on cultivating digital third spaces (aka the fourth space)

29.10.24: Way back in August of 2023, I wrote a blog that aimed to summarise some personal reflections about digital life, community management, and researcher/praxis reflections a year into my role with The Turing Way. As Jia Tolentino wrote in her book Trick Mirror: “I write to think”, and for me, this is true as well. Journalistic or creative writing uses a very different set of muscles than documentation or academic writing, and as I round out my second year with the project, I wanted to document these broader reflections. This post was started in 2024, but I finally got around to finishing it in 2025. That means that it may be slightly out of date, but much of it still applies today..

The growth of digital ‘third spaces’

It took me a long time to realise that as a Community Manager of an open source project, I’m a steward of a kind of “digital third space”.

The “third space” is a term coined by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg, as spaces for gathering that play a different role than home (the first place) or work (the second place). For him, third spaces were “cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons and other hangouts at the heart of a community” (The Great Good Place, 1999). In many ways, his book highlighted the importance of third spaces in a time when they seemed to be disappearing from American life, in favor of suburbanisation and the increasing privatisaton of public spaces.

These third spaces were important, because they created social bonds and connections outside of the context of working life, labor, and the nuclear family. I love how Lia Schifitto described them in the syllabus project:

“In the most basic sense, a third place is somewhere people gather that is neither the home (first place) nor for labor (second place). There is a certain magic to third places. They subvert barriers and boundaries we often accept, expanding limitations we unknowingly perpetuate. Third places exist in the in-between, a space both liminal and seemingly permanent and tangible. They are both the site of connection but also the connection itself.”

Many urban planners, designers, and sociologists have understood this implicitly and at length. Jane Jacobs talked about the importance of “sidewalks” in facilitating community connections in urban spaces. Of course, many cities across the world continue to have vibrant “third spaces”, and it would be a grave mistake to universalise the idea that all third spaces are in decline. I’m thinking of city squares (plazas) in Spanish cities, or coffee culture in Turkish cones. These spaces are very

Third spaces haven taken many forms, and will continue to evolve as we do. They are coffee shops, community gardens, churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, co-ops, pubs, parks, clubs, music venues – even malls.

The rise of digital third spaces and open source ‘communities’

From the get go, the internet operated as a kind of “third space” for many. It was an escape from the norms and values in life IRL (“in real life”), for better or for worse. Countless digital scholars have documented the cultures of digital life: from hacker communities, to forums, to dating apps and how they have affected our digital life. I remember the forums and digital communities I myself hung out on as a pre-teen, finding other pseudo-hacker-writer types on myspace and on forums, formative third spaces of my digitally-oriented youth.

The free and open source software movements similarly emerged from one of the world’s most famous third spaces (or perhaps for some, a second space!): that of the university. As hardware, software, and services unbundled in the breakdown of mainframe computers, it was at the university that early computer scientists were able to reimagine an understanding of software that went beyond intellectual property and copyright to something perhaps more.

In the years since, this way of working has expanded in scope and size. Open source communities are both vibrant and precarious ecosystems. They’re also a critical infrastructure, as this famous comic from xkcd defly illustrates, and as Nadia Eghbal wrote about in her book Bridges and Roads. As their important has become increasing visislbe, various funds to support their maintenance have emerged: from Mozilla’s DFL Infrastructure Fund, to Open Technology Fund’s Free and Open Source Software Sustainability Fund, to the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation’s Essential Open Source Software for Science. Fiscal sponsors like Code for Science & Society and Educopia

How spaces changed during the COVID-19 pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, our sense of spaces and the boundaries between them blended. For many, the COVID-19 pandemic was the first time that many first and second spaces went online, along with most other services: from corporate jobs, to school classes, to doctor’s appointments, to friend catch-ups and even parties.

During my research with the OpenStreetMap community, it was palpable how much the project operated as a third space for many folks stuck at home throughout 2020 and 2021 in particular. As I participated in remote monthly mapathons with Missing Maps, I became a contributor too, understanding that the project’s role as a crowdsourced map had a much larger social function: for purpose, belonging, and community-building within the mapping community. As I began to participate in other open projects like Edit-a-Thons for Wikipedia and open knowledge communities, I witnessed these same dynamics at play.

Of course right around the same time, we were also all witness to many discussions about how these blurred lines between first, second, and third spaces (that is: the home become a place of home, work, and recreation) was perpetuating a culture of burnout, and a shift in the culture of work itself. It was COVID-19 that perhaps accelerated these trends that were already underway.

Digital third spaces of open science and The Turing Way

When I joined The Turing Way, the paid staff working on the project based at the Alan Turing Institute was expanding. As a part of people’s roles at the Turing, many were required to contribute to The Turing Way as a part of their job remit. While 10% of their time was the number cited - the much broader idea before this was: how can people be supported to work on open source projects as a part of their paid work? In other words: what happens when people are paid to contribute to an open source project?

When I joined the team, I spent many hours thinking and talking together with my colleagues to ask them about what contributing to open source looks like in the context of their work: what encourages or enables it? What prevents it? How does that change your relationship to the project? To your work?

I had been witness to the kind of collaborative environment at OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia, and interested in how I could steward that kind of environment within the context of the Turing, especially in a post-COVID landscape. I learned a lot about what makes for a third space for many, and the second space for some, and what happens when you mix the two (or even the three). Here are a few learnings.

