TED Radio Hour - The Public Commons

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

How can we create public places that feel welcoming and safe for everyone? This hour, TED speakers examine our physical and digital spaces—how they run, who they serve, and how to make them better. Guests include community organizer Shari Davis, researcher Eli Pariser, Wikipedia Library founder Jake Orlowitz, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and artist Matthew Mazzotta. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way?

Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. And as we begin to gather again in parks, city centers, or at school, I've been wondering, why do we, want to meet in certain places, but not others. What do the best public places have in common? The first thing that I think of is safety, and the second thing is creativity. And when we are in spaces where we can be together safely, I think that we can do things that we maybe didn't

imagine. This is Sherry Davis. They help communities and local governments decide, together, how to spend public money. I talked to Sherry as they stood outside one of their favorite public places, the library. I am just out front of a really awesome neighborhood branch library and around me are summer camp students or young people, children, basketball courts. It is a beautiful day in California.

Sherry is at a branch of the Berkeley Public Library. But this library offers more than books. People can come here for all kinds of resources. And just outside, there is a tent setup with various seating areas and designated activities. So folks can rent a laptop. Folks can learn about kitchen equipment and rent an item that they want to do a kitchen equipment with. So Sherry, it seems like some libraries have really figured out how to serve their neighbors to become the heart of a community. And maybe we should be looking to them as a kind of model if we want to build better public places, right?

And build more of them. For sure. I think libraries are special in magical places. And in the work that I do, it's actually around seeing people create special magical spaces. to be used in community. And libraries are an example of these beautiful hubs that can take on the shape of whatever community that uses them really needs. And so this example of a library is exactly that.

We're seeing community members really define how they want to use the library, how they want to come together, how they want to learn, how they want to expand what a library could possibly be. And I think that that's a really powerful example of what happens when we do things like community, community-led decision-making that allow community members to radically imagine what's possible in a space and then live into it. Okay, this brings us to what you do. You help communities, as you said, build and support public places that actually meet their wants and needs through something called participatory budgeting.

So for those who aren't familiar, what is participatory budgeting? In short, PB or participatory budgeting is a framework that centers community-led decision-making and allows community members to design, plan, and decide on how portions of a budget should be spent for use in a community. When we talk about deep participation or participatory democracy, we're talking about months-long processes that allow people. to go through what it means to actually imagine a different world, to test it, to build it, and then to iterate on it, to evaluate that process.

When I look around this library, I'm seeing folks that are engaging in activities, they're creating together, and they're also kind of designing the other pieces of this common space. That's what a public common is for. And I think what is possible in that space is everything. From the library to the playground,

the town square to the local park. Citizens gather in public to play, learn, people watch, and feel part of a community. And at their best, these places build trust between neighbors. They create a cohesive society. But all too often, common spaces don't provide equally for everyone. Those who need these places the most are left out.

And online, creating inviting public places sometimes feels impossible. We've seen how the web can bring people together and turn them against each other. And so today on the show, what does it take to make sure a public place actually serves the public, online endoff? Sherry Davis believes every one of us should have a say in how public places are built and run. And participatory budgeting is one way to make sure that happens. But it's still kind of a new concept in the U.S. Sherry first learned about participatory budgeting in 2014, back when they were working for the mayor of Boston. I remember it like it was yesterday.

The mayor called me into his office and said, Sherry, we are going to run the country's first. youth-focused participatory budgeting effort. And I said, yes, sir, march right down to my desk and Googled what participatory budgeting was. And that's how I found out about a global movement that allowed community members to make real decisions about portions of a budget so that they could decide what resources they needed and what was going to offer them the best use of, of funding. Sherry Davis picks up the story in their TED Talk. It was 2014 in Boston, Massachusetts,

and Mayor Menino asked me to launch the country's first youth-focused PV effort with $1 million of city funds. Now, we didn't start with line items and limits or spreadsheets and formulas. We started with people. So we brought in young people from historically and traditionally marginalized neighborhoods, members of the queer community,

and youth that were formerly incarcerated and together. We imagined Boston where young people could feel safe in their communities and where they can transform public spaces into real hubs of life for all people. And that's exactly what they did. In the first year, young people allocated $90,000 to increase technology access for Boston Public High School students by delivering laptops right to Boston. public high schools, they allocated $400,000 to renovating parks to make them more accessible for all people of all bodies. Now, admittedly, this didn't go as smoothly as we had planned.

