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Monthly Archives: January 2007

Weekly Sampler: Fire Victim Gratitude

Posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 by • 2 comments

This past week saw about 200 messages posted in the various neighborhood forums hosted by Front Porch Forum in and around Burlington, VT. People often ask for a concise summary of what members submit to their neighborhood forum… I’ll share some of the topics from the past week. If this works, perhaps I’ll repeat in the weeks ahead. In no particular order:

  • Thank you to neighbors from fire victims in Essex
  • Wireless broadband in Westford
  • Seeking neighbor to sew on buttons in Burlington
  • Sugarshack open-door offer in Westford
  • Pick-up basketball game discussion
  • Senior center programs announced
  • Seeking bridge game, apartment, drum lessons, bike route, sled run, contractor
  • Sidewalk snowplowing in Essex
  • School Commissioner update in Burlington’s Ward 5
  • Many people seeking leads for home snow removal
  • Movie night at Euro Gourmet for Five Sisters neighborhood
  • NYC dog seeking new home in Vermont
  • Impeachment petition circulating in various towns
  • Free wine rack, car seat, and lots of other stuff
  • Snow parking ban announcements
  • Seeking off-street parking during bans
  • Housing regs discussion in the Old North End
  • For sale: snow shoes, yoga lessons, GIS services, singing Valentines
  • Lots of municipal news in Winooski… ice rink status, etc.
  • Waterfront airshow comments
  • Found: aqua blue fleece hat
  • Available: housekeeper, babysitter, real estate appraiser
  • Lots of new member introductions
  • And, a week can’t go by without… Lost cat!

Block Parties Popping Up all Over

Posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 by • 1 comment

Human beings are social creatures. The current high degree of individual isolation in the United States appears to this layperson to be at an all-time high. The culprits? Who knows? Television, suburban sprawl, migration and job turnover, fear of strangers and crime… the internet?

So… here’s some good news. In many of the neighborhoods in which Front Porch Forum hosts a forum, people are throwing block parties in order to meet their neighbors (and reconnect with those they already know). In most cases, the neighborhood forum was both the catalyst to gather and the means to issue the invitation. In others, people are using their forum to invite a broader swath of the neighborhood than just the folks they know.

One forum member in the Old North End challenged her neighbors:

I appreciate reading everyone’s experience and stories on how to solve the recycling problem and crime. However, I think one of the long term solutions is to stop being reactive and start having discussions about how to raise the social capital of this neighborhood. Can we start talking about events, social activities, neighborly gestures and other positive things we can start doing to benefit the neighborhood?

After ten days and many good responses, she wrote again to the neighborhood:

Hi – Thanks to everyone who responded to my call for social capital building. To start us off, I would like to invite everyone in the ONE Central Forum to my place on Sunday from 1-4 pm for dessert and coffee. If you’d like to bring something, that would be great… but not necessary.

Other recent examples occurred in: Hinesburg, Richmond, South Burlington, Charlotte, and neighborhoods in Burlington: Birchcliff, Appletree Point, Staniford, and many in the Five Sisters.

NY Times weighs in on Local Online

Posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 by • No comments yet

Bob Tedeschi has an interesting article in the New York Times Sunday about local online efforts:

Across the United States, citizen bloggers and deep-pocketed entrepreneurs are creating town-specific, and even neighborhood-specific, Web sites where the public can read and contribute items too small or too fleeting for weekly newspapers. Suburban towns across the greater New York area are joining in, giving residents a new way to avoid traffic snags, find a lost dog or just vent about a local hot-button issue.

“It replaces the guy from 200 years ago who rang the bell in town,” said Chris Marengo, a lawyer in Pleasantville, N.Y., who visits www.Pleasantville.AmericanTowns.com every few days to stay abreast of local events. “It’s as provincial as it gets.”

Pleasantville is one of thousands of municipalities on the AmericanTowns service, which is based in Fairfield, Conn. Like other community-oriented sites, AmericanTowns offers users the chance to post information free, to bolster postings by site editors.

Other sites mentioned include: WestportNow.com and Baristanet.  There’s some genuine success here, however, different than Front Porch Forum‘s neighborhood-level approach.

