Category Archives: Media

Portland Press Herald looks at Vermont innovations

Posted on Monday, May 14th, 2012 by Michael • No comments yet

#BTV #VT - From Charles Lawton in yesterday’s Portland Press Herald…

… Two election cycles ago, Howard Dean introduced us to the financial aspect of this [e-government] revolution by showing how Internet-savvy political appeals could mobilize institutionally unconnected individuals into an effective donation and voting bloc.

Since then, Internet appeals and social media have become basic tools of political campaigns.

Another Vermont innovation — Front Porch Forum — has brought the same technological capability to what used to be the town meeting, the pancake breakfast and the church bean supper. It is a virtual meeting place for neighbors to share ideas on topics as mundane as a lost cat and as controversial as ATV trails and town charters. To judge by its glowing testimonials and rapid spread to towns across the Green Mountain state, it has been a great success.

Much is simply an expression of neighborliness — the loan of a sump pump, a reference to a native French speaker, thanks for a bigger-than-average turnout for church bingo.

But other testimonials speak to the forum’s value in building community — “I look forward to reading it every night. I’m not a Facebook fan but I LOVE Front Porch Forum.” And still other comments illustrate its value as a well-utilized source for varying but always respectful, never ranting, opinions on hot-button public issues.

In this last respect, the FPF represents e-government as a reflection not of a more efficient bureaucracy but of a more involved citizenry. And that is its greatest contribution and the one we ought to seek to promote here in Maine.

Tapping Tech 2.0: Transforming Vermont’s Economy

Posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 by Michael • No comments yet

Good looking publication recently released from Vermont Technology Alliance, Vermont Technology Council, and Vermont Biosciences Alliance…

Tapping Tech 2.0: Transforming Vermont’s Economy

See pp. 16-17 for a write-up of Front Porch Forum.

Vermont’s digital future, social media, social responsibility, local politics…

Posted on Friday, May 4th, 2012 by Michael • No comments yet

#BTV #VT - Three compelling events over the next week in Burlington, Vermont…

May 7, 6 PM
#BTVMayor: How Social Media is Redefining Politics
Maglianero Cafe, 47 Maple Street
Front Porch Forum will be featured on the panel.

May 8
Vermont’s Digital Future Conference
Champlain College
FPF will be on the Connecting Communities panel.

May 15
VBSR 2012 Spring Conference – Creating Pathways for Vermont’s Next Business Generation
UVM Davis Center
FPF is proud to be a conference sponsor.

Calais collective community diary…

Posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 by Michael • No comments yet

#Calais #VT - Published on the e-Vermont site today…

Front Porch Forum Helps Calais Neighbors Connect

What if nearly every household in a small rural town were in daily communication with each other? What would change?

e-Vermont partner Front Porch Forum provides towns and neighborhoods with a virtual town green and bulletin board. Once FPF is set up in a town, it opens unlimited possibilities to connect

Calais is a great example.

Out of the 680 households in town, 570 people are members of the Calais Front Porch Forum, and they’ve shared 2,300 postings with neighbors since it began fifteen months ago.

Dozens of lost pets have been reunited with owners, cars sold, used strollers given away, mechanics recommended, break-ins reported and much more. Adoption has reached the point where most local institutions have come to count on it as well, as seen by this posting:

“I do not know if this will work, but my pastor referred me to this FrontPorchForum.com. My car died on me. I am trying to find a ride to work for 10am. If anyone could help it would be greatly appreciated.” -Danielle Duprey

In addition to transactions and news sharing, Calais citizens use their FPF to debate local issues, including exchanges about road conditions, WiFi in the school, and more.

“You know, Front Porch Forum at times may sound more like a lively Town Meeting than neighbors talking while they rock on their front porches, but in the end we seem to have arrived at a pretty good place.” – Elizabeth Davis

Each posting, almost regardless of the topic, weaves an additional strand in the web of community.

“I woke up this morning thinking about FPF… our collective community diary that records where we have been and help us work together where we are going. Thank you everyone for broadening our community, giving us a way to better understand each other.” -Peter Harvey

Top ten reasons neighbors no longer know each other

Posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 by Michael • 2 comments

#VT - From Karen Wyman in the Williston Oberserver…

I remember growing up and knowing everyone on my block, including their pets. All of us neighborhood kids would go on epic bike rides (sans helmets of course) or play group games such as “Manhunt,” “Ghost in the Graveyard,” kickball or Wiffle ball. As darkness fell, we waited until our parents yelled our names before we even thought about heading home.

