One year ago, I published The First Post — my attempt to explain to myself and anyone listening at the time (just my wife, it turned out!) what I was going to do next with my career.

I said I was driven by 3 high-level ideas:

1. Massive impact — Odds are this venture will fail. So if it’s risk you seek, might as well go for broke! I’m committed to contributing to society whatever skills and traits at my disposal to leave as large and positive an impact on the world as possible.

At Civil, we still have a long way to go before we make a material impact on the world, let alone a massive one. But 8 world-class teammates, 5 remarkable strategic partnerships, nearly 100 newsmakers in our First Fleet pipeline, more than 1,500 people in our community, and $5 million in backing from the world’s leading blockchain company all demonstrate serious momentum.

We’re all really building something now — that much is palpably obvious and highly motivating.

2. Network effects — The majority of massive new ventures today are platforms, a trend that’s still greatly increasing. Network effects — systems where each additional user increases the value of the system for every other user — are the first competitive advantage that’s truly native to the Internet era. Because software is fungible and organizing people is cheaper and faster than ever, a great idea needs to grow as rapidly and sharply as possible. This meant for me personally that I was looking for a business concept to found that 1) had the technical features of a fast-growth platform with 2) the capacity to have a large and positive impact on society while 3) being centered around something where I had a unique vision and perspective.

To me, the most striking thing when re-reading this post is how I never mention blockchain or cryptocurrency. I knew we would leverage these technologies, but I was so early in my exploration of the space that I was hesitant to commit. But is there any more network-effect-driven concept than blockchain? Maybe only the Internet itself!

After immersing myself in blockchain for the past year, my biggest takeaway is that people are at least as important as the technology. We need to build the thing to do the process, but what we really need is A LOT of DIFFERENT people to use that thing A LOT — often in unexpected and ingenious ways.

Ethereum and ConsenSys have both demonstrated that deliberately building community around your work compounds the quality and rate of improvement in that work. Of course, lots of projects have shown this before, but what’s unique is how vital/fundamental I believe it is to virtually every blockchain project.

The early Internet days inspired many with dreams that Linux and Wikipedia were the first of many massively collaborative, anti-corporate ventures to come. Since then, we’ve seen consolidation and monopoly forces prevail more often than not.

I believe blockchain will revitalize the early-Internet pipe dreams in practical ways for two primary reasons:

1. Psychographics — Early adopters in blockchain/crypto seem to share a similar psychographic profile: People inspired by decentralization, motivated by fairness and justice but also meritocracies and mobility. To be sure, I’m convinced the blockchain space is significantly over-indexed with “mission-driven” people. This creates a natural bond among disparate parties and projects. It really feels like we’re all building this newer, better future together.
2. Economics — Practically speaking, every success story (or failure/scam_ has a direct impact on the overall success of the space right now. Not just in a Fat Protocol sense, but as market signals that the technology and its associated new business models are for real. This will inherently attract more entrepreneurs, more creators and more customers. Rising tides lift all boats.

We’re lucky and grateful for our passionate and motivated community, which reminds us daily the importance of our collective work. Beyond the talented journalists and community leaders drawn to our work, we’re excited to be forging early partnerships with leading tech companies throughout the space as well.

Yet as vital as blockchain is to our goals, we clearly see it as a means to an end. Our mission is journalism, and in many corners of the Earth, the state of journalism is as dire as people’s freedom and safety.

For this reason, we are and must always be motivated not by short-term wins or even economic upside, but by long-lasting impact on people’s lives throughout the world. That’s what makes us and our community tick, and it’s why I think we’ll be so successful for so long.

Civil is simply people working together to make a better society with accurate information, wise analysis and civil discourse. We’re confident there’s a very big market for that.

3. Journalism and democracy — I’ve always had a special, awestruck respect for journalism. It doesn’t have the credentialing systems like law and medicine, but like those professions, there’s an (often unwritten) code of conduct and oath of service that great journalists take seriously. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, granting journalists the right to watchdog the powerful and create safe spaces for people to voice their concerns, priorities, ideas and opinions. I believe a healthy news media strongly correlates with a healthy democracy, and the opposite is also true.

I could write at length about the state of journalism in America over the past year, but there’s enough being done there already.

What’s never been more clear to us and what I think is a growing number of people is this: Journalism is directly correlated to a people’s morale and unity. What’s undeniable is how divided we are, and the wedge is news and information — what to believe, what to discredit, who is right and who is wrong often being conflated with who is good and who evil. It’s all driven by the news people read and who reported it.

People are understandably angry with everything. The government, Big Tech, fake news, but also broader, systemic societal issues like men abusing their relationships with female colleagues in disgusting ways, or mass violence depressingly becoming commonplace.

When we’re angry, it’s easy to recede and turn in to what’s comfortable while also lashing out at what’s different and strange. Unfortunately, our society is experiencing a trend in this direction that seems very likely to get worse before it gets better.

There are many constructive efforts underway to address these issues in America and abroad. We believe journalism is a critical part, but it’s just one part.

That said, it’s moments of reflection like this that I remind myself of simple truths: People are good. Community matters. The future is ours. We can all make a difference.

What we can’t do is hide, hate or give up. We must acknowledge our differences, open ourselves up to criticism and new ideas, and yearn like crazy to understand each other — now more than ever.

If Civil stands for anything it’s this: A world in which we work together, despite our differences, to make a collective and inclusive vision of the future that is more just and rewarding than a world in which we don’t.

One year later, I’m confident that — together — we are all well on our way to a brighter future through trustworthy collaboration, mission-driven journalism and basic human decency.

When I review what we accomplished together one year in, I’m heartened to imagine what we might do one year from now and beyond.

Team & Acknowledgements

Our team

Matthew Iles is CEO of Civil.

Lillian Ruiz leads Growth & Operations at Civil.

Christine Mohan leads Community & Partnerships at Civil.

Dan Kinsley leads Data Services at Civil.

Julia Himmel is Product Designer at Civil.

Matt Coolidge leads Content & Communications at Civil.

Nguyet Vuong leads Product Design at Civil.

Patrick Heinz leads Blockchain Architecture at Civil.

Our partners

• ConsenSys: Civil recently announced $5M in funding from ConsenSys, the world’s leading blockchain company and venture production studio. CEO Joe Lubin and CMO Amanda Gutterman are Civil board members.
• CoinFund: Jake Brukhman and Aleksandr Bulkin are co-founders of CoinFund, a cryptoeconomics advisory team and open research community for blockchain, and also lead authors of Civil’s cryptoeconomic whitepaper.
• Old Town Media: Tom McGeveran, Josh Benson and Katherine Lehr are longtime journalists who teamed up to establish and oversee POLITICO’s state operations, before leaving earlier this year to form Old Town Media, a media strategy firm working to find new models for journalists and publishers. McGeveran is a Civil board member.
• Chris Padovano is a New York-based attorney and the founder of Decentralized Legal. His practice specializes in the legal and regulatory implications of blockchain tokens and distributed software.
• Ed Klaris is former general counsel to New Yorker and Conde Nast, advising Civil on matters of libel, privacy, fair use, technology and the First Amendment.

CVL token sale starts September 18. Support independent journalism when you purchase CVL tokens in the Civil economy. Register today!

The news this week that Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of DNAinfo in New York and Chicago and recent buyer of the Gothamist network, was shuttering the whole operation came as a shock everywhere DNAinfo and “-ist” had a footprint.