Right before we broke ground on the park, we actually found out that it was on top of an archaeological site and had to halt construction. I thought I broke PB. But because the city was so committed to the project, that's not what happened. They invited community in to do a dig, protected the site, found artifacts, and then move forward with the renovation. If that isn't a reflection of radical imagination and government, I don't know what is. I had never even seen an archaeological dig before. And now I have young people coming out of their homes and participating in an

archaeological dig that it extended Boston's history. And so I didn't break P.B. But again, I learned that there's actually some importance in deep community building and implementation. We could not have moved forward and protecting that site without community showing up. They showed up because they believed in what happened. I mean, Sherry, this all sounds amazing, but I can only assume that actually making it happen was incredibly hard. And I wonder if one of the hard things was just convincing people to give their time. Like, for me, personally, I didn't even know that participatory budgeting was a thing in my neighborhood. And for other people, I wonder if they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, one more thing to do. I'll get to it eventually.

Like, how do you convince people to take part? Well, I think we have to recognize that so often people want to be involved and they don't have an avenue to do that. So where do we channel that energy for effective and smart decision making? Well, PB is an opportunity for that. And I don't often have to convince people to do it, but I do have to explain that it will be real. And this is not about tokenized leadership. This is not like just for fun. This is powerful and it allows us to do things that maybe we didn't think about before.

And that makes the argument itself. So can you just tell us like how widespread is participatory budgeting? Like do we know like in terms of how many states or local municipalities? Like how did it come about in the first place? Well, first of all, participatory budgeting has existed for over 30 years globally. And while it's maybe 10 years new in the United States, there are entire countries that do participatory budgeting. There are processes as large as what happens in Paris, France, where community members decide on over 100 million euros. Now, when you look at the United States, there are instances like Phoenix, Arizona, where they started with one school in their high school district, where students had an opportunity to decide a portion of district dollars.

Then it went to five schools, the entire district. And now Phoenix Union High School District is embarking on a journey of reimagining safety. They've made the decision and acknowledged that continuing to employ armed officers is not keeping students safe. And so they're saying, let's get clear on what safety means for us, driven by students, parents, and teachers. And I'm like, this is the potential of what PB looks like. We started this conversation talking about how a public place can make a town or a community make people there feel like they belong, like they have a say. And I guess I'm wondering, like now that you've been doing this for a long time, what change do you see in people in terms of how they feel about their government if they have taken part in participatory budgeting? I think the biggest win that I see with participatory budgeting.

is actually the relationships. It's the trust built between community members and each other. It's the trust built between community members and those that are in government. For me, the biggest win is being able to change the way that you see yourself in this larger system and to understand that the system can be changed. And so, yes, I've seen beautification projects happen around cities across the country. I've seen new structures be built. But for me, it's the behavior change.

For me, it's seeing folks say like, being a community member is great, but I can be a part of something bigger. Actually, I want to run that agency. That's the real win for me. That's Sherry Davis, their co-executive director of the participatory budgeting project. And you can hear their full talk at TED.com. On the show today, the public commons. I'm Anoush Zamoroti and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anish Zomerode. And on the show today, ideas about the public comments. We were just talking to Sherry Davis about how to make our public places more safe and welcoming. But how can we bring those values to places online? That is exactly what Eli Parrits. is trying to figure out. All of these public spaces that we take for granted in the physical world, parks and libraries

