Social Apps Lab

I direct the Social Apps Lab at UC Berkeley, which I co-founded in 2010 with Professor Greg Niemeyer.  The Lab undertakes interdisciplinary collaboration to develop social and software platforms that encourage active citizenship and direct democracy.  It engages social science, computer science, public health, engineering, art, and aspects of gameplay in research and design.  These collaborations aim to reformulate the terms and scales of democratic assembly, citizen participation, civic action, and urban knowledge.  The Lab’s platforms include denguechat.org, vallejopb.appcivist.org, and unifesp.appcivist.org.

We develop these platforms as both socialware and software.  We use the term “platform” to emphasize the construction of both a structure and an opportunity, as in a platform for public discussion. This platform incorporates multiple resources for specific purposes, including digital technologies and certain kinds of speech.  The term “socialware” emphasizes that the platforms are based on and aim to foster an association of users of a particular type for a particular purpose – in the following examples, for assemblies engaged in direct action at large scale.