Amazing Tools and Content at Harvard

Posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 by • 1 comment

What a delight! I just returned from a couple days in Cambridge, MA… invited to participate at a Harvard workshop about innovative local uses of the internet, focusing on politics. The event was hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Sunlight Foundation. About 50 people were invited from around the country.

About half of the speakers were content providers, mostly local and state-level political bloggers. The other half were online tool developers focused on improving public access to information about state and federal legislatures. I strongly recommend checking out what I was lucky enough to see. Some of the participants have kindly blogged and wiki-ed about it already…
David Weinberger, Ethan Zuckerman, David Gillmor, Campaigns Wikia… and others, I’m sure. Try Technorati (photos too).

On the one hand we had bloggers generating great content about fairly narrow topics. On the other were people developing incredible tools for drilling into all sort of data and stories about what’s really going on behind the scenes in Congress and the statehouses. Most of the folks in both these camps shared one challenge… engaging a wide-enough audience.

So Front Porch Forum was met with curiosity and interest. We’re building surprisingly high participation numbers when viewed from a geographical per capita perspective. Lots of great questions and leads. I need to explore more of what was on display. More later, perhaps.

Thanks to Berkman and Sunlight for bringing me to this wonderful event, and to all my colleagues for sharing their projects and insights. A hopeful way to spend the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. By the way, snow in Vermont kept me in Cambridge/Somerville an extra night… a local cousin came to my rescue!

Local Reviews from Strangers vs. Neighbors

Posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 by • No comments yet

Millions of dollars are flowing into dot.com start-ups that provide the public a place to read and write reviews on just about anything local… restaurants, stores, etc. Some include: insiderpages.com, judysbook.com, riffs.com, yelp.com, and zipingo.com. Blogosphere comments swirl around their relative merits and their mangement ups and downs… hard to hear the true tune through the din.

Some of the comments seen recently: Rahul Pathak, Naffziger’s Net, Greg Sterling, Andy Sack, TechCrunch and another. It goes on and on, of course. Where’s there’s money invested, there’s commentary.

Front Porch Forum does local review too, but it’s a different model… the reviews are requested and then the reviews come from nearby neighbors. So (1) the reviews are demand driven, and (2) there’s credibility because the advice is coming from the person around the corner with his/her real identity provided. And this is only one of many uses that our neighborhood forums are supporting… classifieds, community organizing, news, etc. It all adds up to helping neighbors connect and foster community within neighborhoods.

In our first city (Burlington, VT), we’re hosting 130 adjacent neighborhood forums that in sum cover the entire metro-area. Five to ten percent of the local households have joined in our first few months with dozens of neighborhoods in the 20-40% range and a couple exceeding 90% already. And it’s all driven by word of mouth and a spinkle of local media attention.

Local Online Changes

Posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 by • No comments yet

David Wilcox writes about changes in the field of local online and links to several examples in England, France and the United States:

The early models of local online communities – like Oncom – aimed to replicated physical proximity online. “Please come to our your space and contribute ….” Some local interests did, many didn’t, and it proved difficult to get a sustainable mix of funding, advertising, and volunteer effort.

I submitted a comment to his blog about Front Porch Forum… a new model that showing early promise.

Fence Talkers Happier?

Posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 by • No comments yet

Kevin Harris writes from England:

The Sunday Times had this article the other day, about a report to the Whitehall Wellbeing Working Group, which suggests that the attempt to quantify a personal “sense of wellbeing” is part of a move by all the main political parties to go beyond purely financial measures of wellbeing in setting goals for policy. Well anyway, it claims that people who take the time to chat over the fence to their neighbours tend to be happier.

Front Porch Forum‘s mission is to help neighbors connect and foster community within neighborhoods.  It seems from our experience that the simple act of chatting over the fence makes a huge difference in people’s lives and in the well being of a community.  Our online forums get the conversation flowing and, when things are working well, that spills over into face-to-face interaction.

MLK Day of Community Service

Posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 by • No comments yet

Rob Filitor, an AmeriCorps State Volunteer for Champlain Housing Trust, had an idea… help people to give some community service on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to benefit their own neighborhood, or another one nearby. So he approached Front Porch Forum and we worked out a couple options. If you’re local to Chittenden County, Vermont, consider this:

1. People ask how to make their neighborhood forum successful… it’s straight forward. Tell your neighbors about it and ask them to sign up and use it! Several Front Porch Forum members will be fanning out across their own neighborhoods and towns to distribute flyers door-to-door on or around MLK Day (Jan. 15). You can do this in your area too! Members can download a neighborhood-specific flyer at http://frontporchforum.com… click the Pitch In link.