Some of my favorite memories were created with my childhood next-door-neighbor. Her parents owned a furniture store, and we would spend hours playing “house.” No dollhouse could ever compare to those life-size decorated rooms. I remember calling each other on large rotary phones every morning to see what adventures lay ahead of us that day…

Front Porch Forum is a great way to get recommendations, communicate important information or to simply connect with neighbors for a common interest…

Here are the top ten reasons I believe why neighbors no longer know each other:

#10. Lawn services
Back in the day, the only people working on lawns were the homeowners. This created a great opportunity to run around with the neighbors while Mom and Dad were outside working. Today, hanging out with the TruGreen guys just isn’t the same.

#9. Decline of the front porch
This is another social tie that has gone by the wayside. People now hang out in their backyards on their decks. They probably don’t even know what kind of cars their neighbors drive or what time they get home from work. I used to be able to tell that it was almost supper time when I would see Mr. Whitcomb’s car pull in. Likewise, when I heard his car start up in the morning, I knew it was 7 a.m. without even looking at the clock. Today, if I wanted to be aware of my neighbor’s coming and goings, I would have to follow him on Twitter.

#8. The Internet
Many people can now work from home, do all of their shopping online and even have their groceries delivered. You can conceivably never leave your house.

#7. Gym memberships
Health clubs weren’t really around when I was younger. People would get their workout the old-fashioned way — walking/jogging/biking around the neighborhood. So, if you were out on your front porch or doing your own yard work, you would see them. Today, people head to an out-of-town gym or work out in their own homes with a slew of fitness DVDs. In the past, there were only so many times we could rewind those Jane Fonda VHS tapes before we gave up and headed outside for a walk.

#6. Dual-income families
There are simply fewer people home during the day. The adults go to work and the kids — and even the dogs — go to daycare.

#5. No free time
We have so many “time saving” advances, yet we don’t seem to be any more efficient. You’d think not having to get up and walk across the room to change the television channel or adjust the volume would give us at least an extra hour a week!

#4. Fear
The media has scared us so much that we may actually fear strangers. They constantly remind us there could be predators or meth labs right next door to us. This doesn’t really encourage people to bring a fruit basket to a new neighbor.

#3. Laziness
If we get to know our neighbors, they may actually (gasp) ask us for a favor. We don’t want to water their plants while they’re away or help them finish their basement.

#2. School bus stops
It seems like the buses these days stop at each child’s house. We had one stop that the entire neighborhood walked to. That’s where we always met the new kids and got to know each other’s parents.

Click here to see reason #1!

Baltimore Sun covers emerging neighbor-connect online space

Posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2012 by Michael • No comments yet

#VT - Jamie Smith Hopkins paints a vivid portrait of the quickly emerging online space where neighbors connect in tomorrow’s Baltimore Sun…

People looking for an online neighborhood forum used to have few free choices beyond discussion sites such as Yahoo groups or email lists. Now options are popping up left and right. Besides Nextdoor, which launched nationally last fall, there’s Home Elephant, My Virtual Neighbor, Neighborland, Yatown and Hey, Neighbor! — to name a few. Some are available in just a handful of cities so far.

“There’s probably 20 startups in this space,” said Michael Wood-Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of another site, Front Porch Forum. His company launched eons ago, in Internet terms — 2006…

Neighbors write in with questions, problems, ideas or needs — “Urgently seeking lost dog,” for example — and the company compiles everything into an emailed newsletter that comes out as often as there’s sufficient content.

In Burlington, Vt., 10,000 of the city’s 16,000 households have signed up. In Westford, Vt., residents used Front Porch Forum to start a food pantry. And in tiny Moretown, one of the Vermont communities hit hard by Tropical Storm Irene last August, neighbors reported that having had the e-newsletter for a year beforehand turned out to be a big help.

“During that year, book clubs were formed, dog-walking groups got together, the school’s PTA got stronger, more people were showing up for events,” Wood-Lewis said. “So when a disaster hit, it wasn’t a bunch of kind of vaguely familiar strangers who weren’t sure how to reach each other. They were living in a community.”

Atlanta-based Home Elephant, which launched last year, allows users in the same neighborhood to share news, chat and pass on alerts. People can sign in through Facebook and let the company suggest neighbors to “friend.” Nearly 6,200 neighborhoods in more than 70 countries — including some areas in Maryland — are using it.

Chandler Powell, a Home Elephant co-founder, said… he feels like the David to Nextdoor’s Goliath, because Nextdoor is a Silicon Valley startup with venture capital money. Home Elephant — so named because elephants are social creatures — has no marketing budget and is a nights-and-weekends labor of love at the moment, Powell said.

