Fostering Connection in Online Spaces

We're thrilled to announce two convenings with $100k in mini research grants, made possible by the generous support from Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. (TWCF). These convenings will catalyze practice-informed research to fuel the efforts of online spaces to foster connection, community, and social cohesion. The first convening, scheduled for Spring 2027, will center on supporting the work of builders in the Open Social Web, helping to answer their questions on how to better design for healthy online communities.

Countless practitioners – including builders, community stewards and tech professionals – are working to create online spaces where connection, understanding and community can flourish,  and they look to prosocial design research to help them in their goals. We know because many of them have joined PDN's community, having found us after looking for evidence-based design solutions to foster healthy interactions in the spaces they host. 

Likewise, scores of academics and other researchers bring social science to bear on imagining and testing prosocial design solutions, motivated by a desire to help practitioners create thriving online spaces. Yet we hear from practitioners that they need more research, in particular actionable research that is informed by practice, answering questions they have with an awareness of how technology works.

Last year PDN worked with Roblox to co-host a researcher practitioner convening to catalyze actionable research towards identifying solutions that foster connection in social gaming.  We are now excited to be able to take a similar approach to support non-industry practitioners, including community stewards and those building on the Open Social Web, to achieve goals related to building social cohesion on their platforms with the generous support of this grant from TWCF.

Over two years, we will host two convenings that will each bring together 15 researchers and 15 tech professionals to imagine and identify design solutions and catalyze new research around fostering connection. Participants in each convening will be eligible to apply for mini-grants to test the effectiveness of those approaches from a pool of $50k.

Our first convening will center around practitioners building spaces in the Open Social Web slated for Spring 2027. As New_ Public and others have noted, the Internet is in transition, with large social media platforms moving from social interaction to passive consumption. What is increasingly filling the void of social media are pockets of the internet – from Signal groups to local community forums like Front Porch Forum  – that provide smaller, more curated and trusted spaces for people to connect. Many of those spaces are being built with the aim of fostering healthy spaces where community, understanding, and social cohesion can flourish. We are more than excited to connect this growing community of builders with researchers to help support their goals

We hope these convenings will not only cross-pollinate insights, spark design ideas and catalyze practice-informed research, but that they will serve as a model for better connecting and syncing researchers and practitioners in their shared goals to foster human connection online.

We are currently in the earliest stages of planning our first convening – including selecting a location for the event – and are holding conversations with several organizations and researchers who we hope can help us think through the key components for a successful event. If interested in learning more about the convening and how you can be involved, please reach out to Julia Kamin @ julia@prosocialdesign.org. 

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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.