Public Press (publicpress.com/.org/.net)

Technology platforms are killing local community. 

Facebook and Google usurp 70% of U.S. digital ad revenue siphoning money away from local newspapers, creating a vacuum in local news coverage. Instead of featuring articles that spur local community engagement, these technology platforms cloy citizens with clickbait and fake news that reinforce filter bubbles, engineer public opinion, and perpetuate an epistemic crisis.

Augmented Reality (AR) creates an uncharted news media landscape where platform hegemony has yet to be established and thus new ground rules can be cultivated that fund and enhance local community.

Public Press is a citizen journalism platform wholly owned, hosted, and operated by public citizens with mobile phones. Public Press enables citizens to overlay AR stories onto locations in their community and to share AR stories via peer-to-peer interaction.

Technology platforms destroy local community by:

1. Depleting funding for local newspapers.

Ad revenue that could go toward funding local newspapers--e.g. via classified ads--gets diverted to a few remote (Bay Area) technology players with the most eyeballs.

2.  Limiting credible local news coverage.

Technology platforms are driven by for-profit surveillance and ad-based revenue models that favor sensationalism over quality journalism. To maximize ad impressions, platforms showcase big national and international stories which marginalize local news coverage. As technology platforms acquire more eyeballs, they become bigger targets for cyberattacks, gaming, and public opinion shaping. Hackers subvert the electoral process by inundating voters with identity confirming messages that reinforce divisive viewpoints. Inevitably, this echo chamber din drowns out rational voices and credible local news.

3. Damaging the environment.

Technology platforms incur massive operational expenses while managing billions of users. Astronomical storage, electricity, and network bandwidth needs lead to huge server farms and dams to power platform infrastructure which cause irreversible damage to local ecosystems.

The bottom line: what's urgently needed is a technology platform alternative to Facebook and Google that helps, rather than hinders, local community.

Public Press serves local communities of the world.

Unlike virtual community hyped by social media, the goal of Public Press is to nurture real community by embracing Augmented Reality as a galvanizing social force—a medium for citizen journalism that unites people at the neighborhood level.

For citizens, journalists, activists, local governments, and neighborhood businesses around the world, Public Press empowers:

• Community exchange--citizens can submit and access neighborhood-specific news stories—including civic government, school, businesses, sporting events, public service bulletins, classifieds, garage sales, and auctions.
• Creation of neighborhood watch bulletins, local amber alerts, lost and found services for personal property and pets.
• Civic mapping--citizens can respond to polls and create issue inventories to track and prioritize issues vital to their community.
• Cultural heritage--citizens can archive public records and securely store, retrieve, and disseminate verifiable information as AR stories that preserve and share unique aspects of community life.
• Aggregation of official voting records to monitor performance and increase accountability of elected local representatives.
• Organization of community initiative and ballot measure information into webs of endorsement that highlight linkages between lobbyists, issues, and candidates.
• Eyewitness reporting about humanitarian issues, e.g., verifiable stories that document war, atrocity, and abuse, e.g., immigration border crises.

Public Press is a citizen journalism platform based on Augmented Reality (AR) where community members can publish, discover, and engage with local stories at the very location where news events occur.

All journalism roles—Source, Reporter, Editor, Copy Editor, Fact Checker, Producer, Reviewer, and Reader—can be performed by public citizens. Credible local news is assembled from the bottom up, empowered by citizen participation and obviating the need for centralized news platforms from Facebook and Google.

Public Press gives people the power to create and broadcast AR stories directly with their phone or mobile device. Local citizens get app notifications when they are near AR-based local news stories overlaid onto their neighborhood. Local citizens can literally bump into AR-based local news stories within their neighborhood. Citizens can then re-broadcast and share these stories as they physically move, spreading news to nearby people--device-to-device--in a peer-to-peer fashion. 

Public Press introduces novel story metrics for tracking the spread of AR stories across time and space/location.