Nextdoor, with its Facebook-like feed for neighborhood conversations, has an immediately familiar look. It also has designated spots for recommendations, resources, photos and the like, along with a map showing where participants live. And users can receive neighborhood “urgent alerts” sent as text messages to their cellphones.

If there’s no Nextdoor site in your neighborhood, you can start one — but only if you get nine other neighbors to sign up within three weeks. The company is trying to avoid ghost-town websites.

To join, you have to prove you live where you say you do — providing your home telephone number for a verification call, for instance. Or a vetted neighbor can vouch for you, which is how Nextdoor said most people end up joining.

Of the approximately 2,000 Nextdoor neighborhood sites, 20 are in Maryland. Seven more are in the pilot stage locally, waiting for enough sign-ups.

UFO sighted over Smugglers’ Notch

Posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2012 by Michael • 5 comments

After midnight last night, I observed a very large bright red light in the sky traveling north away from Smugglers’ Notch ski area. It appeared to be quite high in the sky, above the mountains and traveling slow. It was not a plane. There was no sound. I ran outside and watched as it traveled over my house. It appeared to go higher as it continued, in straight line path in the sky. I watched until it disappeared over the mountain behind us. I was hoping someone else observed this unusual phenomenon. I would also appreciate any reasonable explanation as to what this could have been.

Posted by Karen on the Cambridge Front Porch Forumtoday!

FOLLOW UP POSTINGS…

I am very intrigued by your sighting… I’ve visited the crop circles in England and I do think that we have neighbors… Thank you for sharing your experience.
It was most likely a Flying Sky Lantern. We have sent those into the sky many times and had neighbors comment on seeing a UFO.
What you saw may have been a satellite. I’ve watched them in the past. Check out the web site stellarium.org for real time satellite and star locations, it’s an amazing site!
I don’t know how bright or how fast your object was but Mars is a very bright red right now and would be about where you described it at midnight. Planets, especially Mars and Venus are often mistaken for UFOs, especially if scudding clouds give them a sense of greater movement in the sky. By the way there is a spectacular dance going on between the crescent moon, Venus and Jupiter in the western sky right now during the evening and early night hours. Here’s some info.
I live just down the road from Smuggler’s View, and although I did not see the large, bright, red light, we now live in unusual times. With last week’s unseasonable heat wave and the strange behavior of my two pups, I feel inclined to paraphrase Carl Sagan’s epitaph to astronomer Johannes Kepler: I prefer the hard truth to my dearest illusions. Go with your gut on this one.
The UFO sighting thread included a comment by a neighbor about sending “flying sky lanterns” “into the sky many times” which were mistaken for UFOs. Please reassure me than nobody would release a balloon or other device with an open flame, combustible materials, or any other hazard that could cause a fire. We’ve just had a period of high risk of brush fires due to dry weather. I’d like to think that everyone who lives in this area is aware of the danger and would not send anything “into the sky” without considering the potential for setting fire to the woods. Probably unnecessary to point out the obvious, but the concept of a “flying sky lantern” caught my eye. Hopefully this was just a joke, a bit early for April Fools. If I saw my neighbor releasing a balloon-borne candle or such, I’d certainly have a discussion with them, but not about UFOs!

IN CONCLUSION from Karen in Cambridge…

I want to thank all of my Front Porch Forum neighbors for all of the emails and posts, in their efforts to solve my UFO mystery! I now believe it was indeed a sky lantern. After doing some research and checking out some images on Google, it seems to match what I saw. My guess is the lantern was launched at Smuggs. Looking forward to a special occasion to launch one myself some night!

More than half of U.S. seniors don’t know neighbors

Posted on Friday, March 16th, 2012 by Michael • No comments yet

Seniors in Vermont have long put their neighborhood Front Porch Forum to good use. Today, AARP reported on this growing trend…

According to a 2010 Pew Internet and American Life Project report, of nearly 2,300 surveyed, half ages 50-64 did not know their neighbors; the number was 52% for ages 65+.

So when I heard about free neighborhood websites, I stopped multitasking. They are a place where neighbors communicate online with others who live nearby about community issues (a new building project in the area, traffic concerns, a burglary, a favorite gardener, a family in need), post requests, and get to know one another. That often leads to face-to-face connections and new relationships.

According to Michael Wood-Lewis, cofounder of the Front Porch Forum, a neighborhood website in Burlington, Vt., there are about 20 similar start-ups around the country. Created in 2006, his is among the oldest and serves one-third of Vermont.

One of most recent entrants is the San Francisco-based Nextdoor, which debuted last October and is in more than 1,200 neighborhoods nationwide. In order to join one of these private social networks, you have to live in that neighborhood (except if you’re an adult child/caregiver) and when posting, use your full name. If there’s no neighborhood website, you can start one and invite neighbors to join.