It’s been popular to observe on social media that the billionaire-funder model for supporting journalism is inherently unstable, and increasingly untenable as the fundamentals of the journalism business seem to be in free fall. It’s true.

An additional shock was to learn that the entire DNAinfo/Gothamist archives appear to have been flushed from the internet. More recently Ricketts’ camp has indicated that the archives will be back up and hosted permanently, but the details of the arrangement are not yet worked out — and we have heard this before, after the shuttering of other publications both print and digital, only to have them disappear when even paying for and maintaining those servers seemed too much.

It used to be that libraries could be relied upon to preserve a permanent record of journalists’ work in print; there is no real equivalent in the digital media space. And if billionaires can’t be relied upon to fund ongoing news operations, can they really be relied upon as the sole responsible party for ensuring that the work of journalists survives into the historical record? Ultimately this “first draft of history” needs to survive the daily news cycle to fulfill its mission. We who work in digital journalism have been too willing to leave it up to central authorities and moneyed individuals’ goodwill to ensure that remains true in perpetuity.

I was talking about both of these issues as recently as Wednesday with the team that is working on Civil, a new journalism platform that seeks to address both of these fundamental issues at their source. (I began talking to Civil as an unpaid, personally fascinated adviser on the project early this year; I’m now a full partner in the project through my company, Old Town Media.)

Civil’s aims are no less than to rewire the fundamental principles of funding and preserving journalism, placing that responsibility in the hands of groups of journalists and readers themselves across a decentralized network built on the blockchain.

There are two central elements to this project:.

The first is to create self-sustaining journalism by using a new cryptocurrency that acts differently from conventional currency, creating a specialized economic environment that encourages great journalism, and non-independently wealthy journalists, to flourish. It also creates the mechanisms for funding these newsrooms with a broad range of supporters, and the mechanisms for governing the whole ecosystem with a view to long-term sustainability.

The second is to create a permanent, indelible, version-controlled record of the journalism Civil enables using a decentralized network of servers forming what is called a blockchain — supported by many, controlled by none.

Civil sees these elements as inseparable and mutually reinforcing, with crucially important ramifications for the way the journalism of the future will work.

Admittedly, the way all this will work is pretty complex — but we’re here to help you understand how this all works.

We encourage you to reach out to the team directly by joining our community on Slack, following and engaging us on Twitter or sending us an email.

And while we are still a few months from launching this new platform, there are ways you can get in on the project right now.

Civil has committed significant funding to a project we are calling the “First Fleet,” in which we’ll fund newsrooms that are ready to get up and running now, with a combination of conventional money and pre-sale of Civil tokens. We want this network to have lots of great journalists on board at launch, and we’re taking applications from journalists who’d like to get seed money to form newsrooms, find funding for specific projects, or just put their shingle up to report on specific beats.

Our first “First Fleet” newsroom is the digital publication Popula, spearheaded by Maria Bustillos. You can read a bit about Popula in our recent press release about First Fleet, and more about why Maria and her team are launching on Civil here.

But we’ve got room for lots more, so we want to hear from you about your ideas.

You can apply to the First Fleet here (it’s a very simple form) and we’ll get back to you quickly. You can also write to us at firstfleet@joincivil.com with specific questions, and we’ll answer everyone directly.

Come join us, and help us build the next generation of digital journalism.

The DNAinfo/Gothamist shutdown and the future of journalism was originally published in Civil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Maria Bustillos, Editor-in-Chief of Popula, the first Newsroom on Civil

Blockchain technology entered the world in January 2009. What you may already know is that Satoshi Nakamoto combined existing techniques like digital signatures, peer-to-peer networks, and public-key cryptography to create Bitcoin, the world’s first real cryptocurrency. But what the Bitcoin system is, more importantly than the money part of it, is a recordkeeping system.

Whenever people need to know whether or not something happened — someone depositing money in a bank account, changing the title of a house, or voting in an election — we set up institutions to guarantee that it happened. For important transactions, we have multiple layers of authority to make those guarantees. We have the Fed, credit agencies, the passport office, the DMV, notaries public, government licensing and regulatory bodies — many, many institutions whose purpose it is to know what happened.

Blockchain technology can be used to make those guarantees automatically, by distributing a shared, verified public record to as many people as are interested in seeing that record. Anyone interested can join a computer network and download the record. Each new set of entries to the record — each block — is added by all the computers in the network, and then verified and timestamped. Because new information is added on block by block, no one can go back and alter what has already happened. The record is incorruptible.

It’s obvious why this sort of recordkeeping is valuable for journalism: it allows us to maintain archives that can’t be censored or altered after the fact. We can amend previous records only through addenda, in other words: not through erasure. This is the first benefit of blockchain technology to the free press, and this benefit alone makes it worth moving our news media into blockchain-based publishing systems. But there is more.

Our media have grown dangerously vulnerable to tampering in the Internet age. The vuvuzela of propaganda drowns out the work of real journalists. Platform companies like Facebook and Google take advertising money for showing you news stories they did not pay to produce. They’re not journalists, and they have failed, catastrophically, and are still failing, to understand the importance of impartial media in a free society. Mark Zuckerberg claimed that it was “crazy” to suggest that his company had affected the results of the 2016 U.S. election. At the moment he spoke these words, his company’s political ad sales pages were bragging about Facebook ads’ power to affect elections, as they still do (“influence online and offline outcomes through DR and video”).

There is no exaggerating the irresponsibility of Silicon Valley’s tech titans, who somehow wound up being in charge of your information, who are accountable to nobody, and who have no earthly idea what they are doing.

By creating an ad-free publishing economy on Civil’s Ethereum-based platform, instead of on the traditional web, Popula is putting up a wall against tampering. Popula is accountable to its readers alone, and is impervious to the interests and agendas of advertisers or other intermediaries or “influencers” of any kind. Readers, and readers alone, provide our community, our platform, and the funding for our journalism.

In addition to this, Popula’s readers and their interactions with the publication will be part of a larger, novel experiment in cryptoeconomics. This sounds scary, but I promise you, it’s not. It’s useful and fun.

Consider Internet comments. At the moment, you can’t be sure whether a Facebook comment on your feed came from a bot paid for by some Dr. Evil freak billionaire, a Russian troll farm, or your cousin’s friend from work. Some hidden percentage of what you are seeing online is not commentary from real people, but bought-and-paid-for, computer-generated propaganda.

Now imagine for a moment that commenting on a news story wasn’t free to every Tom, Dick and Yuri, but was instead a privilege that comes only with a paid subscription to a responsible publication. It would be worth paying something to know that the comments are real, right?

Commenters can earn tips on the Civil platform, so there will be a point to being smart and careful about what you write. Imagine adding information to a news story you’re interested in, and not just getting thumbs up or ‘likes’ for it, but getting paid for it. Same with comments: make a comment that others find interesting, and your subscriber account can be credited with microtips that will accrue for as long as they continue to read and value your contribution. And, when someone comments, the microtipping system forwards a portion of every tip to all subscribers, meaning that all subscribers benefit from an active network.

By the time the stories of November 2016 are told in full, from Cambridge Analytica to the truth about the mass dissemination of propaganda on social media, I believe it will be even more obvious that the free press in America is in a state of crisis.

If we want information that is true to the best of our ability to report it, unaffected by commercial or political interests, we need to remove the influence of advertisers or sponsors on editorial concerns. Money never comes without strings. That’s why we can’t allow anyone but our readers to pay the bills.

