Bulletin Board: Open Social Awards, digital rabbit holes, and pizza parties
Welcome back to New_ Public’s Bulletin Board, where we share the best of what the prosocial internet has to offer and build connections between our readers.
From inspiring talks about cheese to community gatherings around the world, many of this month’s gems were brought to us by readers, team members, and friends of New_ Public.
The month’s edition was put together by New_ Public’s Social Media Fellow, Nina Joung. Thanks Nina!
Reminder that you can share a request or update in the comments section or use our contact form.
–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public
Announcements and events
Applications for the Open Social Awards are due May 1! New_ Public, PublicSpaces, and Waag Futurelab are seeking teams of builders with MVP products built on open protocols. A Grand-Prize (€10,000) winner and two Excellence Award (€5,000) winners will be recognized during the PublicSpaces Conference 2026, held in Amsterdam, June 4-6. Learn more at newpublic.org/OSA
To keep up with relevant events, we heartily recommend the Prosocial Tech Collab community calendar. PTC supports builders of prosocial tech, as well as researchers, journalists, artists, and community organizers who are working on projects that advance the goals of prosocial technology. (PTC’s creator, Julia Morris, started their Slack during a New_ Public virtual event!)
Our friends at Design It For Us, a youth-led coalition advocating for better social media, just announced their new Innovators Circle. This is an inspiring group, including friend of New_ Public Rudy Fraser of Blacksky.
April 28-30 | Join FediForum, the global online unconference dedicated to the Open Social Web. They’ve also just announced FediForum Connect, a curated product and service directory for organizations, communities, and creators on ActivityPub and beyond. More here.
April 22 | Living Room Lectures will be at Index Space in Brooklyn, NY in conversation with AI policy expert and poet Serena Dokuaa Oduro. The talk will encourage attendees to reimagine AI by uncovering the political and social forces that shape it, exploring the question: “Do we need AI or do we need Black feminisms?”
April 25 | Londoners are invited to join an Internet Infrastructure Walk (for Earth Day) guided by a research fellow and artist. Together, you’ll walk through the ubiquitous but often invisible infrastructure that enables millions of Londoners to stay connected.
May 8-10 | New Yorkers should not miss Media Party New York 2026, a three day convening with workshops and keynotes, including from New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser on Friday, May 8. This year’s core themes touch on topics close to our hearts, including how local journalism intersects with AI and content creators.
Links I would Slack you
Author Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, shows how engagement-hacking has basically de-evolved social media spaces. He reflects on the “peak eras” of platforms like Facebook and X, and how engagement-hacking has led to incredibly unhealthy online ecosystems.
Social media researcher Jonathan Stray shares promising results from the Prosocial Ranking Challenge, an open competition that encouraged the creation of better social media algorithms. Two of the five algorithms that were tested showed statistically significant depolarization effects.
Word from the web
We highly recommend this talk from Blaine Cook, Principal Software Engineer for Roundabout. (Blaine also built this web tool to host the recordings, transcripts, and an index. That’s the Open Web for ya!) At this year’s ATmosphere Conference, Blaine spoke about Roundabout, cheese, and ecological computing:
If a single centralized approach can’t preserve the diversity of cheese, one of the simplest living systems that we know how to cultivate, then consider what we attempted over the last 20 years with human culture. The first generation of the social web tried to pasteurize human culture.
And the thing that I want us to reckon with is not just that it failed, it is that it could not have succeeded … because the architecture made it structurally impossible to preserve the thing that it was trying to protect.
Designs to Know
Every now and then, we highlight the research coming out of the Prosocial Design Network, a major resource for digital design practices that has shaped New_ Public’s work. Recently, they added a new intervention to their library: Quality Scores.
Audrey Hingle, Comms and Community Lead at Prosocial Design Network and Editor-in-Chief of Internet Exchange, shares with the New_ Public team:
Social media platforms almost all use popularity signals alongside content – number of likes, reposts etc. – which can amplify and increase engagement with divisive and otherwise unhealthy posts. A new survey experiment suggests a way that platform can counter that negative effect of popularity cues by also including a quality score. In the study, participants who saw quality scores next to popularity cues were more likely to say they’d repost more prosocial content (judged by an LLM). We give the intervention a “tentative” rating for now, but see it as a promising approach worthy of testing in more naturalistic settings.
A connection is made
Let’s see if we can make a connection within our larger community! This latest call for support comes from Jennifer at Govdirectory, a “crowdsourced and fact checked directory of official governmental online accounts and services.”
Help improve your local government directory as an individual contributor or leader in your community. We are particularly seeking volunteers to add data about U.S. states. Connect to the project by adding your Wikipedia username to the list of participants. If you don’t have a username yet, you can create an account here.
You’re also welcome to join an online Collab Hour, held weekly at 8PM Thursday and 9AM Friday (EDT), to learn more.
If you have a request to share in the next Bulletin Board, let us know using the New_ Public contact form or replying to this email. In last month’s newsletter, we got over a dozen people reaching out to Aaron Bear Berger. (Thank you to everyone who did!)
Digital Delight
Rich Speeney and Tyler Heath are two friends offering anyone $50 to host a pizza party for their friends or neighbors through their super simple website, wednesdaynightpizzaclub.com
While experimenting to find the best way to encourage people to gather, Rich and Tyler realized that a lot of barriers could be resolved by keeping the purpose “stupidly simple.” Read here about their eight year journey to Wednesday Night Pizza Club, a great example of a prosocial design process in action.
Let us know if you end up joining the 🍕 Club, and thank you, Tyler, for sharing this with us!
Scheming ways to embarrass my brother at his doctoral ceremony,
– Nina Joung, Social Media Fellow, New_ Public