Public Press AR stories are watermarked and notarized as an antidote to fake news and deepfake videos. When the Public Press app publishes AR scenes composed of video/audio/images/text, all story assets are encrypted with invisible watermarks that establish the authenticity of the assets. Authors and readers can subsequently validate any asset's watermark as proof that the asset was not "Photoshopped" or processed as part of a deepfake.

Public Press lets citizen journalists leave AR stories in the location where a story happens and gives viewers a backchannel for communicating follow-up information, opinions, or poll responses.

Public Press is the first app that:

1. Turns Augmented Reality into a hyperlocal news publishing medium. It creates a new media landscape where digital stories can be overlaid onto physical locations within communities empowering citizens to publish, share, track, and interact with local news, events, and issues via Augmented Reality. 

2. Watermarks AR story assets--3D models and captured video--for purposes of tracking, verifying, and enforcing authenticity, provenance, and rights management. Unlike blockchain approaches, Public Press invents a novel peer-to-peer asset verification chain that does not require internet connectivity, consumes far less power than cloud-based solutions, seamlessly achieves worldwide scale without incurring massive operational costs, and minimizes environmental impact. Reported threats of deepfakes on upcoming elections, culture, and political economy, as well as growing investment in startups focused on point-of-capture verification solutions  indicate the urgency for media verification solutions designed to combat fake news and misinformation.

3. Gives authors the means to control when, where, and who can view their stories, if story assets can be remixed, and how far stories can travel--both geographically and based on resharing limits. Story authors can set an expiration. When the expiration time is reached, all instances of the story--whether on the author’s device or on the devices of people resharing the story--disappear and are deleted forever.

4. Measures and rewards individual participant contribution in the news delivery value chain--from authors to resharers to readers--enabling equitable remuneration via a news token currency.

Public Press utilizes Augmented Reality and mobile devices.

Public Press employs AR as a novel story-telling medium that can be broadcasted by mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The ubiquity of mobile devices and the mobility of people carrying these devices creates mobile ad-hoc networks for delivery and discovery of community-based news. Unlike current social media behemoths, the entire Public Press platform runs peer-to-peer on a single mobile phone app. Public Press does not need servers or an AR Cloud or even the internet to operate. Hence Public Press can run anywhere in the world.

Public Press recognizes that AR is new terrain. There are no established ground rules about who, what, where, and how AR-based stories can be seen and shared. Public Press introduces a first cut at defining these rules of AR story creation, engagement, and remixing informed by current challenges plaguing existing social media--e.g., deepfakes, lack of authenticity, lack of provenance, lack of verifiability, and inequitable content monetization.

Until now there has been no realistic and viable way to flip the balance of news publishing power. Incumbent technology platforms are de-facto publishers and own the brands, audiences, and algorithms that govern what and how news gets created and seen. Most importantly, just a handful of these platforms own the vast share of revenue associated with news which diminishes news coverage for local communities.

Augmented Reality creates a tectonic shift in the news and information landscape. It creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity to disrupt the news playing field. AR content is innately location-based. Thus any community location becomes a natural site for an AR story. Public Press sees AR as the ideal medium for hyperlocal citizen journalism. We anticipate an imminent landrush to colonize AR space. We believe first mover solutions will have advantages especially if they can lay the ground rules and scale quickly without prohibitive operational expenses. Public Press is deliberately designed to scale globally without massive cloud expenses or environmental impact.

0 today. 

1 million in one year.

1 billion in five years.

This year the goals of Public Press are to:

• Develop, test, and iterate on initial publishing tools for story-based AR.
• Develop, test, and iterate on initial browsing tools for story-based AR.
• Develop, test, and iterate on initial ground rules for story-based AR.

The five year goals of Public Press add sustainable revenue models for citizen journalism participants:

• Develop, test, and iterate on revenue models that equitably reward each participant in the news publishing value chain.
• Develop, test, and iterate on new publishing tools for story-based AR.
• Develop, test, and iterate on new browsing tools for story-based AR.
• Develop, test, and iterate on new ground rules for story-based AR.