On Civil’s Ethereum-based platform, we can make very nearly certain that only individual readers are paying for our work: Blockchain technology is as valuable for the hidden tampering it forbids, as for the verifiable gathering and dissemination of information it permits. That’s why my colleagues and I gave up everything else we were working on for the chance to start Popula, an alternative internationalist news and culture magazine: it’s the world’s first publication to live on the blockchain, and to use this new technology to benefit everyone who believes in society’s unfettered right to inform itself.

Journalist, editor and entrepreneur Maria Bustillos, whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Awl, Harper’s, the Guardian and The New York Times, is the editor-in-chief of Popula, an alternative news and culture publication that will be launching on the Civil platform. In addition to Maria, Popula is written and edited by Trevor Alixopulos, Aaron Bady, Willy Blackmore, Ryan Bradley, Vanessa Davis, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Sarah Miller.

Why does journalism need blockchain technology? was originally published in Civil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

BROOKLYN, NY — October 25, 2017 — Civil, a decentralized newsmaking platform, today announced $5 million in funding from ConsenSys, the leading global blockchain venture studio. ConsenSys is committing $2.5 million in capital and $2.5 million in services in support of Civil’s newsmaking platform that enables a direct relationship between journalists and readers.

In Civil’s self-governing marketplace, readers may directly sponsor newsrooms, and journalists collaboratively run their own publications. Readers may subscribe to Civil-hosted publications, and will use Civil’s cryptocurrency or “CVL” tokens to sponsor individual journalists, investigations and stories, creating a new collaborative model for the gathering and dissemination of news. Civil’s independent journalism advisory board will govern the platform overall, in order to ensure that fair, objective, professional standards are met throughout the network.

The blockchain-based platform and its smart contracts will protect journalists against censorship and intellectual property disputes while fostering transparency across the network. Meanwhile, properly incentivized collaborative editing and fact-checking will substantially limit misinformation.

“By providing the economic incentives and governance structures for newsmakers — writers, editors, photographers, fact-checkers — to self-organize, Civil offers a new business model for journalism,” said Civil founder Matthew Iles. “Our goal is to create a self-sustaining global marketplace for journalism that is free from advertising, fake news, and outside influence.”

Initially the platform will focus on local, policy and investigative reporting. Civil has dedicated one million dollars to fund the First Fleet, a diverse group of top-tier journalists creating their own newsrooms and publications. Interested journalists can apply on Civil’s website.

Civil’s newsmaking platform and its CVL token sale will launch simultaneously in early 2018 with live newsrooms including Popula, an alternative news and culture publication. Journalist, editor and entrepreneur Maria Bustillos, whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Awl, Harper’s, the Guardian and The New York Times, will manage the Popula newsroom, joined by Sasha Frere-Jones, Ryan Bradley, Aaron Bady and other well-known journalists.

“The events of November 2016 demonstrated that our media is in a state of crisis, owing to the increased power of moneyed interests in our politics and publishing, as well as the colossal media power of platform companies such as Google and Facebook,” said Bustillos. “Only a direct, incorruptible conduit between journalists and readers can protect our free press and First Amendment rights. Civil’s development of an Ethereum-based platform for media is the first step, and I’m very proud to be involved.”

Civil is partnering with ConsenSys; the cryptoeconomics advisory team at CoinFund, led by Jake Brukhman and Alex Bulkin; and editorial strategy firm Old Town Media, led by Josh Benson, Katherine Lehr and Tom McGeveran to launch the platform, tokens and newsrooms.

“Decentralizing technologies have enormous potential to unlock new business models and reinvigorate the digital media landscape, putting power back in the hands of journalists and readers. Built on the Ethereum platform, the most advanced manifestation of blockchain technology, Civil will provide opportunities for journalists to build reputations and take home value, and for users to access trustworthy, high-quality information. As a leader driving the development of the Ethereum ecosystem worldwide, ConsenSys is proud to support Civil, which is not only a natural, innovative, excellent use of the technology, but also backed up by a strong team and aligned with our mission to drive change which puts economic, social and political systems on firmer, healthier foundations,” said Joseph Lubin, Ethereum co-founder and founder of ConsenSys.

Journalists can apply to become First Fleet newsmakers at www.joincivil.com. Those interested in participating in the community can follow Civil on Medium, Twitter, and Slack and subscribe to Civil’s newsletter to learn more about the platform and token launch.

About Civil

Civil is a self-governing marketplace where citizens directly sponsor newsrooms and journalists collaboratively run their own publications. The blockchain-based platform will protect journalists against censorship and intellectual property disputes while substantially limiting misinformation through properly incentivized collaborative editing and fact-checking, increasing transparency and openness across the network. For more information visit https://www.joincivil.com.

About ConsenSys

ConsenSys is a venture production studio and custom software development consultancy building decentralized applications (DApps), enterprise solutions and developer tools for blockchain ecosystems, focused primarily on Ethereum. Powered by smart contracts and secured through encryption, our applications provide the benefits of transparency, auditability, and immutability that are unique to blockchain-based solutions. For more information, please visit: http://www.consensys.net.

###

Press contact:
Christine Mohan
christine@joincivil.com

UPDATE: This post reflects the founding vision for Civil, and our commitment to introducing a new, self-sustaining model for journalism. Civil’s core mission of introducing a new funding model for journalism remains, but some of the details outlined below have evolved as we have refined the cryptoeconomic model that will power our platform. We’re finalizing a formal white paper (to be posted by March 2018) that will outline how this model works. In the meantime, here are two other relevant reads reflective of how Civil will be a self-sustaining marketplace for journalism:

• The Waterline: How Civil Works (Civil blog)
• Token Curated Registries 1.0 (ConsenSys blog)

What if the news were run by the people?

The Fourth Estate as we know it is vanishing. Advertising dollars, fake news, and powerful agendas are manipulating what we see and what we think we know. Our freedom, justice and even democracy are at risk. We’ve never been more divided.

At Civil, we believe the certainty and transparency of blockchain technology can offer a radical new way forward. With open governance and cryptoeconomics, we can create a sustainable place for journalism — even the kind of local, policy and investigative journalism that has been most eroded. Decentralization is the key to a free and independent press.

How it works

“The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.”
 — Bill Kovach & Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism

Civil is building a newsroom platform using blockchain technology and cryptoeconomics to create an open marketplace for journalists and citizens. In Civil’s self-governing marketplace, readers may directly sponsor journalists, and journalists collaboratively run their own publications, called Newsrooms. Citizens may sponsor Newsrooms using Civil’s cryptocurrency (CVL), thus kickstarting a new collaborative model for the production and distribution of news. Civil will launch a public search to fill the Journalism Advisory Board, an independent governing board that ensures fair, objective and professional standards are met throughout the platform.

Our blockchain-based platform and its smart contracts will protect journalists against censorship and intellectual property disputes while fostering transparency across the platform. Meanwhile, properly incentivized collaborative editing and fact-checking will substantially limit misinformation.

Initially the Civil platform will focus on local, policy and investigative reporting led by our First Fleet, a diverse group of 200 top-tier journalists across 30 self-directed Newsrooms. Civil is bootstrapping these initial Newsrooms with pre-sale CVL tokens and $1,000,000 in grant funding, not to mention substantial logistical support to get started.

If you’re interested in joining our First Fleet, apply on our website: joincivil.com.

A message from Team Civil

We believe that in order to build Civil the right way, we need to build it together. In that spirit, we invite constructive criticism and feedback for this whitepaper on Github. Thanks for all your support.

Please be sure to visit our website, job board and prior major posts (here and here). Then come chat with us on Slack!

