There are many types of people you could bring together. Could be a closed group, everybody from a high school class, or everybody who works in a particular place or parents of a particular school class. Or an open group, people who speak Japanese in Istanbul, or people who play bridge in Hanoi, or people in Philadelphia who’d like to take a nature hike in a different place every Saturday morning, or people in Lusaka who may want to volunteer to help clean and take care of a particular vacant lot.

How does that happen. There are endless corporate platforms with ready, well functioning solutions for communication, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram. They all have their proponents and detractors and are popular and or not with various generations and they all have serious privacy issues and thanks to enshittification, they all degrade. Ten years ago Facebook was good for this, now if you have a big group on Facebook, you have to “boost” your post (pay) to reach members of your own group. Each of these platforms have various ways to charge community leaders to more effectively manage their groups.

They also don’t really help with some important things, who are the leaders and how do the leaders and groups make decisions? Some people communicate tons, and others never, others want much less communication, some want it all. How to deal with those differences? How to do it as cheaply as possible? How to do it as permanently as possible? The reason most groups end is because the person who did all the work moves on or gets sick of it. How do you set up a community, in terms of common agreements among the members as well as technologically, so that work can be shared and it takes as little time as possible to achieve its goals?

These are some of the questions we hope to answer with Junto. So it won’t be a platform or an app, it will make use of existing platforms, as safe, easy, enduring, and cheap as possible. It will have some videos on how to do a few things, some resources, and other ways to get a community going.

Out of curiosity, if you were going to use Junto to set up a group, which group and where would you set it up?