Welcome Eliana Bravos: Prosocial Design Network's New Community Lead

We're pleased to welcome Eliana Bravos (she/her) as the Prosocial Design Network's new Community Lead. Eliana is a social entrepreneur and community steward focused on building online tools and spaces that meaningfully bring people together and help them do more of what they care about. She loves designing systems that consider human plurality, facilitate curiosity about each other and the world, and embody that there's no one right way to exist. Eliana first got involved with PDN through the monthly pro-socials in our Slack community.

As part of her role, she’s helping produce our upcoming Research Meets Practice Summit, connecting researchers and practitioners in the Open Social Web. To get to know Eliana better, I asked her a few questions:

1. What's your favorite corner of the internet?

There are a few internet corners I love:

• playhtml.fun is an open-source library that's meant to be infrastructure for communal internet experiences. I really love their mission of making the web feel alive and playful. You can have a lot of fun exploring their examples and community sites.
• Lately I've been enjoying using leaflet.pub as a collaborative writing space, and reading personal blogs on various sites like Leaflet and Substack.
• Disclaimer: I'm biased because I helped make this one, but I've met several of my closest friends and mentors through ND Connect, a virtual clubhouse built around neurodivergent experiences.
• I also genuinely love PDN's Slack community for finding out about events and research on building more ethical tech. I'd highly recommend joining the monthly pro-socials; they're a lot of fun and how I first got involved with the PDN.

2. What is the most enjoyable or interesting piece of research or writing you've read recently?

30 minutes with a stranger by Alvin Chang. It's an incredible visual essay that walks through a project he did exploring 1,700 online conversations between strangers. He found that strangers tend to feel happier after talking to each other, even though they might expect to feel worse, and even when they don't agree politically.

I like it because it's a helpful reminder for me to be more open to connection in my day-to-day, and it makes me happy and hopeful that people tended to have positive interactions with each other.

3. How many browser tabs do you have open right now?

43 windows of browser tabs. (My reaction: 😱!) 

4. Anything else you'd like us to know about you?

Following the findings of the internet stranger study, I like chatting with new people! If anything resonated, something I said made you curious, or you'd like to share your favourite corner of the internet with me, please reach out. I would genuinely love to hear from you and be happy that you did.

Please join us in welcoming Eliana to PDN in our community Slack channel!

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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.