Stories, updates, and thought leadership from the people building a more connected world. Updated whenever the vibes are right.
Our annual gala was held at the Pawnee Commons Pavilion, and it was, in the words of one attendee, "a lot." Over 800 guests gathered to celebrate the Foundation's impact, enjoy a locally sourced dinner curated by an algorithm that analyzed dietary preferences across all RSVPs, and dance to a DJ set by someone we can't name because the NDA hasn't expired.
The highlight of the evening was the unveiling of our 2025 initiatives, including the expansion of Project Open Signal into 12 new states and the launch of MentorBot 2.0, which now incorporates facial expression analysis for "enhanced emotional attunement." Several teens were brought on stage to share their MentorBot experiences. One of them cried, which was unscripted and extremely effective for donor engagement. The silent auction raised $340,000, which is a lot of money but also, coincidentally, the same number as our Community Bandwidth Increase percentage, which wasn't planned but which our comms team is calling "synchronistic."
By Zara Chen, Executive Director
We're thrilled to announce a first-of-its-kind partnership with Muncie, Indiana, making it the first city in America to achieve what we're calling "Total Community Connectivity." Over the next 18 months, every public space in Muncie will receive FriendPoint installations, NeighborNet will go city-wide, and Data Fluency workshops will be offered free at all 14 branch libraries.
Mayor Deborah Franklin called the partnership "ambitious and slightly hard to explain to my constituents, but I trust the data." We couldn't agree more. Muncie's 65,000 residents will serve as the first complete dataset for our Community Intelligence Platform, which we're rolling out in beta and which is definitely not as ominous as it sounds. We've already installed 240 FriendPoints across Muncie's downtown corridor, and early reports indicate a 12% increase in foot traffic near deployment zones, which we attribute to either curiosity about the birdhouses or general civic renewal. Either way, we're counting it.
By Kwame Osei-Mensah, Director of Radical Programs
I've been thinking a lot about empathy lately. Not the kind where you imagine walking in someone else's shoes. That's fine. That's nice. But what if you didn't have to imagine? What if you had enough data to actually know what it's like to be someone else? What if empathy wasn't a feeling but a technology?
That's the premise behind what I call "radical data empathy." It's the idea that true understanding between humans requires more than good intentions. It requires infrastructure. It requires sensors. It requires a willingness to collect, analyze, and act on the full spectrum of human behavior in a way that is compassionate, rigorous, and only a little bit invasive. Some people hear this and say it sounds dystopian. I hear that. I do. But consider: isn't it more dystopian to not understand each other?
By Sage Patel, Head of Community Data Stewardship
When the Garcia family of Terre Haute received a Gryzzl Gives package in June, they weren't expecting it. Nobody ever is. That's kind of the point. Inside was a tent, a portable camping stove, a first aid kit, three sleeping bags (sized appropriately), and a handwritten note that said "You've been talking about camping for weeks. Here's everything you need."
The Garcias had, in fact, been talking about camping. Around the dinner table, on family group chats, and in several Google searches that our Community Need Algorithm flagged as "aspirational outdoor recreation interest." The package arrived on a Thursday. By Saturday, the family was at Brown County State Park, which our algorithm predicted based on proximity, reviews the family had read online, and the fact that their minivan's GPS had searched for it twice in the past month. They had, by all accounts, a wonderful time.
By Tyler Lundquist, VP of Operations & Good Times
We're excited to announce that MentorBot 2.0 has rolled out with support for 14 languages, including American Sign Language via camera input. The system can now provide mentorship to non-English-speaking teens in their native language, which has been one of our most requested features since we launched.
The bigger update, though, is the sarcasm engine. Teens are sarcastic. This is not a new observation. But it presented a real challenge for MentorBot 1.0, which would occasionally respond to sarcasm with earnest advice, leading to exchanges that multiple teens described as "painful." The new system uses contextual tone analysis, prior conversation patterns, and what our engineers are calling a "vibe check layer" to detect when a teen is being genuine versus when they're being a 16-year-old. Accuracy is currently at 91%, with the remaining 9% mostly involving the phrase "yeah, totally," which can go either way and honestly confuses humans too. We're also aware that some teens have started trying to trick the sarcasm detector on purpose, which we're choosing to interpret as engagement.
By Sage Patel, Head of Community Data Stewardship
When we designed the FriendPoint hardware enclosures to look like birdhouses, it was primarily an aesthetic choice. We wanted something that would blend into park environments. Something friendly. Something that wouldn't alarm people, because historically, when you install networked sensor arrays in public parks, people have questions, and we'd rather they didn't.
What we didn't anticipate is that actual birds would move in. As of this month, 347 FriendPoints across 12 states have been colonized by various species, primarily house sparrows and Carolina wrens. This has created some challenges. The ambient audio sensors, for instance, are picking up a lot more birdsong than anticipated, which is throwing off our pedestrian conversation analysis model. Our data team spent two weeks trying to figure out why community sentiment scores in Bloomington suddenly spiked before realizing the microphones were recording cardinals.
We've decided not to evict the birds. Instead, we've partnered with the Indiana Audubon Society to turn the colonized FriendPoints into a citizen science project. Users of the NeighborNet app can now identify bird species at their local FriendPoint, which is nice for the community and also helps us calibrate the audio filters. Tyler has started calling them "BirbPoints" in internal communications and we've asked him to stop but he won't.
By Kwame Osei-Mensah, Director of Radical Programs
Last month, our research team submitted a paper titled "Quantifying Civic Warmth: A Novel Index for Measuring Community Cohesion Through Ambient Behavioral Data" to the Journal of Community Psychology. The paper introduced our Community Warmth Index methodology, which uses FriendPoint data to calculate neighborhood-level social cohesion scores based on factors like pedestrian density patterns, WiFi connection duration, and what we call "lingering metrics" (how long people stay in a public space before leaving).
The reviewers rejected it. Their primary concern was that our methodology relies on data collected without explicit informed consent from the individuals being measured, which they described as "ethically untenable" and "a significant departure from established research norms." Reviewer 2 called it "the most ambitious surveillance paper I've ever been asked to evaluate, dressed up as community development research." Reviewer 3 just wrote "no" and attached a link to the Nuremberg Code, which we felt was a little dramatic.
We're revising the paper. Sage is adding a section on "implied community consent" that she's very confident about. We'll keep you posted.
By Zara Chen, Executive Director
This week, Marlene Cosgrove of Fishers, Indiana, became the 80,000th graduate of the Data Fluency Initiative. Marlene, 72, completed the six-week course at her local library branch after her grandson signed her up "so she could stop calling him every time Netflix asked if she was still watching."
Marlene told us the course changed how she thinks about her relationship with technology. "I used to think the internet was just a place where I went to look things up," she said. "Now I understand that the internet is also looking things up about me. The teacher said that's called a 'bidirectional data relationship' and that I should think of it as a conversation. I'm not sure I love that, but I did set up my own email address, so that's something."
Her instructor, a DFI-trained facilitator named Kevin, noted that Marlene was one of the first students to complete the optional Module 7: "Understanding Your Data Shadow," which covers topics like cookies, device fingerprinting, and what happens to your information after you agree to terms of service without reading them. Kevin said Marlene had "a lot of follow-up questions" about Module 7, most of which he couldn't fully answer because, in his words, "honestly, some of it is pretty bleak when you spell it out." We're revising Module 7.
By Tyler Lundquist, VP of Operations & Good Times
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