Apps for Civic Life
Since 2010, the Social Apps Lab has produced over 20 projects where students, faculty, and community participants develop software platforms that encourage democratic habits and foster civic engagement.
The Social Apps Lab develops and releases software platforms as open source code to foster active citizenship, especially in the context of metropolitan civic life both in the United States and internationally. At the Lab, we identify problems in contemporary society that social and software platforms can productively address by mobilizing assemblies of people to take specific kinds of civic action. We do not develop generic social media. Rather, we are interested in developing software technologies that promote the agency of defined user communities to imagine new social worlds and transform their speech into action.
The Social Apps Lab is organized around the activities of specific platform projects (points of engagement), development teams, and courses; and it is mobilized by its faculty, students, and visiting researchers. It relies on methodologies from data science, social science (especially anthropology), and art practice. It has many sponsors and emphasizes community partnerships and collaborations.
