We need a replacement for the universal public forum. In my community, Facebook has essentially become the public square. It's where most of the local public

We need a replacement for the universal public forum. In my community, Facebook has essentially become the public square. It's where most of the local public political dialog happens. It's where I get my local news, it's where I find out what my local representatives are doing, and it's where I can converse with them - and the rest of the community - about what local government should be doing. This is all so valuable that I just can't walk away from it. I would be completely cut out of local events. The news media does an extremely poor job of reporting - and we have an unusually vibrant local news sector (I think in no small part because we have such an active political and governance community on Facebook). So much of it is network effect, I just don't even know how we'd go about creating it in a new service, even if a new service were created that served the purpose better.