and all of this social infrastructure doesn't exist in digital space mostly. We just don't have those kinds of institutions. Eli is probably best known for coining the term filter bubble about a decade ago. That's when he noticed that the internet was getting so personalized that we only saw what the algorithms assumed we wanted to see. And, I mean, there are a couple problems here. One is that, you know, sort of creates this feedback loop where you're fed content, you're

likely to be interested on it. You click on it. That kind of confirms the model that the machine learning was building. And you're in this kind of pretty narrow echo chamber. And I think that's part of why we see as a country, our realities are drifting apart. And as someone who cares a lot of it. lot about both, you know, America and democracy. It stresses me out. I think it's stressing a lot of people out that, you know, it's not just that we like disagree about particular policies, it's that

the whole story of what is happening in the world is different depending on who you are when you log on to Facebook or Twitter. The big question, I think, is not just what do we want platforms to stop doing. But now that they've effectively taken control of our online public square, what do we need from them for the greater good? Here's Eli Pariser on the TED stage. To me, this is one of the most important questions of our time. What obligations do tech platforms have to us in exchange for the power that we let them hold over our discourse? So for the last year, I've been working with Dr. Talia Stroud at the University of Texas, Austin, and we've talked to sociologists and political scientists and philosophers to try to answer this question. We asked, what happens when we think about platforms as

spaces? And for us, the platform crisis is a people problem. It's a problem about the emergent, weird things that happen when large groups of people get together. We know from social psychology that spaces shape behavior, when researchers put softer furniture in classrooms. classrooms, participation rates rose by 42%. And spaces even have political consequences. When researchers looked at neighborhoods with parks versus neighborhoods without, after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, they found that neighborhoods with parks had higher levels of social trust

and were better able to advocate for themselves politically. So spaces shape behavior, partly by the way they're designed and partly by the way that they encode certain norms about how to behave. You know, we all know that there are some behaviors that are okay in a bar, that are not okay in a library, and maybe vice versa. And this gives us a little bit of a clue because there are online spaces that encode these same kinds of behavioral norms. So, for example, behavior on LinkedIn seems pretty good. Why? Because it reads as a workplace.

And so people follow workplace norms. If LinkedIn is a workplace, what is Twitter like? Well, it's like a vast, cavernous expanse where there are people talking about sports, arguing about politics, yelling at each other, flirting, trying to get a job, all in the same place with no walls, no divisions, and the owner gets paid more, the louder the noise is. No wonder it's a mess.

And this raises another thing that becomes obvious when we think about platforms in terms of physical space. Good physical spaces are almost always structured. They have rules. So, Eli, you did some research into how these rules in the real world sort of guide people, like say to them, you know, this is how you should behave in these spaces. And you tried to figure out, you know,

whether that was possible to translate those guidelines into how we behave online, right? Yeah, so then our project became like, well, what are the qualities of public spaces that kind of translate into digital platforms? And we ended up with four categories, which was welcome, connect, understand, and act. Welcome, connect, understand, and act, okay? Yeah, and we actually like polled people in 20 countries and we saw that there was this big buy-in to this notion that, like, yeah, we want these. qualities in our spaces and also the platforms that we have now aren't really doing a great job of delivering them. Okay. So four steps to a better internet. I've got to say I'm a little skeptical, but let's do it. Where do we

start? Yeah, well, I think welcome is kind of the foundation layer, which is do I actually feel like I belong here? Do I feel like I'm invited here? Do I feel safe here? And, you know, I think in some ways when people do use spatial metaphors, we overfocus on like a town square and people arguing about politics, but actually like a lot of what we've used public space for in democracies over the centuries isn't to like walk up to strangers and tell them your most incendiary political opinion. But it's like to have an experience of like, oh, I can go outside and I'm safe and other people are kind of like with their families and I can see how they relate to them. And it's okay. And that's actually a really important experience for people to have. And it's a place both that

