Rosieland Roundup 256 — The Anti-Social Century, Superblocks, community as medicine

👋 Welcome to another week in Rosieland!

🌈 This week on Rosieland...

Every week I show up to help you learn and think about community...

Digital displacement
Acknowledging community confidence
Community Ambassador Programmes — A very brief guide and a list of examples
🔮 The Guide to Community Discovery: it's time to start taking community research seriously (Beta pricing ends on 31st of January)

This is a great and varied piece on how our behaviours are changing, from the pandemic, restaurants, food delivery, the preference for being homebound, screentime and politics...

Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.

It doesn't have to be fact-checking or community notes | Patrick O'Keefe

A great point, especially with the size of these organizations. There's shouldn't be a shortage of resources to do a bit of both:

I have to hand it to Zuckerberg in one way: He was very successful in convincing the average person that it had to be fact-checking OR community notes, and that it could never be fact-checking AND community notes.

I don't really care about Meta, but I hope this isn't a message that community and platform operators take to heart. You *can* do both. They aren't incompatible with one another.

You can have a small, internal group that knocks down highly visible, harmful misinformation. And then leave the lower stakes stuff to users, with oversight from community, moderation, trust, and safety.

Replies function as community notes, anyway. What is a reply that adds context to a conversation if not a note from the community? They're the same thing, some platforms have just decided to make a whole big, polarizing deal out of it.

You can take action against harmful misinformation *and* allow the community to provide deeper context. It's not an either/or scenario.

Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults | Sociological Science

No surprises that many of are and want to be more homebound, but what does it mean for our future? And how can we adapt our strategies as community professionals?

I predict, or I hope that "Community as Medicine" will continue to be more of a thing. It won't come without it's challenges, but it makes sense!

Social prescribing aims to move healthcare away from a "pill for each problem" approach and towards a broader view of health and healthcare. Activities prescribed include cold water swimming, fishing groups, jogging groups, art classes, volunteerism, phone outreach, and farm work.

How ‘Superblocks’ Can Create People-Centered Cities | Reasons to be cheerful

This piece is both uplifting, yet also realistic in how these things are so hard to implement and scale. It is possible though and with that comes hope for safer and community focused cities.