Community Platforms

Better Together is building and maintaining open source public community infrastructure. Not just physical infrastructure as we're used to, such as highways and bridges, but digital infrastructure—things like social networks, applications, tools for people to connect and share. We're working to build up a shared public community infrastructure, such as a version of Facebook that is community owned, for example, or a version of Amazon that's community owned.

We are bringing people together and empowering them to participate in processes that are normally held at a distance or behind closed doors. We want to allow people to have more control over and more understanding of what's happening in their communities and on the platforms they use, to educate and empower them to participate, not just as consumers but as producers as well.

The projects we're currently working on include a local community platform called the Community Hub, built using the open-source Discourse platform. Our Community Commerce project is a community-owned e-commerce platform powered by the open-source Solidus e-commerce platform that empowers people to find the products and services around them in their communities. For example, if you want to buy a book or a tool around you but don't know which stores carry it. People and organizations will be able to have their own online stores within a larger network of our community marketplace, and make it accessible. This is just the first step, because we're also transitioning into offering a Community Item Library, to be able to list the things that you have access to and want to share, because we want to encourage caring and sharing. We know that it's through actually helping each other out, that we can make a big difference.