people told us that they didn't feel like current digital environments did a great job of, especially if they're coming from more typically marginalized communities. But it's also just not a place that most of these companies have put in a whole lot of thought or effort. Okay, so welcome. So we've got welcome. Yeah. And then Connect is kind of the, it's a word that's been used a lot in digital space that was famously, you know, Facebook's mission. But really underneath Connect, what we're talking about is how do you bring groups together in ways that they actually form cross-group bonds and ties? What we know from the social science is that if you bring two groups of people into a space and you have them play tug of war in those initial two groups, they reinforce their bonds with each other. and they reinforce the antagonism to the other group. If you mix up the groups, and this is an experiment that's been done, you know, you start to erode that sense of kind of like,

there's us and there's them. And a lot of that is about the rules of the space. And so I think our point with Connect is that this is something that really has to be designed for. It's not something that just happens when you throw people into a space naturally that they form these kind of cross-cutting connections. I mean, this kind of is reminding me of icebreaker exercises. at conferences that I've been to where they want to make sure you don't just sit with the people you already know or people you came with.

Okay, so we've been welcomed. Connections have been facilitated. And then what? So then, yeah, understanding what we think about in this understanding category is how do we, like, make meaning together? So Audrey Tang, who's this amazing digital pioneer in Taiwan, has a system called Polis. And Polis is kind of like some of the, like, online petitions. systems that folks may have seen here, except that essentially what gets elevated to the Taiwanese

government is what there is kind of the most cross-sectional support for in the society. So if lots of people across different groups all agree with the same statement and sign on to it, then that's a really important signal that like, hey, this is a really urgent issue to address. That turns out to be a really different set of issues from what each little tiny activist subgroup might want to elevate on a petition platform. And so I just offer that as an example of, you know, there are ways you can design online systems that support like, oh, we have some shared goals. Some of them are kind of boring, but really important to a lot of people like filling potholes. and that's important for governments to know, to be responsive. And then there's this last piece of acting together.

Sociologists call it kind of collective efficacy, but this idea that, hey, if there's a problem that comes up, we can see it, we can address it together, and we can do something about it. It turns out that not only is that a really strong predictor of kind of positive community outcomes, but it also turns out, interestingly, that that's a function of how many public spaces you have in your community. And so places that have more public spaces have a higher level of collective advocacy.

For example, I grew up in a small town in Maine, and I went to a lot of those town hall meetings that you hear about. And unlike sort of the storybook version, they weren't always nice. Like people had big conflicts, big feelings. it was hard sometimes. But because of the way that that space was structured, we managed to land it okay. How? Well, here's one important piece.

The downcast glance, the dirty look, the raised eyebrow, the cough. When people went on too long or lost the crowd, they didn't get banned or blocked or hauled out by the police. They just got this soft negative social feedback. And that was actually very powerful. I think, you know, Facebook and Twitter could build this. Digital designers could think about what kind of conversations do we actually want to invite?

And how do we build specifically for those kinds of conversations? But the difference is with a physical public space is that at least those people come with at least one thing in common, which is that, you know, geography, their bodies are in the same place. how that is not the case with being on the World Wide Web. Like who who decides online? Are we talking about creating kind of a governance? Like what does this look like if we put those four pillars to work in a digital public space? Well, I think in order to really kind of embrace these signals,

I mean, I think the existing platforms can make some moves toward being better on these signals. I think ultimately we have to reckon with the fact that we need a really different approach to online space, that the idea that we're going to come up with some magical algorithm that's going to serve all of these different needs for all of these, you know, hundreds of different countries and millions of different communities and billions of people on its face seems absurd and is absurd. and that we need to start thinking again in terms of the kinds of community institutions that have worked in the past, and that's the libraries and the parks, that do have a somewhat, there's not one solution for everyone. They're situated in particular spaces, in particular communities, and they're governed by those communities. And so they are suited to the particular needs of those communities in ways that one top-down,

algorithm is not going to be able to be. And some of those might be still profit-driven, and some of them might put the public interest first the way that parks and libraries do. And I think that's actually a much more durable model is to have lots of well-constructed communities than one giant free-for-all that's global and scale, but that makes it really hard to manage. Okay, so let's just sum it up. You're envisioning, this mix of public and private online places that meet the needs of different groups in new kinds of ways. But to build these places, you are saying that we need like a new design movement.