As with any new social media app, establishing "network effect" for Public Press is the most important barrier. 

In order for citizens and communities to want to utilize Public Press and AR as a new publishing medium, a critical mass of AR stories needs to be organically published by citizens. These AR stories in turn must be discovered and shared in a timely, peer-to-peer fashion to grow awareness and usefulness of AR stories.

Public Press plans to achieve network effect by offering novel tools for AR story creation and story browsing.

The Public Press mobile app lets journalists effortlessly compose and broadcast AR-based experiences with just their phone including new tools for audience feedback:

• The editor lets journalists combine animated 3D models, drawings, and text with captured video.
• Share multi-user AR experiences with nearby citizens; no AR Cloud or Internet required.
• Each AR experience is digitally watermarked to insure attribution, combat deep fakes and fake news, and prevent unauthorized remixing.
• Realtime feedback from crowds can be gathered by projecting polls that citizens can view in AR and reply to.
• Chyron readerboard projected in AR that citizens can view.
• Message board projected in AR that citizens can post feedback to.
• Anonymous tip box projected in AR “dropped” at locations asking people for tips/information.

On the viewing side, the Public Press app provides local citizens with:

• An AR story browser that can filter for particular story content
• Push notifications for nearby content and nearby Public Press members
• A means of couriering one or more stories on a mobile device in order to share stories with other people (beyond a community).

One

I have been active in citizen journalism for two decades. I acquired the domains publicpress.org/.com/.net 20 years ago. I own the Twitter handle @publicpress.

Professionally, I'm a full-stack engineer, artist, writer, and entrepreneur focused on using technology to empower community, agency, and sovereignty.

I was co-founder and CEO of Celly, a Portland Oregon startup with 1M+ users that helped organizations--K12 schools and universities, city governments, NGOs, activists, and humanitarian relief organizations--create social networks for school communication, gang-violence prevention, health education, social justice, and volunteer disaster relief. 

Before Celly, I was Chief Scientist and led the development of large-scale distributed systems and realtime database management products at GemStone Systems (acquired by VMware in 2010). 

I developed an early web-based version of Public Press in 2002. 

I am an Augmented Reality consultant. I've developed and shipped iOS games using ARKit, SceneKit, SpriteKit, CoreImage, Metal, CoreLocation, CoreData, Image Processing, AVFoundation, CoreML, Vision, TensorFlow

https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...
https://medium.com/spriteville... 
https://medium.com/@rokamo
https://twitter.com/rokamo
https://github.com/rokamo

The Public Press business model is simple: revenue generated from app subscriptions. (Currently iOS only)

Public Press has no operational expense.

As a peer-to-peer app-based platform, Public Press has no cloud infrastructure. Therefore, the bottom line on financial sustainability is low compared to centralized cloud-based social networks.

So app revenue subscriptions is our the path to financial sustainability. 

I'm applying to Solve in order to cover initial development costs for the Public Press app. I hope Solve's partnership network, funding relationships, and reputation can help with future resource needs.

Report For America

Witness.org

Knight Foundation

Pew Research

Public Press will use the Prize to utilize AI to help AR story authoring. 

In particular the Public Press app will implement AI-based solutions for object segmentation and object tracking to identify and label people and story objects. The app will also use AI methods to identify the location of crowds/audiences in order to place AR message boards appropriately. FInally, the app also will utilize speech and natural language processing AI to parse spoken language into AR scene authoring commands (instead of using menus). For example, an author can say "Put a caption above the crowd".

Public Press will use the Prize to utilize AI to help AR story authoring. 

In particular the Public Press app will implement AI-based solutions for object segmentation and object tracking to identify and label people and story objects. The app will also use AI methods to identify the location of crowds/audiences in order to place AR message boards appropriately. FInally, the app also will utilize speech and natural language processing AI to parse spoken language into AR scene authoring commands (instead of using menus). For example, an author can say "Put a caption above the crowd".