Cryptoeconomic design

“Media is increasingly less just a source of information, and it is increasingly more a site of coordination.” — Clay Shirky, Internet sociologist

The Civil platform uses smart contracts on a decentralized network underpinned by Ethereum and related blockchain technologies. Our cryptoeconomics (powered by the CVL cryptocurrency) define the users within Civil and their interdependent incentives in order to align all behavior with the overall sustainability and growth of the platform.

The Civil platform comprises 4 interdependent smart contract procedures:

1. Creating and running a Newsroom — Anyone can apply to create a Newsroom with a proposed charter and creation fee paid in CVL, kicking off a Journalism Advisory Board review process. If approved, the newly appointed Newsroom Officers may run their organization however they like within the confines of the Civil Code of Conduct.
2. Producing news content collaboratively — Any Newsroom-appointed Newsmaker can start a piece, invite or request collaborators, negotiate terms directly and transparently, and publish good journalism to a global network of concerned Citizens.
3. Supporting good journalism—People can also sponsor Newsrooms with recurring CVL token allocations to provide more stable support in exchange for a portion of future revenues. Anyone can pledge CVL tokens to an individual Newsmaker or collaborative piece to offer one-off support, and it will be allocated automatically according to any relevant terms active on the platform.
4. Floodlighting and fact checking — Our mission is to connect diverse perspectives exchanging accurate information. Therefore discovery will be built to floodlight issues with stories from multiple angles, so readers don’t get trapped in bubbles; and a role, with cryptoeconomic incentives (described in greater detail below) will be created for fact checkers across the network.

Newsrooms are independently owned news organizations with the power to govern, finance, produce, validate and distribute their own original news content into an open market. Newsrooms are self-directed: they define their own mandates, governance structure, operational parameters and sponsorship tiers — all within a broader Civil platform and its Code of Conduct. Newsrooms are also just a piece of self-managed software, which programmatically handles all incentive structures, smart contracts and record-keeping to share internally and with the wider network.

Civil roles

1. Journalism Advisory Board — An independent body consisting of leaders in journalism and journalism ethics. It oversees the governance of the platform, and acts as the ultimate dispute resolution body.
2. Officers — Officers run Newsrooms according to charters that have been agreed to by participating Newsmakers, supporting Citizens, and approved by the Advisory Board. They are responsible for Newsroom operations.
3. Newsmakers — Reporters, writers, editors, photographers, videographers, illustrators, researchers, proofreaders and more who are affiliated with a given Newsroom.
4. Citizens — It’s our mission to make the vast majority of content on Civil freely accessible to all. However, those who choose to pledge or sponsor CVL tokens on the platform will unlock certain “power user” features as well as potential earnings opportunities over the long-term.
5. Fact Checkers — People can validate content, flag inaccuracies or challenge claims for the opportunity to 1) earn CVL tokens and 2) improve their reputation. Newsmakers will seek out highly effective Fact Checkers, creating an important secondary market on the platform.

How Newsrooms Work

What are Civil Newsrooms?

Civil Newsrooms are a software implementation of a marketplace for news creation and distribution with DAO-style governance, a business model, and an economy that allows the marketplace to function fairly and sustainably. Technically, a Newsroom is a deployed set of smart contracts together with a content storage layer that is open source, trustless and decentralized.

Civil Newsrooms collectively form a marketplace like any other — there’s a demand side and a supply side. Citizens demand news content and serve as the primary source of revenue via pledges and sponsorships. Newsmakers supply the news through content production and distribution. The Civil Newsroom marketplace connects these demand and supply groups more effectively than current models — and in a direct, transparent and self-sustaining way.

The following table shows how different people intersect across various Civil Newsrooms throughout the platform:

Creating and running a Newsroom

The Journalism Advisory Board — Civil’s independent decentralized governance board — will establish the Newsroom creation fee, a security margin primarily meant to deter spam. It also builds economic commitment among Officers, and creates sustaining revenue for the Journalism Advisory Board.

Founding Officers must pay this fee in CVL in order to submit their application for review. Officers may also choose to bootstrap their Newsroom with initial seed capital.

Fluctuations in the CVL exchange rate may cause fluctuations in the creation fee, which is unstable. Therefore, the Journalism Advisory Board may adjust the price to the market from time to time.

Once approved, Officers may now perform the following basic functions on behalf of their Newsroom:

1. Establishing and managing Newsroom parameters, such as sponsorship tiers and earnings allocations.
2. Reviewing and voting on applications to admit new Officers or Newsmakers (as well as the powers to remove them).
3. Publicly reviewing Code of Conduct disputes, with powers to adjudicate or escalate to the Journalism Advisory Board.

All official Newsroom business will be conducted in plain sight, and each decision brought to a vote will be permanently public.

Officers’ governance rights and Newsmakers’ publishing rights are represented as state within Newsroom contracts. Officers may confer or rescind these rights from members only using a Newsroom proposal system. The relative voting power among Officers is arbitrary and decided autonomously.

For example, Matthew and Lillian start a Newsroom, sharing voting power 50/50. They add Christine as a new Officer, collectively agreeing to 20% voting power. Thus, the updated voting distribution is Matthew (40%), Lillian (40%), and Christine (20%).

Publishing content collaboratively

Newsmakers are authorized to publish at any time via their Newsroom to the broader Civil platform and potentially beyond via shared links or embedded content. They may invite or request collaborators such as editors, photographers and more — drawing from Civil’s growing global network of Newsmakers and beyond. Every piece published on Civil has an associated compensation table, which represents the agreements made amongst collaborators for the work contributed. This information is permanently public as soon as the piece is published.

It’s possible to update or add new collaborators to the piece’s compensation table after publishing — new research is conducted or more footage is collected, for example — all of which is tracked and publicly available.

Supporting good journalism

Besides seed capital provided by Officers, Civil Newsrooms have two primary sources of revenue: pledges and sponsorships.

Pledges are like tips— totally discretionary and tied to an individual piece of work. Anyone is free to pledge any amount of CVL tokens to Newsmakers in recognition for a strong content, and this revenue is automatically allocated amongst the Newsmakers according to their compensation table via smart contract.

Sponsorships are like memberships — recurring payments via smart contract that unlock premium content or community experiences, with tiers and pricing set by Newsroom Officers. Citizens sponsor the Newsrooms that matter most to them in order to provide consistent backing, participate in the community, and potentially share in the Newsroom’s long-term financial sustainability and growth.

This works by allocating a portion of pledging revenue to Newsroom sponsors, thus incentivizing these Citizens to consume and share great content throughout the Civil platform and beyond. Civil will use a system for early-bird rewards, so early backers are entitled to a larger allocation of pledge revenue than those who sponsor later on. This will be achieved through a quantitative function on the number of sponsorships over time.

Pledge and sponsorship revenue will directly, transparently and instantly pass through to Newsmakers and Officers according to active agreements on the platform. Newsrooms may also direct some or all sponsorship revenues to a ‘treasury’ — a multi-signature autonomous agent — in order to manage, reinvest or distribute profits at the discretion of its Officers.

The intent is to provide Officers tremendous flexibility in running their Newsroom operations, while also providing unprecedented transparency and accountability for Citizens to see how Newsmakers earn their revenue.

Floodlighting and fact checking

Civil aims to create a news marketplace that minimizes factual errors and misinformation. Therefore, validating and fact checking are critical functions within the marketplace. Civil strives for a cooperative newsmaking process as much as possible, welcoming corrections to accidental misrepresentations and honest human error. It is also important to note that false accusations should not be allowed to undermine the platform’s legitimacy or become a tool for censorship.