We need urban designers for the digital world. And I'm guessing like people are thinking, I love this idea. But the internet is way too far gone. We are at the point of no return. They're definitely, Eli, there are going to be people who are thinking that. guess, how do you respond to the most cynical people out there who are listening and maybe don't even believe it is possible to build something egalitarian on the internet? I would say, number one, this is something we've done many times in the past with similar, you know, sort of capital formations arrayed against these causes. You know, one big hero of mine is Jane Jacobs, who kind of changed how we thought about cities and neighborhoods and what good neighborhoods looked like and having like a walkable, livable neighborhood where you see and meet people.

So that's one piece. I think the second piece is this doesn't have to be about competing with a giant like a Facebook or Google on its own turf. There's a really compelling argument to be made that if we're, invest in our digital ecosystem, that's going to be good for everyone who's part of it, including these companies, because they're not going to be the sole line of defense against the negative externalities that they're also in some ways creating. So I think there's a, as we all kind of grow up a bit with the internet, I think there's a more mature way of looking at it that says, like, of course we need all of these different pieces

of infrastructure working together if we want to have a healthy society. It doesn't surprise me that people are. are giving up on the idea of online public spaces. And sometimes I'll be honest, it feels to me like this whole project of like wiring up a civilization and getting billions of people to come into contact with each other is just impossible.

But modern cities tell us that it is possible for millions of people who are really different, sometimes living right on top of each other, not just to not kill each other, but to actually build things together, find new experiences, create beautiful, important infrastructure. And we cannot give up on that promise. If we want to solve the big, important problems in front of us,

we need better online public spaces. We need digital urban planners, new Jane Jacobses, who are going to build the parks and park benches of the online world. And we need digital public-friendly architects who are going to build what Eric Kleinenberg calls palaces for the people, libraries and museums and town halls. And we need a transnational movement where these spaces can learn from each other,

just like cities have about everything from urban farming to public art to rapid transit. Humanity moves forward when we find new ways to rely on and understand and trust each other. and we need this now more than ever. If online digital spaces are going to be our new home, let's make them a comfortable, beautiful place to live. A place we all feel not just included, but actually some ownership of.

A place we get to know each other. A place you'd actually want, not just to visit, but to bring your kids. So let's cast forward. I think we've heard your kids playing occasionally. in the background. What would you like it to be for all of us? I don't know. Are we talking about a decade, multiple decades, where we do think about public comments, public spaces online? Like, what would our experience be like? Yeah. I mean, I think the digital world that I hope, you know, my kids grow up in is one where they feel connected to a bunch of kids.

communities where they're valued, where they're seen, and where they're valued not just for like the content they produce, but who they are in relationship to others. And that they also have some power in that situation, that they have some agency, that when they see, you know, the digital equivalent of a pothole, that they can get a group of people together and change that. And I guess I'd like, you know, sort of my kids and future generations to feel like, you know, that actually can be constructive and productive. And I think when you form better digital public spaces and you start to build trust, you start to see a bit more of the humanity in other people. That's Eli Pariser. He's a researcher and author, and he runs the organization New Public. You can see both of his TED Talks at TED.com.

On the show today, ideas about the public commons. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. And on the show today, the public commons, building more democratic, more civil public places, whether it's a library, a city council, budget meeting or the online platforms we use every day.

That online part, as we've heard, is particularly tricky. But there is one place that's an example of a public commons on the web that mostly works, with robust rules and norms run almost entirely by volunteers. I saw an article about a young man, probably not much younger than I was at the time. His name was Kyle Saeed, and he had been beaten horrifically to death by Egyptian police. This is Jake Orlowitz. And it was the photograph of his face, the time called The Face that sparked a Revolution. And I put the photograph of his battered face in the article.

