Photo: Marvin Meyer / Unsplash
The Mandate
Where people and organisations
meet the network.
The Places Office is Platform's operating desk for the social and governance layer — the infrastructure that lets every member, company, and community body communicate, organise, and participate across the POCITS network. Every profile, every post, every connection lives on the infrastructure this office builds and maintains.
Places has two faces that are always present together: a public stream outward and an in-house stream inward. Those two faces have names. They are not two offices — they are the same office, seen from two directions.
The Two Streams
S
channel · public
Social
The public face — what followers and the wider network see.
›
channel · public
Social
The public face — what followers and the wider network see.
Social is the public stream. When a person or organisation posts to Social, it reaches their followers and surfaces in the wider network. This is the stream the ~80% interact with — the town square, the feed, the public face of every community body.
Social posts carry a reach choice (who/where: contacts, county, international) and a channel tag (social). These are independent. A post can reach just your county and still be a social post — or reach the international body and be circuit-only. The two axes do not determine each other.
C
channel · in-house
Circuit
The in-house stream — participation, governance, and shop-talk.
›
channel · in-house
Circuit
The in-house stream — participation, governance, and shop-talk.
Circuit is the in-house stream. Every node — a company, a department, a county — has its own circuit by default. It carries technical, participation, and governance material that the ~20% who live there want, without filling the public stream with content the other 80% didn't ask for.
Circuit nests the way the org already nests: a department has its circuit, its division has a circuit above that, the whole company has one above that. You sit in multiple circuits at once, at different depths, mirroring your real position in the org. No separate configuration — the nesting is inherited from the structure that already exists.
Access to a circuit is governed at both ends. A charter account sets what is possible — including requiring membership to view or post. Circuit follow is conditional on access; social follow generally is not.
Associate with the Places Portfolio
Build the infrastructure
the whole network runs on.
Platform associates on the Places portfolio work on the systems that make social and governance participation possible at scale. Follow mechanics, feed architecture, circuit nesting, membership tooling — the substrate underneath every profile, post, and vote on the platform. You build here first. Every other division runs on what the Places office makes reliable.