Consequently, Civil’s fact-checking process is designed to resolve disputes only when parties continue to publicly disagree on the merits of their respective claims. In such cases, Newsroom Officers act as the first recourse among disagreeing parties, and in rare cases of appeal, the Journalism Advisory Board acts as the ultimate decision-making authority. There’s potential concern that Newsroom Officers will exhibit bias in favor of their Newsmakers. However, because the process is public and there’s the opportunity to escalate to a higher power, Officers are more strongly incentivized to protect their Newsroom’s credibility lest they lose support from Citizens or incur financial and reputation repercussions themselves for Code of Conduct violations.

The public fact-checking process begins when Newsmakers publish their piece, at which point anyone may become a Fact Checker to suggest corrections and flag errors. In most cases, Newsmakers will simply accept or reject the recommendations, and where accepted, include Fact Checkers in the piece’s compensation table commensurate with the contribution. In rare cases, a Fact Checker may claim a piece is violating more serious standards and ethics (e.g. libel, plagiarism, hate speech). Fact Checkers must post a CVL bond, which deters fact-checking spam, along with any supporting evidence to issue these severe claims, triggering a Newsroom Officer review process.

At any time, the relevant Newsmakers may simply accept the correction, which will return the CVL bond to the Fact Checkers plus a small interest. This interest rate is set by the Journalism Advisory Board and is drawn from the Newsroom’s capital pool, which implies that many such corrections will drain resources.

Alternatively, the Newsmakers may dispute the claim, triggering a vote by Newsroom Officers to decide in favor of either the Newsmakers or the Fact Checker. If either party feels wronged by the Newsroom’s decision, they may appeal once to the Journalism Advisory Board for a final review and vote. All adjudication processes should be as public and transparent as possible to most fairly uncover the facts.

Apart from the small CVL bond to deter frivolous claims, the fact-checking process is not influenced financially. There is no way for anyone — Fact Checker, Newsmaker or Officer — to ‘sway’ a review or ‘buy’ a victory.

Anyone who visits news content under review will see a clear notification communicating the specific issue in question and the current review status. No content will ever be ‘blocked’ or ‘taken down’. Instead, there will be a public and permanent record of claims and confirmed violations visible to anyone visiting the individual piece as well as the Newsmakers implicated.

Summary

With this proposed cryptoeconomic design, Civil seeks to establish the necessary roles, relationships, governance processes and revenue streams to self-sustainably produce, distribute and validate news content via an open and transparent marketplace platform. Advisors and Officers are compensated for their leadership, management and decision-making. Newsmakers are compensated fairly through both recurring payments from committed sponsors as well as ad hoc payments from Internet readers in general for highly valued, widely shared pieces. Citizens pay sponsorship fees to support and access exclusive content and experiences, but are also rewarded for helping to distribute quality content and grow compelling Newsrooms. Finally, Fact Checkers earn revenue from Newsmakers or Newsrooms for highlighting valuable corrections and harmful conduct violations in order to ensure Civil maintains a high standard for accuracy and ethics.

Civil Newsroom Walkthrough

Three journalists decide there’s a need for a publication in their region about opioids — a vital, fraught topic crying out for serious coverage — but doubt the local newspaper can be persuaded to devote the necessary resources to it or that a start-up digital publication on the topic could sustain itself in the current digital media economy, if they even knew how to go about starting one.

They decide to create a Newsroom dedicated to covering the topic from the top down — the role of government agencies and politicians, the medical establishment, first responders, the pharma industry — as well as from the bottom up, telling unsentimental and unflinching stories about the impact of the epidemic in local communities.

They pay 100 CVL to apply and create the Newsroom, and begin collecting revenue from Citizens on the Civil platform in two forms: year-long sponsorships with recurring monthly payments, and Friend of Founder-level pledges of between 100–500 CVL. These early supporters become entitled to a commensurate share of future revenue.

The Newsroom Officers set their share of revenue at 60 percent, split three ways, with 30 percent reserved for “freelance” expenditure — other contributing writers, photographers, fact-checkers, etc. The remaining 10 percent is allocated as “dividends,” to be distributed to Citizens in accordance with the amount and earliness of their support.

The Newsroom quickly collects 500 sponsorship smart contracts from Citizens for 10 CVL/month for 12 months, creating a minimum near-future revenue stream of 60,000 CVL. They also collect 200 pledges for 100–500 CVL up front, giving them 25,000 CVL on hand.

This is enough for them to launch a proof-of-concept version of the publication and earn some money while they’re working on it. Their work draws positive notice, and entices other Newsmakers to offer submissions and suggest assignments.

They add 50 new sponsors each month, with an additional several thousand CVL coming in through one-off pledges.

One of the founding Newsmakers likes to work with a talented freelance photographer. Together they create a news story about an innovative local intervention program. The Newsroom agrees with the photographer to split any potential revenue with her 50–50.

The story gets picked up by national outlets and makes 4,000 CVL in pledges as people find the story from across the Internet. Of this 2,000 CVL goes to the Newsroom, and 2,000 CVL goes to the freelance photographer.

The Newsroom’s charter indicates how this remainder revenue is distributed: this Newsroom allocates a portion of pledges to its members (40 percent, or 800 CVL, distributed among the three Officers); puts 40 percent into the Newsroom treasury (800 CVL); and distributes the remaining 20 percent among supporting Citizens. In this way, the newsroom has directly monetized an individual successful story by bringing in outside help and paying that help a fair fee; and it has incentivized its Citizens to help popularize the team’s work.

At the 12-month mark, the Newsroom has increased their sponsors to 1,000, good for 10,000 CVL in revenue per month. The individual Officers are also making money, along with the rest of the Newsroom, through the increased value of their own token holdings and through their cut of pledges.

They are now faced with a choice between keeping their share of the revenue static while maintaining the Newsroom’s mission and capacity, or whether to spur faster growth by reducing their share slightly and expanding the mission.

They choose to expand.

They make a deal with a respected investigative journalist to contribute six 4,000-word pieces on the interplay between the pharma industry and public opioid policy over the course of the next year in exchange for a 2-percent stake of Newsroom revenue and a 50-percent cut of pledges on her pieces. They invite their favorite photographer to become a regular member of the Newsroom, giving her a 10-percent stake in the Newsroom and the ability to contract other talented local photographers to individual assignments using the freelance budget.

They also decide to dedicate a portion of Newsroom revenue to a paid internship.

They form a partnership with a nonprofit health care think tank and a national newspaper to create themed series of deeply reported articles.

All of these things increase the publication’s impact, making it a go-to place for sources, experts and interested Citizens, while driving up in-market exposure, support numbers, and revenue.

They achieve sustainability and the ability to plan growth over a long term, without having compromised their mission to suit the desires of a wealthy owner or the traffic-based demands of an advertising model. They have created something viable, and vital.

Next steps

Join our token sale

We are launching the Civil platform and CVL token simultaneously in early 2018. We will be posting weekly roadmap updates along the way, including opportunities to contribute to the cause.

→ Join our mailing to hear updates first.

Apply to our First Fleet

Civil is issuing pre-sale CVL tokens and $1,000,000 in grant funding to 200 top-tier journalists across 30 self-directed Newsrooms.

→ Apply to become a First Fleet newsmaker.

Join our growing team

We are hiring engineers, designers, product managers, journalists and marketers.

→ Apply here.