And I thought, you know, as an information activist, when there's something like this, the world needs to see it. Titled Death of Khalid Mohammed Saeed, the article was, is part of Wikipedia's coverage of the Arab Spring. Jake was one of the pages' editors. So I'm editing this article and then the crowds start gathering in Turr Square, which is Cairo's Central Square. And I am glued. I have Al Jazeera live show. streaming into the bathroom.

Every 20 seconds, 30 seconds, I'm typing in, you know, Egypt, Cairo, Uprising, Revolution. I'm gathering sources. And as I'm gathering these sources, another editor had started the article, which at the time was called 2011 protests in Egypt. Jake worked out of his parents' home in Philadelphia as part of a small team of Wikipedia editors. Based around the globe, they updated the page constantly, keeping tabs on the enormous flow of information and rumors coming out of Cairo. You have reports coming in from various new Janusances, and someone needs to say,

these sources are good sources, these sources are not good sources. Someone needs to say this breaking news event has now been reported in. enough papers that we can consider it dependable. There are sections that need to be added explaining the background causes. You're starting to get international reactions and different heads of state or commenting. And all of this is being organized by four or five really core editors. It's me. It's a European who's really interested in politics. It's an Egyptian who's on the ground in Egypt. We're walking this fine line between rooting for the revolution and making sure the Wikipedia article does its job, which is to report

neutrally. Maybe you've gotten a breaking news alert on your phone. It could be a massive revolution or a celebrity wardrobe malfunction. And you go to Wikipedia and you find that it's already been updated with the latest details. It can feel like magic. But the over six million English language articles from the Egyptian Revolution to Benefer are almost all written, edited, and fact-checked by a small army of volunteer editors who call themselves Wikipedians. Writing a new article, it's a lot of fun because you get to shape what comes next. Wikipedians build in layers. And if you put down that first layer, that scaffolding,

someone else will hopefully come by and put up a wall here or a window there. Ideally, copy editors and researchers come in and make that scaffolding stronger, supported by verified information. Because at the core of Wikipedia's ethos is that you don't write your own knowledge. You're merely summarizing other good sources. Because if I don't do that, someone is likely to come by and say, I recommend this article be deleted. And then you have to have a debate about it for a whole week about whether or not the article can exist at all.

All these layers and debates, the whole open source ethos. Jake says that's why Wikipedia is different than other places online. And I think that's what readers love because everywhere else you look when you're trying to get news, there's so much noise that comes with them. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said that Wikipedia is like a temple for the mind. You go to a Wikipedia page and you're not going to get bombarded by an ad. You're not going to have to see threads of comments. It's just quiet.

And we don't have a lot of quiet digital spaces anymore. You know, when most people first got on the internet, one of the first thoughts that people would have is like, wow, this is amazing. Like everyone in the world can communicate. And so I just thought, okay, why don't we just use the internet for that? We've got this great tool for sharing knowledge. So why don't we just share knowledge?

This is Jimmy Wales. You could call him the original Wikipedia. He co-founded the website back in 2001. And even then, he had big ideas for the platform. The original vision for Wikipedia is to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. But to create a digital public space that could even begin to deliver on those ambitions, it required a set of founding values. Here's Jimmy Wales on the TED stage back in 2005. So the biggest and the most important thing is our neutral point of view policy. This is something that I set down from the very beginning as a core principle of the community that's completely not debatable.

It's a social concept of cooperation. So we don't talk a lot about truth and objectivity. Anytime there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue. We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it. So this neutrality policy is really important for us because it empowers a community to come together and actually get some work done. By having this firm neutrality policy, which is non-negotiable from the beginning, we ensure that people can work together and that the entries don't become simply a war back and forth between the left and the right. If you engage in that type of behavior, you'll be asked to leave the community. Jimmy, you have always emphasized the importance of neutrality.

