Content Curation & Surfacing
How the community surfaces, rates, and amplifies its best work — across formats — for the audience it is actually trying to reach.
If AV is about producing the work, this sandbox is about choosing which work to put in front of which audience. The seed conversation was the Forum 5 exchange between Lisa Crawford, Sue Seccombe, Geoff Theiss, Gabriel Rymberg, and Mo Siegel about how the institutions can promote the highest-quality community-produced videos.
This is broader than AV because it spans formats: written content, video, podcasts, and social posts. It is also the actionable form of David Kantor's Forum 3 diagnosis that 6–15% of community content is public-facing — the answer is not necessarily to make more, but to surface the best of what already exists.
Anchors
Lisa Crawford
Posed the central question: what does "best" mean? (Forum 5)
Foundation
Sue Seccombe
Proposed an Amazon-style rating system, sliced by age cohort
Fellowship
Geoff Theiss
Brought the Angel Studios endorsement model into the conversation
Fellowship
Gabriel Rymberg
Framed "build in public" as engagement, not leak; cited Angel Studios voting model
CFU
Mo Siegel
Cited Truth Book high-performing topics with view counts; proposed internal/external bifurcation
Foundation
Projects
- conceptChris Wood (chair) · Lisa Crawford · Sue Seccombe · Geoff Theiss · Gabriel Rymberg · Mo Siegel
Forum 5 distribution-and-promotion discussion
The Roundtable's seed artefact for this sandbox: an extended chair-led exchange on what makes a community-produced piece shareable beyond the readership.
- liveJim Zigarelli · Mo Siegel
Truth Book trending / seasonal slider
Existing operational example of curated surfacing inside one channel. Could inform what a cross-channel community surface would look like.
- liveFoundation digital team
Foundation Google Ads grant programme
Already amplifying Foundation digital properties. Live data on which framings actually convert with non-readers. Worth bringing into the curation conversation as evidence base.
Open questions
- What does "best" actually mean — best for whom? (Lisa Crawford, Forum 5)
- Should the community adopt a rating system, sliced by age cohort, modelled on Amazon-style reviews? (Sue Seccombe, Forum 5)
- Is Angel Studios's community-endorsement model the right shape — voting, storytelling participation around selected pieces — instead of competing on YouTube discovery? (Geoff Theiss / Gabriel Rymberg, Forum 5)
- Where is the line between institutional newsletter (wrong venue for daily promotion, per Chris Wood) and institutional social-media accounts (which can amplify community videos)?
- How do we operationalise David Kantor's 6–15% public-facing diagnosis — by producing more, by surfacing more of what exists, or both?
From the forums
- 2026 · forum 3 multi media 1
David Kantor's 6–15% public-facing diagnosis. Brad Gardner's sanctuary-vs-marketplace framing.
- 2026 · forum 5 how can we help
The chair-led distribution-and-promotion discussion — the canonical seed for this sandbox.
Get involved
Sandboxes are explicitly meant to have permeable edges. If you have a project, an idea, or a piece of work that fits this sandbox, the right next step is to talk to one of the anchors above, or to surface the suggestion at the next gathering.