Team & Acknowledgements

Our team

Matthew Iles is CEO of Civil, leading strategy, product and team-building. He studied journalism at Duke University before an 8-year career in digital marketing and startup entrepreneurship. He believes journalism is core to a healthy society, but that legacy business models are holding it back. He started Civil to energize journalism for the 21st century by rewiring how it works with blockchain technologies. For more, read his posts “What if the news were run by the people?” and “Why Civil?”

Lillian Ruiz leads Growth & Operations at Civil. She studied history at Wesleyan University before beginning her career in the digital marketing space, where she has served startup media companies and non-profits alike. Lillian comes to Civil energized by its paradigm shifting vision of a fully autonomous media landscape, and is eager to share its story with new audiences.

Christine Mohan leads Community & Partnerships at Civil.

Dan Kinsley leads Data Services at Civil.

Julia Himmel is Product Designer at Civil.

Matt Coolidge leads Content & Communications at Civil.

Nguyet Vuong leads Product Design at Civil.

Patrick Heinz leads Blockchain Architecture at Civil.

Our partners

• ConsenSys: Civil recently announced $5M in funding from ConsenSys, the world’s leading blockchain company and venture production studio. CEO Joe Lubin and CMO Amanda Gutterman are Civil board members.
• CoinFund: Jake Brukhman and Aleksandr Bulkin are co-founders of CoinFund, a cryptoeconomics advisory team and open research community for blockchain, and also lead authors of Civil’s cryptoeconomic whitepaper.
• Old Town Media: Tom McGeveran, Josh Benson and Katherine Lehr are longtime journalists who teamed up to establish and oversee POLITICO’s state operations, before leaving earlier this year to form Old Town Media, a media strategy firm working to find new models for journalists and publishers. McGeveran is a Civil board member.
• Chris Padovano is a New York-based attorney and the founder of Decentralized Legal. His practice specializes in the legal and regulatory implications of blockchain tokens and distributed software.
• Ed Klaris is former general counsel to New Yorker and Conde Nast, advising Civil on matters of libel, privacy, fair use, technology and the First Amendment.

Acknowledgements

We didn’t reference any of their work specifically here, but these people have been highly influential to our thinking: Eric Ries, steve blank, Brian Robertson, Jay Rosen, Charlie O’Donnell, Fred Wilson, Joel Monegro, Nick Grossman, Brad Burnham, Ben Thompson, Fred Ehrsam, Satoshi Nakamoto, Ted Nelson, The Coral Project, Hearken, Marc Andreessen, bhorowitz, Chris Dixon, Vitalik Buterin, Frederic Filloux, Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson, Sangeet Paul Choudary, Jason Fried, DHH, John Wooden.

Thanks to Katie Neufeld Iles, Kim Schatzel, Trevor Iles, Barbara Neufeld, Doug Neufeld, Ron Garrett, Matt Corva, Kavita Gupta, Sam Cassatt, Alex Felix, Jono Schafler, Stefan Pepe, Christian Crowley, Alex Hardy, Eric Richmond, Ryan Zampardo, Ed Staples, Sawyer Carter Jacobs, Lauren Ramsby, John Ness, Blake Eskin, Jerry Weinstein for their support and input.

Blockchain is at a critical juncture. More people are hearing about it — yes, in some cases sensationally, but they’re hearing about it nonetheless. As opportunity grows, it’s important to not only think of the easy opportunities, but the necessary ones.

Earlier this week, Coinbase announced a toll-free phone line for customer service. What’s so fascinating was how crypto watchers viewed the move as a surprisingly big deal, because this should be seen as an obvious choice. Coinbase is one of the most user-friendly crypto-apps in the world, continuously showing a commitment to thinking about the newly initiated user. After all, buying your first bitcoin or ether isn’t so scary if you can call a human at any point. Crypto needs a more friendly, or at least more intuitive, face to introduce itself to the masses. Coinbase can’t be the only one to do so, and before you protest that Kik is a mainstream company using crypto, remember that its ICO was in service of its developer base and community, not its everyday user.

Crypto-converts the world over praise the blockchain’s ability to make every industry and service transparent, accountable, and egalitarian, and at Civil we too believe in blockchain’s capacity to do just that. However, are we within the crypto community asking the right questions and making the right choices to ensure our space is not only egalitarian but also inclusive?

Blockchain’s promise of both anonymity and transparency may make it read as a cloak and dagger operation rather than the truly human operation it seeks to be. Something as simple as a phone line creates the needed human touch to convince people that the blockchain community means what it says. We cannot only build community for people who “just get it.” We have to make obvious the pathways for others and push ourselves to think about what it truly means to spread the message and promise of blockchain far and wide. What are the simple product touches that engender trust? What are the emotional beats and narratives that both technical and non-technical individuals can unite behind?

Few things have inspired as much devotion and ire as the crypto space, and with good reason. Promising sweeping changes, a complete re-writing of current systems and a crusade-like commitment to total transparency, it can strike the kind of hyperbolic tone that typically breeds an us vs. them tribalism.

There is so much available to us in this new space. As such, it’s everyone’s responsibility to ensure that this transformative technology isn’t only visible to those who have always had access to transformative technologies. We must think of the simple and empathetic ways to make this a space more accessible to everyone, because that is where the power, potential and mission behind blockchain truly lies.

Written by

Lillian Ruiz leads marketing and partnerships at Civil. She studied history at Wesleyan University before beginning her career in the digital marketing space, where she has served startup media companies and non-profits alike. Lillian comes to Civil energized by its paradigm shifting vision of a fully autonomous media landscape, and is eager to share its story with new audiences.

→ Contact: lillian@joincivil.com

Our team

Stephanie Soussloff leads research and development at Civil. After studying geography, economics and social entrepreneurship at Middlebury College, she dove headfirst into the New York startup scene as a customer-centric analyst. She is excited about Civil’s potential to strengthen and empower communities globally.

→ Contact: stephanie@joincivil.com

Matthew Iles is CEO of Civil, leading strategy, product and team-building. He studied journalism at Duke University before an 8-year career in digital marketing and startup entrepreneurship. He believes journalism is core to a healthy society, but that legacy business models are holding it back. He started Civil to energize journalism for the 21st century by rewiring how it works using emerging social technologies. For more, read “What if the news were run by the people?” and “Why Civil?”

→ Contact: matthew@joincivil.com

Our mission is to fuel a more free and just world through self-sustaining and crowd-operated journalism. This starts with openness.

Openness describes how Civil works to its core. It is in everything from its technology, product and operating model, to community and team relationships. Over the past several weeks, we pushed ourselves to decide what it means to be open, transparent and decentralized and why it matters. We quickly realized, without openness, Civil will fail.

We know this will take ongoing work, countless iterations, and most importantly, lived experience to achieve the standard of openness, transparency and decentralization that we strive for at Civil. So it is in the spirit of openness that we invite you to share your thoughts and ideas for future inclusion in the comments or on Slack.

Open Teamwork

We are committed to building a workforce of diverse and inclusive teams, with strong relationships built on trust. Building that trust requires transparency, and from that flows empowered and cooperative decision-making.

There is no question that transparency is hard.

It inherently keeps us honest and holds us accountable to ourselves and our teammates. It makes us more vulnerable, and it takes intentional time and effort.

No longer siloed or shielded by hierarchical structures and restricting roles, we can work more freely, creatively and efficiently, but with that comes the responsibility of communication. We discovered that we are better off sharing our struggles and weaknesses in order to support one another in our work, and carry each other through to higher achievements.