What does this have to do with caregiving? These companies are seeing adult children, who are caregivers, or their parents or relatives, the care recipients, using it to enlist the help of others. Last winter, during a blizzard, an adult daughter living across town got on the Front Porch Forum website and asked her mother’s neighbors to check on her. Several went over to make sure she was okay and fed, while someone else shoveled her driveway and walk…

A quick look in the FPF archive reveals some gems. First, from a Seven Days article…

Arthur Goyette knows the value of good neighbors. His wife Betty died three years ago, but while she was battling cancer, his neighbors brought countless meals to their Caroline Street home. When the neighbors learned that Betty had always wanted to ride in a convertible, they found a dealership willing to loan them a car, and surprised the Goyettes with a Chrysler Sebring. When the couple drove down the street with the top down, people lined the block waving and taking pictures.

Remembering this time, the 71-year-old Goyette marvels that he barely knew some of the people who helped him. He might never have known them at all if it weren’t for an email newsletter called the Front Porch Forum, which serves the South End neighborhood known as the Five Sisters.

Goyette’s neighbors used the newsletter to organize support for the family. “If the web wasn’t there,” he says, “it never would have happened.”

Goyette is not the only South End resident who credits the 6-year-old Front Porch Forum with bolstering community. The FPF website lists testimonials from dozens of users who say they like the way this free online service helps them connect with others in the immediate area; of the 350 households in Five Sisters, 286 subscribe…

And from this blog… Dozens of Front Porch Forum members requested help from their neighbors in the wake of the blizzard… most in need of snow removal. Others posted generous offers to help. We also were glad to help spread the word about Operation Snow Shovel… apparently to good effect:

Thanks so, so much for posting the message about Operation Snow Shovel throughout Burlington. The response was incredible! Can you believe that I’ve heard from 57 people willing to volunteer to shovel? 57! (That’s in addition to the 33 permanent volunteers who shovel for a particular person each time it snows– many of them were recruited through Front Porch Forum, too.) A large percentage of volunteers said they’d heard about the need through their neighborhood forum.

As of right now, every single elderly or disabled person in need of help that contacted OSS has been accommodated. And those I’ve yet to hear from will get help quickly. What a wonderful resource these forums are! Many, many thanks!

And another one… Watching neighbors connect through Front Porch Forum is often both fascinating and moving. This post from today, e.g., adds to other evidence we’ve witnessed of people wanting and waiting for a chance to lend a helping hand to those around them.

My husband died from metastatic prostate cancer in October. I asked for help finding someone to snowblow my driveway [through her FPF neighborhood forum] and think I have found someone. Then I went away for a week and when I returned my leaves were raked and removed and items moved from around the house to the driveway. I don’t know who did this, but I have to think it was someone in the neighborhood and I wanted to say thank you.

This message comes from a suburban-style neighborhood where about a quarter of the 200 households signed up with Front Porch Forum in the first three months of operation. To further thank her neighbors, the writer goes on to share a warning:

You should also know that in July 2006 we had a house invasion during the daytime (2:30 pm, man with a ski-mask) and my husband’s pain medication was stolen ([he] was lying in bed at the time). While I was away in November, there was another break in. His remaining medications were taken too. There is no more medication in the house and it is now very much more secure, but be aware that this sort of thing happens even in our own “safe” neighborhood.

Many thanks to the kind-hearted and energetic people who helped me out.

The anwser to the request for snow-removal help for the coming winter is great. The mysterious leaf-rakers are even better. But it’s the willingness of the writer to share her loss, ask for help, and offer a constructive warning to her neighbors out of what must have been an awful experience that motivates us to make Front Porch Forum happen for more people and neighborhoods.

Promise of Broadband…

Posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2012 by Michael • No comments yet

#VT - Here’s an opening from an Alabama article about rural development using broadband…

Five years after borrowing $8 from her mother to start an online business, Michigan teenager Ashley Qualls has an annual income of more than $1 million. Her secrets? A creative idea and access to broadband Internet. In [Vermont], Michael Wood-Lewis invested $15 and invited neighbors to “share messages about lost cats and block parties.” Today, he is president of a thriving enterprise and lives in one of America’s “top-ten” neighborhoods. His secret? Leveraging Internet technology to create a space for community. These stories may leave you wondering how you could benefit from the opportunities presented by broadband technologies…

Radio listeners are responding…

Posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 by Michael • No comments yet

#VT - Have you heard FPF‘s ad on Farm Fresh Radio? Give a listen.

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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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