What Happens When You Have a Choice? : A Breakdown of The People’s Assembly and Blacksky’s Vision for Democratic Tooling

Democracy can feel scary due to how we have been introduced to it and how we’ve engaged in it when it comes to our political landscape. Because of this, many of us don’t believe that we have a choice or even a valuable way to provide input that will actually be considered worthy of listening to or would enact real change. Unfortunately, due to how Big Tech has been run and its focus on capitalism over community, it can feel very difficult to enact real change in digital spaces that also include those who are running the tech companies.

Blacksky’s foundation is built on self-governance and self-determination. We took learnings from Black and Brown revolutionaries with our belief that everyone has the ability and the self-efficacy to do the things that are best for their community, but we also realize that that ability is something that is not seen as a right that everyone should be able to experience. Due to this, we sought out to create a solution, at least in the digital space, specifically for Blacksky. 

The People’s Assembly is our answer to the question of “how do we empower our users and larger community members to have buy-in and engage with each other in a way that creates a container for conversations that directly impact their social media experiences”. As a community-led and built platform, self-governance is crucial to the foundation of who we are, how we ideate with the community, and where we hope to take Blacksky in the future.

For those of you who may not be familiar with The People’s Assembly, we have used The People’s Assembly at Blacksky to talk to you all about labels; we’ve used it to build out our community guidelines with your input, and we’ve even used it for very tough conversations around Artificial Intelligence on our app. These use cases showed the team and our community that we are operating from a place of community alignment and consensus. The People’s Assembly is not a tool just for the Blacksky Team to get feedback and feature requests; it is also a tool for community members to engage in conversations around what matters to them.

The way it works currently is that you can create a People’s Assembly with your account, and you can add seed statements. Those statements are statements that you want people to vote on, and they can also contribute to the conversation by adding their own statements – if you want them to. This promotes community involvement, and it makes decision-making easier in a digital space. What’s really exciting about The People’s Assembly and where we hope it goes is that it will not only support Blacksky in understanding what the communities’ needs are, but it will also continue to empower community members.  This empowerment looks like the community being able to use a participatory decision-making tool—as a way to vote, give feedback, and reach consensus on topics that are Important to them. But because we know that our virtual or third space is not always focused on very polarizing or serious conversations, we are working towards building out The People’s Assembly to also double as a polling feature within the app. By providing the polling feature in the app, it will allow folks to be able to ask questions to get feedback and to also just build community around any and every topic that they find interesting.

The People’s Assembly, as it stands, acts like a vehicle for community members’ ideas for Blacksky, directly influencing how the Blacksky Team continues to build out the app and upcoming products. The future of The People’s Assembly allows this vehicle to become multiple modes of transportation for people to drive, fly, and navigate big decisions, tough conversations, and the silly shit that we all love to talk about online. 

The Blacksky Team designed The People’s Assembly to foster a two-way dialogue with our community and provide a dedicated space for members to connect directly with one another. As we expand together, we encourage greater participation in The People’s Assembly. Looking ahead, we hope the upcoming polling feature integrated into the app will empower everyone to use the platform in ways far beyond what we originally envisioned.

While taking the reins to guide a platform you use might initially feel unfamiliar, you have always deserved these tools and this encouragement toward self-governance. Our goal remains unchanged: to be a platform built and led by the community. The People’s Assembly is central to making that vision a reality right now.

Having a voice and an active choice in your digital experience is vital. For Blacksky, providing the tools to make that possible is an absolute non-negotiable.