Seems like just yesterday we were getting our start in the UMass Amherst Innovation Challenge and talking with you about our ideas for an online Town Common. A lot has happened since we launched in 2010. We've launched 7 Localocracies around Massachusetts, won the Poynter prize in Entrepreneurial Journalism, raised seed funding from the prestigious Knight Foundation, signed the Boston Globe as our first customer, and even spoke as a Champion of Change at The White House.

We’ve been pretty quiet about most of this, but we’ve been listening and learning, mostly from you, our community, and trying to figure out how we can bring this idea across the country (and maybe someday the world), and how we can make a tool that will have the greatest possible positive impact. 

Today we’re announcing some pretty significant changes to Localocracy based on what we’ve learned over the past months.  Our ambition is still the same, we want to help unlock all the untapped knowledge in our communities and connect people to one another so we can make the world a better place.  But our approach is going to look somewhat different. 

The biggest change is that Localocracy is moving from being a “Online Town Common” that existed in many places on our own, to powering a platform for community based questions and answers for news organizations.  This means we'll be expanding the type of questions that have been asked on the site, and the priorities will move towards identifying the best answers, whether those come from community members or reporters. 

For those of you in existing communities like Amherst, don’t worry, we won’t be closing you down, and we think you’ll actually be able to have the same civic conversations with even greater success, but we realized the changes were significant enough that we should probably explain our rational. This post is for you.

The Orginal Localocracy Features and the logic behind the new ones

Original Feature:  All questions were Yes or No questions around public policy issues.  Comments were divided into to columns.  Only users who voted could comment, and they could only comment and rank comments on their side. 

The Hypothesis:  Our original purpose was to determine the best positions for or against a given idea, and get a sense of what the public felt around a given issue.  In many ways, this was simply a different kind of polling tool.  Our goal was to expose people to other opinions, and help people who hadn’t made up their mind understand the issue in greater depth.  Our belief was that if users voted on the issue and ranked the best points on their side, it would be easier to get a sense of where the community stood and whether the community should take a particular action on complex issues. 

Our Finding:  We found that, regardless of whether we had hundreds of people voting or only a handful, there were always questions about what impact the voting would actually have.  It wasn’t clear what the result would be, whether the vote was in any way representative of the population, or whether it would have any impact on the decision of the elected officials or a voter investigating the issue (this was true even when elected officials were posing the question).  Additionally, many people who did want to express their thoughts told us that their views didn’t fit into a Yes or a No box.  In fact, sometimes they were seeking  a third solution, or wanted to express a position to reframe the debate. 

New feature:  The new version of the site allows users to ask any type of question.  Any user can still propose a “Should the town build a solar farm on the old landfill?” style question, but they can also ask all other forms of questions as well like “How do I register to vote?”,  “Where can I sign my 3rd grader up for swim classes?”,  “Why did Amherst Brewing Company move?” or “Who is the man who picks up trash downtown?”  With this new orientation, voting is removed, there is only one column, and any user can rank any answer up or down.   

Current Belief:  By introducing questions that are objective (there is actually a best answer), users will be able to get much more valuable background information about the issues in their community and be better informed overall.  Additionally, this will open the site up to a lot of other uses, which may not be specifically political, but will provide great opportunities for neighbors to help each other out and have a better interaction with the community.  We believe that the subjective questions around public policy (Should the town do Y?) will still be useful, but that instead of voting YES or NO, users will express their support for a position or an idea by voting up a well written comment articulating that position.  Our hope is that this will still allow for some numerical representation of the number of people supporting an idea, and will open the conversation up to a broader range of options than simply yes and no.   

We recognize there is still a risk that some individuals will rank down good comments they disagree with, and that top comments may end up representing the majority opinion on the issue.  We have some other ideas on fixing this, but decided it would be best to make sure it actually is a real problem.  As Aaron likes to say “we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

Original Feature:  Only confirmed registered voters were allowed to join Localocracy.

The hypothesis:  By allowing only registered voters, votes on the site would have greater political significance and greater potential to influence policy.  Confirming registered voters would also keep out outsiders with malicious intentions or who were seeking undue influence over a local issue.

Our Finding:  Only allowing registered voters left out a number of important and relevant stakeholders.  These included people who had moved away but still cared deeply about the town, people under 18, immigrants (legal and otherwise), local business owners, and people who worked or went to school in the town but didn’t live or vote there. 

New Feature:  Any person can join a community, users can sign up using Facebook, Twitter, or even just email.  They are still asked to provide real names, but are allowed anonymity in certain cases (see below) if they break community norms they can be banned. 

Current Belief:  The only people who will use the site in it’s current structure are people who care about the town, and we should allow for a wide net.  Because users can be banned if they misbehave, there is no reason to proactively limit people. 

Original Feature:  Comments were only allowed from people using Real Names

The Hypothesis:  Anonymity was causing a significant amount of the rancor and hatred that was being spewed on the web.  By requiring that users used real names, we would drive up the quality of conversation on the site. 

Our Finding:  The quality of our conversations was indeed incredibly high, so high in fact that the head of community management at a major international news organization said he had never seen that level of engagement anywhere else on the web.  But when we spoke to users and community members we did hear that a lot of people were afraid to use their real names in certain situations.  Some people (including government employees) feared their views might but their employment at risk.  Some people feared it would put their kids at risk, especially around the issues of schools.  Some people even felt their views could put them physically at risk.  Often too, we saw that some of the people who were fearful were already marginalized. 

New Feature:  Users can ask or answer questions anonymously, but we pay special attention to any anonymous actions and will ban users if they break the sites code of conduct.  Replies still require the use of a real name, so you won’t find yourself in a back and forth with an anonymous user. 

Current Belief:  Anonymous questions and answers will add valuable information and perspective to the site.  

We hope this will help explain the changes in the product for those of you who have been with us for a long time.  We'll be rolling out our integrations with media partners soon, for now, we have some of our own reporters on the ground in Amherst and are turning on the new version there first as it is our ever loyal, always faithful home turf community where we have always rolled out our new features.

If you have questions, comments, you can reach both founders at Contact@localocracy.com

if you have loving praise of adoration, you can reach our CTO Aaron at Aaron@Localocracy.com

If you just want someone to yell at, you can get our CEO at Conor@localocracy.com 

Hope to hear from you

Conor, Aaron, and The Localocracy team