Three Learnings from facilitating third spaces

1. People generally tend to want different things from their second and third spaces

If there’s anything I’ve learned from my team, it’s that third spaces are often very different from first and second spaces – both in the social norms and expectations of participants, as well as the facilitation of the space itself. I learned from my colleagues and collaborators how different their expectations differed.

On the surface, this makes sense. You probably wouldn’t like your best friend to interact with you in the same way that your line manager does, and you wouldn’t expect them to as well. In many professions where this line is blurred, such as therapy, much preparation and structure goes into developing and stewarding a relationship that enables the simultaneous kind of psychological safety and professionalism needed to do such vulnerable work.

As an open source community manager in both an institutional setting as well as a volunteer one, I found the need for meetings and community calls to differ in particular.

For example, facilitating a third space looks like facilitating spaces of belonging, joy, meaning, and subversion: people want something different that they don’t get from their first or second space. This might deprioritise efficiency over connection and emergence. On the other hand, facilitating a second space might look like: managing expectations and people, project management, professionalism, leadership, and efficiency. This might prioritise decision-making and speed. Joy, meaning, and belonging remain important of course, but remain secondary to being able to get work done (what folks are paid for after all).

It took me a while to realise that these needs might not necessarily be congruous with each other while running meetings and/or community calls, or rather that the balance was different depending on the call. Last year, I spoke to my team about “professional love languages”, and it was interesting to see how different people’s expectations varied in this too.

Rosie has a great blog about understanding the love languages of your community. Priya Parker’s “On Gathering” and adrienne marie brown’s “Holding Change” have been great texts for learning about facilitating belonging. I’ve also leaned into (and learned a lot about) perhaps more classical project management techniques and facilitation tactics to hold us all accountable to the agenda, ever so gently.

2. At the same time, more than ever, movements are being built on the blurring of the first, second and third space

Despite the fact that people’s expectations may differ from their first, second, and third spaces - let’s face it. The boundaries between spaces have never really been clear and defined as we make them out to be, especially in certain industries.

The role of the boy’s club (both literally and metaphorically) has long been an example of this type of social structure: where personal relationships transfer directly into professional ones and vice versa. Political lobbying can range from professional occupations to formalised rituals of pomp and circumstance, while the real work happens behind the scenes. In the most extreme form, bribing and nepotism can take on similar cadences. Importantly, social movements also spring from a foundation of social relationships, something that Zeynep Tufekci wrote about in her op-ed about protests.

These examples illustrate a kind of universal truth: every institutional structure has a social element, and thereby, all movements are social ones.

After almost ~5 years in the open ecosystem, I’ve learned about just how much it operates off of relationships, relationships that are cultivated not only in spaces like conferences, community calls, and fellowships – but also parties, socials, friendships – and extend far beyond set institutions or projects. This means that not dissimilar from a boys club, these spaces are blurring, whereas the space of personal belonging becomes a place of professional advancement, and the relationships are deeply interwoven with each other.

3. Because digital third spaces are usually moderated by people, what are the third spaces for third space facilitators?

It took me years to realise that as a facilitator, my third space would not necessarily be the same one that I was responsible for as a community manager. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: facilitation comes with a kind of responsibility that should not be taken lightly. If we’re to be trusted with the full selves of others as a professional responsibility, there’s a kind of “duty of care” that emerges that is important to maintain for a community to feel cared for.

In my experience, bringing our full, complicated selves can sometimes break that mutual spell and maintenance of care. Especially because so much care work in third spaces is emotional labor, outlets and “third spaces” (or rather fourth spaces) are necessary, if not integral for emotional health of the facilitator.

Three questions for digital third space facilitators

As I reflect on three years of community management and third spaces broadly, a few questions emerge for others doing similar work, especially as we enter the second half of the 2020s.

1. Where do the (digital) boundaries lie between digital second and third spaces now lie?

In the digital space, particularly on social media, the mediums we use as our professional and personal lives are now interwoven more than ever. Instagrams are places for professional connections. Jobs require slack or discord workspaces, but so do social movements and community groups. We post slivers of our full selves on Linkedin, and other versions on Bluesky or Mastodon. That’s not to talk about the dangers of platform politics (and reliance on Big Tech) that this often inculcates, but rather that the lines between our second and third spaces are more blurred than ever because of the tools and platforms that we use.

2. What is the responsibility of a digital third space in the attention economy – and the shifts in current political life?

A few years ago, I read an article titled “the revolution will (not) be shared on instagram”. The article focuses on how the platform demands a particular kind of engagement that is the antithesis of the kind of work required for social organising. Again, Zeynep Tufekci wrote about this in her op-ed about protests, as did Jenny Odell in her book “How to do Nothing”. What Sophie Bishop calls “influencer creep” is affecting the way in which we engage with the world, because of how our attention is being constantly fought for. In this attention economy, how responsible are facilitators for keeping our attention lazer-focused on what is actuallly important?

3. What is the role of privatisation in the development of digital third spaces?

Over the past few years, I’ve studied, observed, and been in the organising rooms of many different types of calls. Some explicitly acknowledged the kinds of funding that made their work possible, and others didn’t. We know that the funding is scarse and momentum is difficult online, but how are brands/companies/privatisation broadly affecting how we meet together and build community online? This notion of infrastructure of “public space” relates very closely to the ideas behind a “knowledge commons” and “digital commons”.