So what does openness look like on a day-to-day basis? Here’s how we practice transparent communication today:

• Sharing early and often about your work to invite collaboration and to avoid siloed decision-making and time-wasting rework.
• Over-communicating daily about roadblocks, successes and failures. Asking for help and giving help when needed.
• Openly discussing our strengths and weaknesses with each other.

In short, we see these values being represented in our teamwork and structure in a myriad of ways, starting with the following:

Fair. Equitable. Valued.

At the core of Openness is the idea that we can make our teams more productive, whole and motivated, simply by acknowledging that we are people, not employees.

As we build our team, we are increasingly aware of the role that compensation plays in making people feel valued, recognized and empowered. We designed a compensation structure that intends to be fair and inclusive, champion equal pay, and bring diverse candidates through the door.

August and Buffer are two role models when it comes to transparent compensation: they use market-driven formulas to arrive at salary and equity breakdowns, all of which is shared publicly. Not without its own challenges, Buffer found this practice not only fostered greater trust within the team, but also boosted their effort to acquire top diverse talent. More qualified, culturally aligned candidates came through their door, while deterring those that might not mesh well from the start. Plus with compensation made public, negotiations are rendered moot, making the interview process more inclusive (like addressing the gender wage gap) and focused on what matters most in the long run — mission and culture alignment.

There is no playbook. We are on a journey that will require learning by trial and error. We hope that by actively testing, living and breathing these transparent processes within our core team, we can foster greater openness in our community.

Open Community

On Radical Listening articulated our vision for responding to and working with our community.

In the coming weeks, we will launch our Open Roadmap — an initiative to both make our work more transparent as well as encourage community participation, including opportunities to earn CVL tokens in advance of our token launch. We believe the power of opening up our work is vast, and aligns with our mission in the areas of independence, transparency, and the democratic sharing of knowledge.

The power of crowd-driven work has been demonstrated in significant ways throughout Internet’s brief history, but token economies will fuel even more rapid development through decentralized platforms, such as Civil. Our token-based model will incentivize journalists, users and developers to build and support a strong future for journalism.

At the highest level, openness and decentralization will enable the Civil community to fuel a more civil society through self-sustaining journalism.

So where does this leave us? How do we sustainably put these practices in place?

We open our doors to you.

Chat with us.

We will soon be hosting live Q&As with our core team and partners around various topics including openness and the future of our technology and organization.

Follow us on Twitter, Slack and Medium to stay tuned.

Work with us.

Volunteer free time. Join our Slack community & check back soon for the release of our Open Roadmap.

Join our team.

We are currently hiring a CTO & Senior Engineer.

Don’t see the job you want? Write to us with your dream job!

Written by

Stephanie Soussloff leads research and development at Civil. After studying geography, economics and social entrepreneurship at Middlebury College, she dove headfirst into the New York startup scene as a customer-centric analyst. She is excited about Civil’s potential to strengthen and empower communities globally.

→ Contact: stephanie@joincivil.com

Our team

Lillian Ruiz leads marketing and partnerships at Civil. She studied history at Wesleyan University before beginning her career in the digital marketing space, where she has served startup media companies and non-profits alike. Lillian comes to Civil energized by its paradigm shifting vision of a fully autonomous media landscape, and is eager to share its story with new audiences.

→ Contact: lillian@joincivil.com

Matthew Iles is CEO of Civil, leading strategy, product and team-building. He studied journalism at Duke University before an 8-year career in digital marketing and startup entrepreneurship. He believes journalism is core to a healthy society, but that legacy business models are holding it back. He started Civil to energize journalism for the 21st century by rewiring how it works using emerging social technologies. For more, read “What if the news were run by the people?” and “Why Civil?”

→ Contact: matthew@joincivil.com

Openness at Civil was originally published in Civil on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are operating at the nexus of two massive trends: 1) decentralized economies powered by blockchain, and 2) accurate journalism and civil discourse in an era of unprecedented cultural division. Both are volatile and face adversaries who wish to hamper their growth and sustainability. Both are vital and necessary for a more open, trustworthy and transformative society tomorrow and beyond.

We are at the beginning of a long road. Today, blockchain and cryptoassets are still distant theories for most. Tomorrow, through improved user experience and consumer education, decentralized models will upend even some of the most substantial monopolies and centers of power in the name of distributed control and ownership. Civil uses blockchain to create a more free and independent press controlled only by the people and the journalists who serve them, and by doing so, we believe we will create a self-sustaining method for fueling a more civil society.

The blockchain space is fraught with risk: cybersecurity and regulation must be considered as we deploy and nurture our decentralized community platform. Markets will chill, consumer perception will be fickle, and opportunists will look to exploit us.

But these risks pale in comparison to those we face in the journalism space. Historically, nothing has proven a more potent tool for the people in the fight for a free and just society than journalism. The powerful, the corrupt and the hateful will view Civil as a threat, and we must expect their challenge to our very existence. Not to mention the digital media monopolies, who will necessarily lose ads dollars as more and more consumers direct their attention to our more accurate and civil ecosystem.

The temptation is to move fast, and that we must. Our team will set a standard for high performance — swift response, creative problem-solving, crisp execution — that will attract top talent and wow our users. We will nurture and grow a community whose collective passion and action will become our most powerful tool against existential challenges. This will be achieved through steadfast commitment, day-in/day-out effort and a deftness to make tough choices in the face of limited information.

Yet even as we urgently face each obstacle as they come, we must always keep one eye fixed on the horizon. Our mission to build a self-sustaining ecosystem for accurate journalism and civil discourse would literally be the first of its kind in human history. The impact of our work will be felt for generations to come. We will reshape how people interact with government, institutions and each other. We will constantly push ourselves to be more open, more trustworthy and more transformative as a product and community experience. We will do this because we will focus on the long term.

Working at Civil is an opportunity unlike any other: a never-ending mission to fuel a more civil society through a revolutionary new technology. The road ahead promises to treat us all to incredible learning and growing opportunities as individuals while insisting we work together as a team in a radically new way.

Our journey is only just beginning.

Always,
Matthew Iles

Chat with us.

We will soon be hosting live Q&As with our core team and partners around various topics including openness and the future of our technology and organization.

Follow us on Twitter, Slack and Medium to stay tuned.

Work with us.

Volunteer free time. Join our Slack community & check back soon for the release of our Open Roadmap.

Join our team.

We are currently hiring a CTO & Senior Engineer.

Don’t see the job you want? Write to us with your dream job!

Written by

Matthew Iles is CEO of Civil, leading strategy, product and team-building. He studied journalism at Duke University before an 8-year career in digital marketing and startup entrepreneurship. He believes journalism is core to a healthy society, but that legacy business models are holding it back. He started Civil to energize journalism for the 21st century by rewiring how it works using emerging social technologies. For more, read “What if the news were run by the people?” and “Why Civil?”

→ Contact: matthew@joincivil.com

Our team

Lillian Ruiz leads marketing and partnerships at Civil. She studied history at Wesleyan University before beginning her career in the digital marketing space, where she has served startup media companies and non-profits alike. Lillian comes to Civil energized by its paradigm shifting vision of a fully autonomous media landscape, and is eager to share its story with new audiences.

→ Contact: lillian@joincivil.com

Stephanie Soussloff leads research and development at Civil. After studying geography, economics and social entrepreneurship at Middlebury College, she dove headfirst into the New York startup scene as a customer-centric analyst. She is excited about Civil’s potential to strengthen and empower communities globally.