But, I mean, let's be honest, it's hard to. to build utopia, right? I mean, Wikipedia has gotten a fair amount of criticism over the years about who gets an entry and who doesn't. Representation continues to be a problem. Like, for example, there are very few entries about notable women, especially women of color, female scientists. And so therefore, what is on Wikipedia is not entirely neutral, no? Yeah. I mean, that is definitely exactly the heart of what we have to strive for.

So we have groups like Women in Red who say, okay, we're going to look into, you know, where are their problems in the coverage of Wikipedia, where we have incomplete coverage of people who should be here who are women. And I can say, having chatted with thousands of Wikipedians over the years, like people first and foremost write about what they know about. They write about what they are interested in. And it turns out that a lot of what people are interested in, there is, that gender is reflected in that. So as a community, we need to bring in more people.

We need to bring in a more diverse bunch of contributors. And then we can ask ourselves, okay, how can we make that happen? What are the barriers to making that happen? And this is a huge body of thinking and talking and working that we do within the community. You know, we actually talked to Eli Pariser about that earlier, that perhaps we need to design platforms. to be welcoming, to be more civil. But also, you know, it makes me wonder, does it come back to the business model?

Like how much did making Wikipedia a nonprofit factor into it being a place where people wanted to share knowledge, not a place to chase clicks and to sell more ads? I would say one of the first things I would suggest is to move away from this, in my view, false dichotomy that you can either do something good for the public space or you can make a lot of money. You know, you can do something that's powerfully ethical, very interesting, makes money, but doesn't involve promoting conspiracy theories and nonsense and creating unhealthy spaces.

You know, it's like the local pub or coffee shop. And they're there to make money and they have a business. But it's also, in many cases, it's the heart of a community. and that's great. But that doesn't always happen with these profit-driven platforms. They are not just virtual coffee shops where people gather together benignly. A lot of the time, people end up in much darker, more profane places, and getting bad information. I mean, it's really interesting because if you think about two places you can go where it's quite easy to get sucked in and spend hours and hours.

So one is Wikipedia. and then YouTube. But the difference is at YouTube, the videos that are shown to you next tend to be videos that keep you on the site longer. Oftentimes, something outrageous, something wrong, is more likely to keep you on the site than otherwise, and so they promote that. At Wikipedia, there is no algorithm. Humans wrote it all.

They link to things they think are interesting. They link to background information. And that just gives you a completely different and opposite result. It doesn't lead you down this unhealthy path to dark places. And I think that's interesting. And, you know, it's hard. It's hard for an advertising-based system to do that. And I think that difference is really what explains a lot that's going on on the Internet.

As we wrap up, I just want to read you a quote that I understand a lot of Wikipedia's like or a phrase. Thank God our little enterprise works in practice because it could never work. in theory. Do you abide by that? I don't. No? I think it really is a system that's designed. I always compare it to a good municipal government. What do you want from a good municipal government? Well, you want to be able to criticize and complain about the administrators or, you know, the police or whatever, without getting thrown in jail, so you don't want to be treated in arbitrary fashion. But at the same time, you also want your children to be able to play in the park and not get accosted and attacked and so on. And so that balance between having rules, creating a safe environment, while at the same time saying,

let's not be over-controlling and so on, it's an art and it's a bit messy, but it does work. Jimmy Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia and a Wikimedia board member. You can see his talk at TED.com. Also, many thanks to Jake Orlowitz, founder of the Wikipedia Library, a project that helps Wikipedians find reliable sources. On the show today, the public commons. And we've been talking about what it takes to build a public space that makes people want to gather there. But what about places that have been forgotten or abandoned? Artist Matthew Mazada helps towns and neighborhoods redesign these old spaces, giving them new purpose.

