In 2018, two entrepreneurs — Tom McGeveran and Josh Young — approached Columbia Journalism Review editor and publisher Kyle Pope with a proposition. The two had created a web app called Galley a few years earlier as a kind of anti-Twitter, a place where users could have thoughtful discussions with a group of trusted collaborators. Galley looked more or less like a chat app, but its key feature was the “trust” button, which appeared on everyone’s profile. Once you clicked it, you could then start a discussion and either make it wide open, or restrict it to only those users you had explicitly trusted.
The idea was that conversations could be open to anyone, or they could be restricted. The person who started the conversation was in control, and they could choose specific people to be a part of it, or they could restrict it to only those they chose to trust. Unlike the free-for-all that Twitter discussions often became, no one on Galley had the right to enter your conversation if you didn’t want them to. The idea was to get a free flow of information from as many people as possible, but not at the expense of civility or safety.
Tom and Josh suggested that CJR could use Galley for discussions with readers and journalists, as well as trusted members of the broader community? Josh offered to continue running it and handle all of the back-end software operations if we wanted him to, so Kyle and I discussed it and agreed that it seemed like a worthwhile experiment — and I agreed to work with Josh to get it up and running. Kyle wrote something in November of 2018 introducing Galley as a new forum to talk about journalism:
Continue reading “Remembering Galley, the anti-Twitter”