It's not enough to have better ideals.

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Last week I was privileged to contribute to the PublicSpaces conference in Amsterdam, which discussed the impact of technology on democracy. I was there all-too-briefly, but I was reminded how wonderful Amsterdam really is as a city: both culturally rich and a reminder of how a city’s infrastructure can work if it receives the investment and thoughtful attention it deserves.<br>PublicSpaces itself is a marvel: a conference that dives into the underlying power dynamics behind tech and aims to create space to discuss alternatives. Robin Berjon’s ‌We Build On Hope and Erin Kissane’s ‌Holdfast were both standout talks that were both excellent in themselves and representative of the tone of the entire event.<br>On Friday, I participated in a panel that asked whether journalism can use the Open Social Web to strengthen democracy. I shared the stage with Catherine Tait, expert in residence at New_ Public and former president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; Robert Amlung, the Senior Innovation Advisor at ZDF; and Björn Staschen, the founder of the European non-profit Save Social.<br>The conversation was spirited, taking in the rise of authoritarianism, what we are hopeful about, and generational shifts in how people seek out news and information. We did plan for one more question that we sadly didn’t get to. It’s a point that I think is important to make, so I thought I’d go into it here.<br>As an early-stage investor in media startups at Matter, and Founder of Elgg and now in your role as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica you probably have had to balance ideals vs business. What would you advise us when we talk about ‘Technology for democracy’: what kind of strategies should we use / explore to combine our lofty ideals while still being able to earn a living?<br>If we have lofty ideals — and we should! — we probably want these three things:<br>To build tools and networks with pro-social values<br>To have lots of people use them<br>To be able to keep doing it<br>The message I’d send to anyone who wants to build a pro-social tool or network is: we are not absolved from doing the complex product work of building something people need in a way that has the potential to be self-sustaining. But the good news is, doing that work is also how we reach more people and get to keep building.<br>In product, we sometimes talk about vitamins vs painkillers. Vitamins are always optional, but if you’re actively experiencing pain, you’re highly motivated to find something that will solve it. Painkillers are the products that truly drive value.<br>Although pro-social values are important, it’s never enough to build something that is ideologically better. We need to build tools that are practically better for people today, based on people’s actual needs. “Twitter but decentralized” is not a particularly useful idea. You need to figure out who you’re going to help first, get to know them, understand what is painful for them, and solve that pain.<br>Extractive networks have literally brought down democracies and enabled genocides, so we know we need software that encodes better ideals — but to most individuals, those ideals alone are vitamins at best. If your project has better ideals but the experience of using your software compared to the incumbents is the same or worse, you’ll only attract the most dedicated idealists. To attract more, you need to both provide better ideals and solve a real need better than the alternatives.<br>And you have to offer it sustainably. Sustainability isn’t a thing you think about after you’ve designed a product. Your product’s business model is an integral part of it: whether your solution is valuable or not to a user depends in large part on the business model you use to provide it. Its cost, and the friction of using it, are a key part of the equation a user will use to determine whether your solution is worth using. If you’re doing something good, you need to be able to keep doing it, so figuring this out very early is really important. You can’t hand-wave it away.<br>A lot of pro-social developers yearn to be paid for building something with great values and distributing it for free in the commons. I like that idea too! It sounds like a great gig. But in reality, that’s almost never how the value exchange actually works. Not to belabor the point, but people will pay you because doing so is an easier way to solve their pain than anything they might be able to do themselves.<br>What about government grants? you might ask — but this harsh reality includes grant funding. For example, the EU is highly motivated to build an alternative tech stack this year because it’s begun to see US tech as a security risk. But it’s only going to pay you if it sees your work as a plausible way to accelerate its path towards getting there in measurable ways. National security risk is certainly pain, but you have to be able to prove you can reduce it.<br>So you always need to understand...