2. A group of AmeriCorps State Volunteerss will be walking across downtown Burlington and the Old North End distributing FPF flyers door-to-door, and they’re looking for other folks to join them on this national day of community service. If you’re interested, please RSVP to Rob Filitor (rmfilitor_AT_gmail_DOT_com) by Jan. 13. They will meet at Radio Bean on N. Winooski Ave. at Pearl St. in Burlington on Jan. 15 at noon.

Since Rob’s notion, I’ve heard more tales today:

3. The dean of Rock Point School is lining up high school students to distribute flyers across the New North End of Burlington on or around MLK Day… that’s thousands of households!

4. A member spoke to a group of retirees at the Charlotte Senior Center yesterday about Front Porch Forum and was surprised by the enthusiastic response… this use of the internet appeals to more than just the young and tech savvy apparently.

5. The superintendent of a local school district told me she plans to hand deliver copies of a local newspaper story about Front Porch Forum to the houses in her neighborhood next week when she walks her pooch each morning.

And there’s more that I never hear about… at least not directly. I got a call from a nearby Post Office reporting that Front Porch Forum flyers were showing up in mailboxes… that’s a no no (unless each piece has postage affixed). Not sure who did that. And a friend reported getting a flyer on her windshield on the other side of the county… wasn’t me. Wow! This is getting downright contagious. Thanks to the dozens (hundreds?) of local folks who are spreading the word… let’s keep it rolling! The people who join, the more valuable the service becomes for everyone.

Yahoo Groups and Swiss Army Knives

Posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 by • 2 comments

For the past couple days a group of old friends, now spread across the country, have exchanged views about global climate change, Al Gore’s movie, and the like. These are dear friends who I don’t really have a chance to connect with anymore, so the exchange was welcomed… even if the topic is a tough one.

Then Margie wrote “does anyone mind if I set up a Yahoo Group for us?” To which I replied “I’ll join, but I’ll bet dollar to donuts that this move will kill the conversation.” “Why?” she asked.

Good question, but I know it’s not uncommon. What is it about Yahoo Groups that seems so appealing when first suggested to help some people communicate, but then often sees the group and it’s postings dry up into an online ghost town? What percentage of Yahoo Groups are dead or dying? How much opportunity is lost?

Another friend in our little crew, Naomi, chimed in “I can’t deal with anything complicated I have to sign up for.” Well that covers a big part of it… Yahoo Groups is not user friendly. Keep in mind that Naomi’s been using a computer most every day for the past 15 years that I’ve known her.

Some folks ask about Front Porch Forum… isn’t it just Yahoo Groups for neighborhoods? No. Not really. It’s simpler, easier to use for the average neighbor, and designed to fulfill our mission… to help neighbors connect and foster community within neighborhoods. Yahoo Groups seems to be designed to be all things to all people… an impressive feat of engineering, but not the best tool if you’re looking to make your neighborhood a great place to live.

Kind of like a Swiss Army knife vs. a screw driver. Need an all-in-one tool that can get the job done in lots of settings? Swiss Army/Yahoo Groups makes sense. Or, do you have a specialized task in mind… driving 100 screws or connecting with your neighbors and fostering community? Then you want the dedicated tool… Front Porch Forum (or the screw driver… you pick).

On second thought, make that a Swiss Army knife that capable folks like Naomi find too hard to pry open.

Yahoo buys Social Network Site for $10M

Posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 by • No comments yet

Yahoo continues to add to its lineup of social media offerings, as reported by paidContent.org:

This rumor has been going on for a couple of months, and finally the confirmation, via Forbes.com: Yahoo has bought the distributed social network MyBlogLog…the story says the price is around $10 million. The Orlando, FL-based website that enables readers to leave information about themselves, building a social networks on blogs and on social networking sites.

MyBlogLog was launched June 2006… half a year ago.  I’ve got a half-eaten box of cereal older than that.

About Blog

Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more

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