarkable World Wide Web. I taught myself how to build my own web sites using html. I was hired to serve as the political science guide at the late but not lamented About.com’s political science “guide.” It was at about that time that I stumbled onto WebLab, which was a promising initiative for bringing people together around contentious issues. I also spent some time working on using IT to help large groups of people reach agreement on divisive topics in real time which took me to places like Perth Australia to help facilitate its Dialogue with the City in which over 1,000 people used online dialogue tools (among other things) to help them reach an agreement on core principles to guide the city’s rapid growth. In less than a day.

In the twenty years since then, we have all come to spend more and more of our time on line. But the promise of WebLab or Perth’s Dialogue With the City have faded off of center stage as the FAANG and other unicorn companies found ways to make billions of dollars using algorithms and other tools that drive us farther apart.

I never gave up on the hope of building constructive online communities for social change. Over the years, I’ve often found myself thinking back to the first Build Up/Build Peace conference at the iconic MIT Media lab ten years ago when we were so optimistic about the “affordances” the new technologies offered peacebuilders. Its most recent conferences have focused on what we could do to counter those divisive trends. Obviously, we need to do that, but it’s a far cry from what I hoped to be doing in 2014 or 2004 or 1994 or 1984.

Two New Opportunities

In short, the state of the online world had left me in a funk.

I began to pull myself out of it, however, a few weeks ago when two realizations hit me when I was presented with two use cases, though it makes more sense here to deal with them in reverse order.

We can build community line. I share the growing consensus that the most effective peacebuilding is locally based and locally led. At the same time, I’m personally not all that engaged in my local community because so much of my personal and professional life is spent online. In fact, the “local” community that matters to me is not Falls Church VA but the “friends and neighbors” that I have in cyberspace.

That gets driven home to me when I go to our very vibrant and very local farmers market each Saturday. I occasionally see people I recognize but almost never run into anyone I actually know. The same thing is true when I go on my daily walks when I interact at least as often with the dogs that I meet as I do with their people.

Yet, I do have a vibrant and vital social life, but it is mostly online. My friends and I don’t interact much using the best known social media platforms. Rather, we have learned to use Zoom, other video conferencing platforms, and a few other apps to develop strong interpersonal relationships in some cases knowing that we will are not likely to ever meet “in the flesh.”

A new political use case. Whatever its flaws, we are going to have to use existing platforms to meet the two overlapping organizational challenges I have agreed to take on:

• I will be part of creating AfP’s Peacebuiding Starts at Home initiative which will have to rely heavily on building an online community of practice. We envision building it through locally led projects that may or may not need a major IT component. But if we are going to be able to build a movement that spreads nationally, leads to the adoption of new cultural norms about how Americans deal with conflict, and then sparks a dramatic shift in public policy, most of that work will have to be done online by bringing together people who will almost never end up in the same room together at the same time.
• Meanwhile, we have already discovered that there are plenty of people who don’t define themselves primarily as peacebuilders but who want to work with us. For that to happen, we will have to engage in what I call the peacebuilding pivot in which we learn to work with organizations that focus on race, climate, gender, economic inequality, and other issues. Building that kind of broad coalition that crosses issue-based as well as ideological silos will also require creating online communities. My new friend David Sloan Wilson of ProSocial World refers to existing initiatives as small islands in an archipelago. The time has come to build metaphorical bridges between them.

Both will require what my late friend Dick O’Neill and I used to refer to as catalytic convening, much of which will have to occur online for the simple reason that the people who will be involved in those projects are scattered around the country and, in some cases, the world. Some of us occasionally gather face-to-fact at events like one I am organizing at AfP’s PeaceCon next month or at ad hoc events like the one we are going to with David Sloan Wilson tomorrow in New York.

But, those meetings will be the exception rather than the rule.

Three Starting Points

My planning for that online catalytic convening will literally start tomorrow with our trip to New York. For now, I have three guiding principles for which I will need plenty of help—see the last section of this post.

Don’t worry about finding the perfect platform. I haven’t found a single social media platform that fits all of these needs which means it is still time to experiment. For the moment, Hylo seems to be the best starting point because it is designed for social change activists and is flexible enough for us to build connections with like-minded initiatives for the archipelago bridging part of the work. Hylo allows users to post information on events and other offerings, post content with links to other platforms, and seek other partners on its expanding network.

I started by creating a Dot Connecters group on Hylo, which is literally all I have done. Over the course of the next month, I will add content and build links my Substack newsletter and other tools so that be the time the AfP group meets in mid-September, it will be vibrant enough to serve as a “container” for projects falling under both of the bullet points above.

As is the case with all of these platforms, the site will need a lot of “care and feeding” from a leadership team which, for the moment, is me. But, as it grows along the lines outlined next, that team will grow and will need to have members who help build interest in the platform and help incubate projects. And lots of other things I haven’t thought of yet….

Start small. I have an annoying tendency to want to change the world overnight—even though I know better. That holds here. I would love to wake up tomorrow and discover that I had magically created a massive online network that can change the world by the end of the month—if not sooner.

I do eventually remember that I do know better and that our immediate challenge is to create something akin to what the tech startup community refers to as a minimum viable product.

To that end, I will use the month before PeaceCon to create the Hylo group, introduce it here and at our September meeting at the AfP office the day after PeaceCon, and begin enrolling members and adding content. To that end, please read the final section of this post, because I do need help.

Plan for (exponential) growth. I won’t be happy with a minimum viable product. In the words of the Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Froundation, America has too many neglected needs. Whatever tools we create, we will have to be able to build networks of peacebuilders as in the first bullet point above but also build networks that span the islands in Wilson’s archipelago. And, we will have to build the capacity for growth without succumbing to the need to raise large quantities of capital which brings with it the need to make large quantities of money.

Help Me Out

In the end, I am convinced that such an online community can be built.

I am also convinced that I’m out of my depth here.

So, if you have ideas that might help, let me know either be leaving a comment (if you are reading this on my Substack newsletter) or click this link to send me an email.

NEXT TIME: The New Paradigm Coalition goes public.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.