Warning: This article is dangerously close to being advertising. It's a brief opportunity to provide an update and insight into the Civic Works project. I've devoted myself to the project in hopes of leaving the world a better place than when I started.
Civic Works is a 501c3 Non-Profit building tools to strengthen democracy through effective civic action. We aspire toward building a comprehensive, trusted Civic Social Network - (https://civ.works). Our pilot is at https://social.civ.works -with the caveat that our developers are actively fixing bugs and provisioning important new functionality, so it is very unstable at present. If you register and try the service, please wear goggles and protective gear.
In a nutshell we are fighting almost impossible odds. Ultimately we'd like to cast Facebook and Twitter/X into the technology dustbin where MySpace and others are patiently waiting.
Here are nine key points as to the "Why's and What's" of civ.works. And as always -we are deeply grateful for all who grasp the importance of our work, and the potential power that is embodied in our mission. Every donation, every person that shares and helps to make our work more visible, every person who "likes" our effort brings us closer to having a meaningful and positive impact upon democracy, justice, and equality in the United States and throughout the world.
Note: We use Stripe as our secure donation processing partner.
1. Any meaningful democracy requires a foundation of an educated, informed, and engaged society. And we are using social networking technology to evolve and strengthen the foundation.
2. Any social network provides easy web and mobile access to connect and share life events, photographs, and news with family, friends, and groups.
3. Major platforms such as Zuckerberg's Facebook and Musk's former Twitter use your data to sell to advertisers, marketers, and political operatives to pay for executives, staff, programmers, sales personnel, and data center/cloud computing capacity while they generate massive profits. In their world, YOU are the product.
In the 2016 U.S. Elections, and in the Brexit versus Remain campaign in the U.K., Facebook betrayed user trust by sharing massive amounts of user data with Cambridge Analytica (now Emerdata). The user data was analyzed to produce psychological profiles which was then intentionally used to manipulate voters and subvert elections.
We are approaching social networking differently. The civ.works social network (social.civ.works) will use small monthly subscriptions to grow, pay for our secure cloud operations, and to pay staff salaries. We are committed to being advertising free, and we will not share or sell your data to anyone.
The product is civ.works, not you.
4. A federated and adaptive global model -each country/region will be managed independently so they can use civ.works technology while ensuring the use of the platform is optimized for languages, localizations, education, news, political system, and civic actions.
5. We will be a place for casual sharing of life events with friends, families, and groups, where subscribers can customize their civ.works experience.
We will also build places for serious conversations where verified subscribers (think "Blue checkmark", however implemented properly) can engage in respectful conversations and debate, seeking "across the aisle" agreements, and then working together to codify those agreements in law and policy.
6. We will build an ecosphere of trusted partners, such as PlaceSpeak.com, to assist with subscriber validation, and others to provide trust ratings of news and information for facts and trustworthiness, thereby limiting propaganda, lies, and disinformation. We will work to be hate-speech, propaganda, and disinformation-free.
7. We will provide revenue sharing agreements to help support local, independent, and investigative journalism and academic research. Trusted, fact/evidence-based information is a vital pillar of democracy. We want to support it through our efforts, and honor the risk and dangers journalists continue to face globally, particularly when declared “enemies of the people” in any language.
8. We will present civic action opportunities, including economic actions and educational actions, for all subscribers, based upon your location and issues you care about.
9. We will adopt emerging social networking interfaces (API's) that will allow our subscribers to easily interact and share with other platforms instead of locking subscribers into civ.works as a “walled garden”.
Thank you to all who advocate for us, donate to our effort via Stripe, share our story, and write about us.
Thank you. This will create a much needed democratic paradigm to replace the present Wild West global social media - via Jujitsu.