Defining Communities in Movement
How can human- and resource-centered thinking improve the way we inform and collaborate with local communities online?
The traditional viewpoint of communities is neighborhood-based, limited to the space around home that’s personal to our lives. With the influx of demand for online information and dialogue from people who are on the move, communities need to be reimagined. Whether we’re walking in a public park, waiting in a train station, or sitting in a conference room, we intersect with diverse groups of people and information that could be valuable to us. In order to target local news and other public data to these people in real-time, publishers need to be aware of how to organize this content effectively.
The research and development conducted for Bloom have helped us explore how content can be made accessible to these dynamic communities on the move. Our approach is based on the perspective of “blooms,” which prioritize values of people and local resources to define real-world communities.
Blooms are defined as:
“large groups of jellyfish that gather in a small area, for a limited time, to absorb nutrients from one another and their surroundings.”
I’d like to share what we’ve learned from our research to show the process of making blooms accessible online, their benefits and challenges, and our take on how they could be a prospective model for fostering communities and the journalism within.
Blooms, Explained
When most of us think of community, the first thought that comes to mind may be a group of neighbors, friends, or hobbyists. Perhaps, it’s a digital community of sorts such as a follower list, newsletter subscribers, or our email address book. In general, it’s a group of people that may have many differences but are all interconnected by at least one common characteristic.
Now, take into account the infinite number of personal characteristics that could be used to form a community — interests, expertise, culture, opinion — and think about how dynamic they are within the people nearby you now. Additionally, consider information about this location’s environment, history, and recent local news. How will all of these characteristics balance or disappear if you walk a mile down the street? The existence of these dynamic communities you encounter is a beautiful, short-lived moment — it’s a gathering that represents a bloom.
This perspective is not always recognized and appreciated but, the truth is that, blooms are around us everywhere we go. Whether in a neighborhood, a subway car, an event venue, or walking on a sidewalk, we are constantly present within a bloom. By engaging with its people, resources, and data, the wealth of information could influence us to share ideas and opinions, and take action to solve problems. However, naturally, we aren’t aware of the blooms we encounter on a daily basis, nor of the influence each one contains. It’s a missed opportunity for significant social impact.
For example, NYC’s Bryant Park recently unveiled its lawn and made many announcements for outdoor activities. Since then, local journalists have published news online about its arts programs, a spontaneous political speech, and the danger of a rotting tree nearby. Every day thousands of people lounge in the park to have a walk or coffee, but are unaware of this local news and the social influence or initiative that it could have sparked. If this information were organized in a way that’s easier for them to obtain, a stronger community, or bloom, within Bryant Park could be fostered.
Challenges Of Making Blooms Accessible
I do realize that we live in a world that’s quite difficult or intimidating to communicate with online. Local news and public data aren’t always organized in a consistent format and are usually stored in a way that’s inaccessible in real-time. In order to make blooms more accessible, a collaborative effort between technology and publishers is required. Before we get into detail on how this can be done, let’s first get a deeper understanding on how blooms are created by breaking down what we know so far. We know that:
- There is at least one common characteristic (tangible or intangible) within a bloom,
- Most of these similarities are within reach — you’re at a location that you can share online, you’re likely to have a social network profile you can share interests from, and information (i.e. news, public data) about this location is available online,
- And there are many other people around you right now with certain characteristics that may be similar to yours.
Connecting this data to make a network seems pretty easy — in your head. However, it’s not easy to do digitally right now due to the lack of consistency and specificity of the data between publishers, businesses, and consumers. As explained by The Brookings Institution “data is usually seen as an output rather than an input.” If data were to be treated as a two-way stream — a network — then new targeting opportunities would open up for publishers to make their content more valuable and discoverable.
Today, some advertising services are offering businesses a strong set of targeting options that allow them to organize data at a very high precision to reach niche audiences. For example, Facebook’s provides a thorough set of demographics that allows anyone to reach audiences by location and interest. News publishers are beginning to use this to target news articles to blooms— as much as their budget can afford. I think this precise targeting is the future of content marketing, but we have a long way to go.
At Bloom, we have extended the strategy of Facebook’s service by integrating targeting tools within publisher CMSs, reaching people in real-time by location, and allowing people to browse content that’s been targeted to them. This gets closer to making blooms accessible, but communication between the parties is still limited in many ways. This is one of the aspects we’re looking to improve in the near future.
The Model Of A Bloom
Despite the infinite number of characteristics that can be targeted and networks that can be formed, patterns are found that help us define a model for a bloom. Here are three primary elements:
- Demographically-targeted information or resources: Local news, public data on the environment, people, and businesses
- Personalized search: Filtering by location, culture, religion, and other characteristics
- Real-time analysis and collaboration: Information is accessible anytime, anywhere
One important aspect needed in order to work with blooms is collaboration— for both producers and consumers. The elements in this model require people to share information about themselves or what’s happening in their surroundings. The collaboration shouldn’t necessarily be telling a life story but rather focusing on how you can use your knowledge to influence others in a bloom.
To put this model and collaboration into context, I’ll explain some recent work we’ve done on our platform. Over the past year, we’ve been working on improving how data is organized by community publishers. We recently released geotagging and geo-targeting tools that integrate into websites to make it easy to tag content by its precise location. This enables their readers to have a personalized local search experience by sharing their current location with the publisher to discover what’s happening near them in real-time.
What led us to building these tools is that location data is rarely tagged by publishers today. Typically, an article is published on a website as a text-based narrative with categories or keyword tags, with little effort given to organizing it as computer-readable data that could be used for audience targeting. Using these types of tools on Bloom or Facebook will make content more accessible, user experience more relevant, and could also inspire collaboration between third parties, such as 311 or other public data. However, publishers must put effort into sharing/tagging this data to make this opportunity a reality.
The Future With Blooms
Soon, I dream, we will live in a world that doesn’t depend on follower lists, but rather is smart enough to automatically connect information to the most appropriate audience. The perspective of blooms can help technologists and publishers achieve the desired goals of informing the most relevant audience. Making information accessible to the right people at the right time will guarantee that social impact is at its highest potential. It will improve essential aspects of communities, encourage active citizenship, and, most importantly, bring more opportunities for people to be social outside of the Internet.
I believe that community journalism is just the beginning and that blooms can be fostered and influenced in many other ways. Our goal is to also enable other forms of journalism to work with blooms, such as social, civic, citizen/participatory, and collaborative. Other industries (non-profit and for-profit) also have opportunities to make use of blooms and create stronger relationships between their businesses based on similar targeted audiences.
I hope this community perspective of blooms has inspired you to be more aware of the people and their influence in your surroundings. I’d love to hear how you’re learning to foster communities in new ways. Feel free to write me!
About The Author
Stephen Jefferson
steve@bloom.li
Bloom, www.bloom.li
Stephen is currently a fellow of the 2016 Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism cohort in NYC. He will be talking more about Bloom and this community perspective in a presentation on May 17th. The event is open to the public and will take place at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York City — RSVP.