→ Contact: stephanie@joincivil.com

These words reflect Civil’s core values, which form a framework for almost all parts of the business.

In the few short weeks since our launch, we began to ask ourselves questions.

• How do we apply these values practically?
• How do we practice them as a team, and with potential users and partners?
• What do our values really mean in the context of day-to-day work?

As these questions gained momentum, our answers began to reflect a common thread: we have to listen.

More specifically, we have to use listening as an active tool to create room for trust, both as it relates to our interactions and to our product. This sort of listening is active and purposeful. It allows for expansive, productive and truly transformative communication.

This is radical listening, and it will allow Civil to make great strides in its culture and development. We hope sharing our thoughts will encourage others to incorporate radical listening in their own toolbox.

What does radical mean?

adjective: (especially of change or action) relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.

Change for change sake is an easy rabbit hole for any startup to fall down, especially one that touts its commitment to implementing transformative change to business models and corporate culture. But the reality is that change can and should be meted out once feedback loops prove that change is necessary. So how do we get there? What role does radical listening play?

How does radical listening work?

When executed consistently and with intent, radical listening should facilitate the following:

• Consistent, proactive communication becomes a tool for ideas as well as higher-quality execution with empathy.
• Deeper personal ties between the listener and their colleagues or community.
• Emergent problem-solving through new networks of information, not simply top-down decision-making.

But from a practical perspective, how does this work?

Guided by principles of openness, trust and transformation, radical listening takes on an incredibly active quality while also providing a wealth of information that will facilitate not only better responses in the future but also actionable insights and ideas.

In our own short-term experience, the implementation of the below has led to some of our most exciting interactions to date, and we hope to continue to iterate on these tactics.

How does Civil apply radical listening?

Currently, we’re exploring how to implement radical listening into our community moderation and engagement. When we began engaging the community, our instinct was to simply push information and utility. We assumed we would provide the context, the follow up, the FAQs, etc. to our community members. Not only was that approach unsustainable, it was hubristic. It assumed we had all the answers and knew all of our community’s motivations for engaging with us. It made little room for meeting people where they were and letting them instruct us on their information and outreach needs.

Realizing that, we continue to work towards pulling from the community and letting them guide us. We’re able to do that with radical listening.

Radical listening helps us suss out member motivations so we can better serve them and learn from them. Over time, radical listening will provide useful insights around the expertise and the conversations we need as a community to create real value.

Radical listening is a success if we find members actively participating in our bouts of intellectual, strategic and tactical wrestling.

In short, the ultimate outcome is trusting other people’s participation. This is not to say every idea or concept is valid, but it is more likely than not that every question or idea has the potential to enhance a listener’s overall frame of reference, increase trust in the community and develop deeper interlinking networks within a community framework.

Written by

Lillian Ruiz leads marketing and partnerships at Civil. She studied history at Wesleyan University before beginning her career in the digital marketing space, where she has served startup media companies and non-profits alike. Lillian comes to Civil energized by its paradigm shifting vision of a fully autonomous media landscape, and is eager to share its story with new audiences.

→ Contact: lillian@joincivil.com

Our team

Stephanie Soussloff leads research and development at Civil. After studying geography, economics and social entrepreneurship at Middlebury College, she dove headfirst into the New York startup scene as a customer-centric analyst. She is excited about Civil’s potential to strengthen and empower communities globally.

→ Contact: stephanie@joincivil.com

Matthew Iles is CEO of Civil, leading strategy, product and team-building. He studied journalism at Duke University before an 8-year career in digital marketing and startup entrepreneurship. He believes journalism is core to a healthy society, but that legacy business models are holding it back. He started Civil to energize journalism for the 21st century by rewiring how it works using emerging social technologies. For more, read “What if the news were run by the people?” and “Why Civil?”

→ Contact: matthew@joincivil.com

Last Monday, we asked our community: “What is journalism for?”

The thoughtful responses to the snap-poll shared common beliefs that journalism is to inform the public and hold power accountable.

Here’s a sample:

“As the old saying goes, the purpose of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”

“Educating the electorate and holding power structures accountable”

“Deliver accurate information to citizens so they may effectively participate in their society”

“Broadcasting information in an engaging way to the public in a non-subjective, non-political form based on facts”

“to ensure an informed citizenry, fundamentally by holding those in power accountable and exposing abuse of same”

Be a part of our growing community.

Join Civil on Slack

P.S. Don’t miss last week’s blog post: “Working at Civil”.

On Radical Listening

Open. Transformative. Trustworthy.

These words reflect Civil’s core values, which form a framework for almost all parts of the business.

In the few short weeks since our launch, we began to ask ourselves questions.

• How do we apply these values practically?
• How do we practice them as a team, and with potential users and partners?
• What do our values really mean in the context of day-to-day work?

As these questions gained momentum, our answers began to reflect a common thread: we have to listen.

More specifically, we have to use listening as an active tool to create room for trust, both as it relates to our interactions and to our product. This sort of listening is active and purposeful. It allows for expansive, productive and truly transformative communication.

This is radical listening, and it will allow Civil to make great strides in its culture and development. We hope sharing our thoughts will encourage others to incorporate radical listening in their own toolbox.

Read “On Radical Listening” full-length post on Medium.

Our Roadmap

Civil uses “Objectives & Key Results” to define and manage its priorities.

How to read:

• Every initiative is meant to be aggressive but achievable: top score of 1.0.
• Acceptable is 0.7–0.8. Scoring all 1.0’s means we didn’t stretch enough.

Our Objectives

Grow community

Our First Fleet strategy is nearly complete and ready to share with you all for feedback. As a reminder, the First Fleet is our codename for the inaugural class of journalists who kickstart the whole Civil platform.

We plan to support 75–150 journalists lighting up 25–50 newsrooms and stations across 3 areas of focus: 1) local, 2) investigate and 3) policy. Soon we will unveil more specifics including how you or someone you know can apply for an opportunity to serve as a journalist with Civil.

- 1 big thing: Join Slack for updates. Also, apply to become a Civil journalist.

Product development

Stephanie, CoinFund and team have been hard at work developing practical solutions to our platform’s thorniest questions, and we’re nearly complete with an update to our whitepaper that we believe goes a level deeper and truly begins to make clear how this will work.

- 1 big thing: It’s key we involve the community in shaping Civil’s work now and far into the future. But what’s the best way to incorporate the crowd’s feedback and volunteer effort? Any good ideas, please let us know.

- 1 big thing: Find out how to apply here.

Fundraising

This week we have 3 confirmed meetings with investors and ongoing conversations with several others. In order to hit our November target launch date, we’re looking to raise $2.5MM by August 31. We want to meet with blockchain investors, media investors and social impact investors. We want to meet with big investors and small investors ($10k min.). Ultimately, we want to pull together a round with parties aligned with our mission. That’s what’s most important.

- 1 big thing: Civil founder Matthew Iles created an investor pitch deck and interested inquiry form for those curious to learn more. Reach out for more information at matthew@joincivil.com.

FLASHPOLL:

Every Monday and Friday, we share 1 new poll to take a collective pulse check on the community. (Bonus poll on Wednesdays in Slack.)

Today’s Poll:
What news content do you currently pay for and why?

Friday’s Poll:
What issues need more dedicated journalism?

Last Monday’s Poll:
What is journalism for?

P.S. See highlight answers from last week’s poll in Slack.

Help with one click

Recommend our Medium post. :)

Thank you for all your support!
The Civil Team