Building Roundabout: A Pro-Social Platform for Local Communities

New_ Public has long asked what a digital space would look like if prosocial design wasn't an add-on, but part of its foundation, built to support healthy local communities. They put those learnings into building Roundabout, "a community space, built from the ground up with community leaders and neighbors." At last month's Pro-Social, the Prosocial Design Network spoke with four members of the team: Sam Liebeskind, Trei Brundrett, Blaine Cook, and Adit Dhanushkodi. They covered what they've built, why they built it, and what they're learning from five communities across the US.

Project Genesis: Why Build Something New?

New_ Public didn't set out to build a platform. As Sam Liebeskind explained, "that was really the last thing we honestly wanted to do. It's hard, it's expensive." But a convergence of trends in the summer of 2024 made it hard to look away: the decline of local newspapers, a Pew study showing that more than 50% of Americans get local news from online forums rather than local papers, and widespread frustration with existing spaces like Nextdoor and local Facebook groups, confirmed by both data and countless online memes.

New_ Public first explored lower-lift approaches. One project convened admins of local Facebook groups, Discord servers, and Nextdoor groups to share stewardship practices, testing whether you could change community dynamics without changing the software at all. Another, led by Adit, helped admins transform chaotic algorithmic feeds into well-organized weekly email roundups. Both showed promise.

The problem, as stewards told them, was that "it feels like we're pushing a rock up a hill." These community leaders were too far removed from the profit-driven technologies they'd built on top of. And so the team decided to build something with different incentives and a pro-social spirit, one that put more power into the hands of local people.

A major reference point was Front Porch Forum, a regional platform in and around Vermont that New_ Public had studied closely. The research showed it was having a real impact on the communities it served, the product of intentional design decisions made from the start.

The Building Blocks: Stewardship and Co-Design

Two principles animate Roundabout's approach, as lead architect Trei Brundrett described. The first is stewardship: supporting the people who give their time and energy to setting norms and facilitating healthy conversations in local spaces. On big tech platforms, these stewards are often in a reactive mode, not recognized or empowered. Roundabout is designed to change that.

The second is co-design. The New_ Public team has worked closely with stewards to understand their day-to-day experience and their challenges, not just researching and talking with them, but building alongside them. Together, "the practices and the product are what makes our approach to Roundabout." The goal, Trei emphasized, is ultimately to increase social trust at the local level: "what are all the ways that we're serving information needs, but also creating connection between neighbors?"

Roundabout is currently running pilots, just about three months old, with local stewards in Lincoln County, Wisconsin; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; North Chattanooga, Tennessee; Burlington, North Carolina; and Richmond, Virginia.

The Product: Designed to Deliver Value, Not Just Engagement

Adit walked through the key design choices. The app opens on a steward-curated Highlights homepage, giving community members a way to stay up to date without "endless scrolling through an ‘enshitiffied’ algorithmic maze." 

The Feed is organized around six to eight content topic buckets, reflecting the insight that "different people have really different information needs, and a single feed doesn't really serve everyone." Topic buckets also set norms, making clear what kinds of content to expect.

Local Guides function like a community-built Wikipedia, grown from conversations in the group and designed to surface evergreen content rather than letting the same questions get asked and answered repeatedly.

The Event Calendar is a key element that is designed as a participatory tool. Anyone who spots a flyer around town can take a photo of it and add it to the calendar event. Adit noted that "the fastest way to superpower social trust is for people to meet in person," so that when they return to the online space, they bring a higher baseline of trust with them.

The platform also sends a human-curated email newsletter for community members who don't want to open an app every day. "We want surfaces like these to actually serve community needs, not just be engagement bait to drive clicks."

Moderation works based on a community agreement that everyone signs on joining. The system automatically flags potential violations but always preserves an option for human review, limiting the reactive burden on stewards while keeping them in the loop on gray-area decisions.

What's Next

Blaine noted that Roundabout is built on the AT Protocol, an open, decentralized architecture. Building on it means that tools like Roundabout's scheduled posts, auto-moderation, and calendar backend are reusable by others building on the same protocol. The goal is to be part of a broader ecosystem rather than becoming "a new monopoly." On sustainability, Trei pointed to membership models and local sponsorship as ways to compensate stewards over time, thinking about how a hardware store might sponsor a Little League team or a local bodega might help keep the basketball court in good shape.

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Watch the interview.

About the Prosocial Design Network

The Prosocial Design Network researches and promotes prosocial design: evidence-based design practices that bring out the best in human nature online. Learn more at prosocialdesign.org.