Here's Matthew's TED Talk. I work with communities around the world, and as we know, every community has problems. Some of these problems are solved through the ballot box or city hall meetings or community efforts, like bike lanes and potholes and school budgets. But some problems are beyond the reach of these structures, like food deserts, community well-being, and the loss of cultural identity. These problems cannot be solved with the existing tool sets. I believe that public space is the most potent place to discuss these issues,

because it contains the richest diversity of perspectives, and that's what makes it so powerful. The existing parks, town squares, and sidewalks are not enough, though, which is why I'm interested in creating a new type of public space, one that's built by the community and designed specifically for their needs. I start by listening and by setting up actual outdoor living rooms, complete with couches, tables, chairs, rugs, and lamps, as a way of holding meetings to learn about the issues directly from the community.

I use this technique to capture the voices and ideas of people that might not have time or feel comfortable in more formal meetings. In York, Alabama, the residents bear witness to the abandoned houses that cover the town, which are a constant reminder of the white flight that took place after segregation ended, when white homeowners left the area and let their houses fall into disrepair. Teaming up with the people of York, we transformed an iconic pink-sided, flighted property in the middle of town into a new house called Open House. However, this house has a secret. It physically transforms into a 100-seat open-air theater for plays, movies, music, or whatever the community would like to experience.

And when it folds back up into the shape of a house, the image of the reclaimed pink siding reminds people of the past. After its opening, the mayor saw the potential in Open House and held the next town. hall meeting there. The excitement of this unique gathering space brought new energy and gave a fresh viewpoint to collectively discuss the future of the town. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, to highlight the issues of energy, waste, and climate change, we replaced a garbage can in a park with an anaerobic digester to transform dog waste into usable methane gas. Burning this methane lights the park and reduces greenhouse gases. By slightly changing an everyday experience in public space, the Park Spark Project provokes neighbors to have conversations

about the natural and built systems around them and their connection to the environment. In Lions, Nebraska, residents spoke about the loss of social life as downtown storefronts began to shutter their doors, a result of the slow violence of disinvestment, which has left many rural downtowns empty. To address this loss of human connection, we used an abandoned storefront to turn Main Street into a movie theater.

The storefront wall is modified with hydraulics, so that the awning and false front fold down over the sidewalk with the push of a button, providing seating for a hundred. And so that summer, we turned downtown into a movie set and the townspeople into actors to create the movie decades, a history of Lions downtown from its founding to the present moment. On opening night, the Main Street, which is usually empty after dark, filled with people to watch the story of their town, leaving locals to question, how will we write the next chapter of Lions? Well, the next chapter started with a series of movie screenings, public events, and international

musicians, as well as a low-budget film community that has blossomed in lions, bringing in people from all over the world, and a permanent art gallery that has opened next door. My work harnesses the power of the built environment to focus on issues that communities and local governments have failed to address themselves. By creating projects so custom-fit, that the community naturally makes it their own. When people from all the world, walks of life, have a shared experience in these spaces, it can lead to a paradigm shift in how we see our home, our community, and the world. And although every place I've worked is unique, it all boils down to one thing. If people can sit together, they can dream together. That was artist Matthew Mazata. You can

watch his talk and see these places at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show today on the Public Commons. To learn more about the people who were on this episode, go to ted.npr.org. And to see hundreds more TED Talks, check out TED.com or the TED app. If you've been enjoying the show, we'd be so grateful if you left us a review on Apple Podcasts. It's the best way for us to reach new listeners, which we are really trying to do. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, Rachel Faulkner, James Delahousie, and Harrison VJ Choi. It was edited by Sana's Mechkampour. Our production staff at NPR also includes Jeff Rogers, Diba Motisham, Matthew Cloutier, Fiona Giron, and Sylvie Douglas. Our audio engineer is Brian Jarbo. Special thanks this week to Jess Alvarenga

for her help too. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feeleyn, Michelle Quint, and Micah Eames. I'm Manus Zamoroti, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.