Join the Digital Placemaking Team at Calling Up Justice
At Calling Up Justice, we don’t just build events—we build places. Digital Placemaking is a term we created to describe our evolving practice of crafting meaningful, accessible, justice-centered digital environments where community can form, thrive, and return. In a world where online spaces are often extractive, chaotic, or exclusionary, our digital placemaking centers care, agency, artistry, and connection. It transforms the internet from a tool into a home.
What Is Digital Placemaking?
Placemaking traditionally refers to the creation and stewardship of physical public spaces that foster belonging and cultural expression. Calling Up Justice extends this concept into the digital realm. Digital Placemaking is the intentional design, facilitation, and maintenance of online environments that function as real community spaces—with culture, history, safety practices, shared values, and room for emergence.
In our practice, digital places are not just meeting links or platforms. They are sites of culture, continuous collaborations, and living ecosystems shaped by disabled, queer, BIPOC, and justice-oriented creators. Digital places can host grief rituals, dance parties, strategy sessions, quiet co-working, art-making, civic actions, and healing spaces. The goal is not content—it’s connection. The goal is not technology—it’s belonging.
How Calling Up Justice Is Innovating Digital Placemaking
We innovate by expanding what digital space can be and who it is for. For over four years, Calling Up Justice has been experimenting with multiple platforms—Zoom, Gathertown, OhYaya, Discord, Twitch, and other emerging tools—to craft environments with soul, access, and intention.
Some of our core digital placemaking sites include:
CripCreate (Zoom)
A twice-weekly disability justice co-working and socializing space running continuously for more than four years. CripCreate functions like a digital studio, community center, and creative sanctuary accessible from anywhere.
F the Gala (OhYaya Platform)
A playful, expansive space where we dismantle ableist and classist fundraising norms. This is a digital gala anyone can attend—centered on joy, liberation, and imagination.
Digital Encampments (Gathertown + Experimental Platforms)
Large-scale digital campuses built for festivals, protests, residencies, celebrations, and collective care. Our encampments have included performance stages, dance floors, art galleries, healing zones, and ephemeral community structures. These spaces come alive through collaborative worldbuilding.
Digital Placemakers Cohort (Thursdays at 9 AM PT)
Every Thursday, our Digital Placemaking Team meets to skill-share, prototype, and collectively maintain the systems that hold our communities. This cohort manages our Gathertown spaces, experiments with new tools, and digs into the philosophy of digital placemaking—how to make virtual space feel real, accessible, and relational.
Together, we have produced:
- Digital theater festivals
- MLK Day and Juneteenth gatherings
- Accessible audienceing and community rituals
- Civic events such as the Medicaid for All vigil
- Endless opportunities for connection across geography, disability, and culture
This is digital placemaking as artistry and mutual aid. This is experimentation in public. This is justice practice as architecture.
Who Can Join?
Digital Placemakers is an open community. You do not need technical experience, design skills, or performance background. You can join if you:
- care about accessible digital futures
- want to co-create spaces where marginalized communities thrive
- enjoy worldbuilding, facilitation, or behind-the-scenes creative work
- want to learn new tools and experiment with emerging platforms
- or simply want to be in community with generous, imaginative people
Digital Placemaking is not a club—it is a commons.
Join Us
We meet every Thursday at 9 AM PT in our main organizing area to plan, create, troubleshoot, and dream together.
If you have ever wanted to shape the future of online gathering, if you have ever felt that the internet could be more alive, more accessible, more joyful, more human—this is your invitation.
Come help us build the places our communities deserve.