SPACES has launched— get ready Oakville!

Oakville, your moment has arrived! 

Built by Village Media, SPACES makes its debut today in Oakville, with expansion plans coming to many more communities in the near future.  

SPACES is a revolutionary concept that’s been five years in the making with the goal to change the way our communities connect online. 

It’s engineered to be hyper-local, knowledge-based and safe — while setting up the foundation to reignite authentic community connections through small online forums, or spaces. 

Each space is a pocket of connectivity, encouraging locals to stay informed about what’s happening in their area and foster authentic relationships around shared interests. 

Looking for fun new ways to incorporate fitness into your life? Tony Galluzzo, local gym owner, hosts the Fitness space. A space to shine a light on fitness trends for people 55+, to increase longevity and overall health. 

If you are passionate about networking, building strong relationships and overall wellness, hop over to the Health and Wellness space - a great place to come and connect with other likeminded people looking for ways to improve themselves. 

Don’t want to spend another Saturday night flipping through Netflix? Check out our Things to do space and find your next event in Oakville.

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Nestled in a trusted news ecosystem, SPACES is jumping on the opportunity to bring news and audiences back together. Built adjacent to OakvilleNews.org, it’s a social media haven to share knowledge and factual information, at a time when trust and facts are eroding from public discourse. 

Over the last year, Meta’s news ban has left Canadians encountering far fewer sources of legitimate news. McGill University and the University of Toronto’s Media Ecosystem Observatory reported a total loss of 11 million fewer views per day on Facebook and Instagram combined.

In a report titled Old News, New Reality: A Year of Meta's News Ban in Canada, they say “Canadians are now encountering political and current affairs content ‘through a more biased and less factual lens than before.’” 

“As a society that cares about the truth and cares about having a population that's informed to ensure better democratic outcomes and to hold politicians to account, this is extremely bad news,” the report reads. 

Enter SPACES, a homebase to exchange ideas and real-time updates — all while reviving the lost art of community engagement. This platform enables residents to forge bonds that are rooted in trust and respect.

There are 22 spaces unique to Oakville. Whether you’re into fitness, wellness or supporting small business, there’s likely a space for you. 

Do you miss the Oakville Jazz Festival? Fall back into the scene with local jazz singer Dyanne Dumas in the Live Music space.

And this is just Day 1. If there’s a hobby or topic that you think would make a great space, let the SPACES team know by suggesting it in the feedback form. 

These spaces are headed by local experts — they are the people within your circle whom you go to for advice, inspiration and insights. 

Hosts also act as moderators, and help keep spaces safe. They are stewards of SPACES Community Guidelines — the rulebook that all members agree to abide by that keeps dialogue welcoming, respectful and courteous. 

Want to take a leading role in SPACES? Express your interest in hosting by filling out the So you want to be a SPACES host form. 

SEE: OakvilleNews wants you — to host one of our new SPACES

There are six other features put in place in SPACES that function to ensure the forums are safe, not harmful to our individual or collective health and not toxic.

During development of SPACES, our team polled Sault Ste. Marie residents on what matters most. We found that one of the top priorities was ensuring users are verified. Audiences strongly expressed there needed to be a way to prevent scammers, impersonators and general distrust. And that’s exactly what the team implemented. 

Members of SPACES need to be verified through an onboarding process, by providing an email address and phone number. What’s more: In order to post, comment, react or share anything in SPACES, users will have to go through this authentication process first. Meaning, all users will be registered with an account, complete with their real name and photo or chosen avatar.

We’re using artificial intelligence and a list of blacklisted words as two additional technical guardrails that work to automatically detect and remove hate speech, harassment and offensive language. 

Additionally, there isn’t an algorithm on the platform. SPACES is a real-time snapshot of the latest conversations about what’s happening in your area. This means there’s no algorithmic bias, no chance for users to game the system and no chance of unfair prominence of any posts in the newsfeed. 

Plus, users can opt into or out of notifications as they choose, under the manage notifications tab. So users will only get pinged based on their chosen parameters — no irritating alerts. 

Lastly, members can choose which spaces suit their interests, and therefore will only see posts from spaces they’ve joined. This means no irrelevant content will fill up their feeds.

Now, it’s over to you — take a peek, tell us what you think, say hello to a host and join some spaces. 

Today is the day we’re reclaiming social media, and taking SPACES public.