Civic Signals started when we asked ourselves what healthy societies need from digital spaces — not just in terms of harms, but in terms of the public goods they provide. Over the last year, we have been engaging experts across a wide variety of disciplines and doing research to understand what makes “public-friendly” spaces, well, public-friendly — what common characteristics (civic signals) are shared by the spaces that valorize the collective, and that are designed for the greater public good.

We think this matters both because these ideas could inform the design of existing digital platforms, but also perhaps more importantly because they could help inspire and shape the new platforms that will rise up in the years to come.