FPF is expanding beyond Burlington… we now serve one-third of Vermont.  More than 32,000 members participate in rural areas, suburbs, and cities.  Imagine this level of engagement in every part of Vermont and beyond!  Let us know if you’d like to help bring FPF to your town (just enter your address on our home page and complete the form).

Three cheers for the tens of thousands FPF members in Vermont… and here’s to vibrant neighborhoods in 2012!

It makes sense.  FPF has a huge local audience and Town Meeting Day is March 2… less than a week away.  Candidates, political parties, advocacy groups… they all are working to get the word out about their issue, their campaign.

But at its core, FPF isn’t about blasting out a single message to thousand of local homes.  It’s about neighborhood-level conversation.  Any local resident may join the single FPF neighborhood forum where he/she lives and post to his/her heart’s content.  (FPF is available in 25 Vermont towns.)

Most people are glad to read items from their clearly identified nearby neighbors… then continue the conversations on the sidewalk or at the local store or school.  FPF members seem less excited about reading one-way bulk postings from non-nearby neighbors.

That said, FPF does offer a range of options around elections, spelled out in our FAQ.  If you want to weigh in before Town Meeting, check out the guidelines and start posting!

Case in point… a Burlington resident who opposes a ballot measure to repeal Instant Runoff Voting.  She asked FPF to broadcast her posting across many of Burlington’s nearly 40 online neighborhood forums.  We declined and encouraged her to post it on her “home” neighborhood forum and ask friends in other neighborhoods to forward her message.

She took our advice and now we see her message popping up all over the city, and in each case it has a lead-in sentence from the friend stating their agreement with her position.  So now thousands of potential voters are getting the message, each with an extra pitch from a nearby neighbor… very effective.  “Best advocacy tool in town,” is how she put it.

And the original advocate had to convince dozens of friends across town to help her get her message out.  This is democracy!  Just the opposite of big money buying elections through mass media.

Indeed, I answered a knock on my door this morning and found a neighbor returning a borrowed pan.  We took the opportunity to discuss the merits of the IRV-repeal ballot measure for five minutes, each getting a little more food for thought before our respective moments in the voting booth next Tuesday.  A great use of Front Porch Forum!

• Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.com
• Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup.com
• Joe Trippi, whom many Vermonters will recall from his “Dean for President” days
• And many other important thinkers and doers.

They’ve capped the gathering at about 100 folks from around the country who are among the top in this quickly emerging field.  Thanks to The Case Foundation for FPF’s special invitation.  I’m looking forward to learning from the conversation and sharing FPF’s amazing story of actual civic engagement catalyzed through FPF’s virtual front porch (here’s a recent sample).

This event will be streamed online live at www.ncoc.net and will be live on Twitter– follow @ncoc and #ncoc.

FPF will also swing by the Gov 2.0 Summit… again thanks to The Case Foundation.

Vermont and the Burlington area rank high in a new national study of volunteering rates, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service.

The state ranks ninth in the percentage of the population that participates in volunteer efforts, according to the CNCS’s Web site, www.volunteeringinAmerica.gov…

In Vermont, 35.6 percent of the population volunteered; the national average is 26.4 percent. The Burlington metropolitan area, which includes Burlington and South Burlington, ranked 11th among the 75 mid-sized cities polled for volunteer rates…

A volunteer coordinator at the United Way of Chittenden County said she is not surprised by Vermont’s high rate of volunteerism.  “We have certainly seen the generosity of this community in giving of their volunteer time,” said Holly Reed, director of the United Way of Chittenden County’s volunteer center. “Vermont is a small place, and we are more acutely aware of what the needs are in the community.”…

The study showed 35.6 percent of Vermonters, or about 180,400 people, volunteered in 2008, putting in 20.6 million hours of service, according to the study…

Front Porch Forum is a great catalyst for getting people involved in their local community.  Many local nonprofits have told us of increased volunteer rolls due to FPF… what a thrill for FPF to play a role in this important trend.

Self-help housing enables people to be active citizens, and it fights the culture of “someone should do something about that”. It was once more common, but over the last two decades community development and regeneration has fallen into the hands of professionals preoccupied with management and measurement.

Kevin concludes with…

Community development will be reinvented from the bottom-up by people like Jon Fitzmaurice. Let’s hope the others just get out of the way.

Reminds me of a recent Front Porch Forum story…

Lauren wondered if her small rural Vermont town had a food shelf. So she posted a note to her neighbors on Front Porch Forum (FPF). When she learned that none existed currently, she reached out again via FPF for a steering committee. Then it was through FPF yet again that they found food, space, volunteers, and, eventually, recipients — her neighbors delivered on every count! Now, one year later, the food shelf is critical in the lives of many town residents affected by the recession. And no government, foundation, or corporate money or leadership has been needed.

FPF hosts a network of 130 online neighborhood forums that blankets all of Chittenden County, VT. More than 14,000 households subscribe, including 40% of the state’s largest city. Members use FPF to communicate with clearly identified nearby neighbors about issues of their choosing. Thousands of topics have been discussed and acted upon. All of this online exchange draws peoples’ attention to their local community, and increases social capital and civic engagement, as witnessed by Lauren’s example:

“Thanks to FPF, having a community-wide conversation about how to address our local hunger problem was a cinch. With the help of rallying neighbors, we got our food shelf up and running in no time. Not a community meeting — or practically any public-oriented conversation — goes by without FPF being tossed into the mix. What a wonderful gift.”

FPF is eager to bring its successful model to more communities.  Some traditional community development professionals and funding programs have a hard time understanding this decentralized, citizen-centered approach.  When we tell them that FPF helps create an environment where folks like Lauren emerge from the crowd to do wonderful acts of public good, I hear things like “well, but we don’t fund food selves.”  Aargh.

Civic synonyms

In common usage, “deliberation and democratic governance”
= active citizenship
= deliberative democracy
= citizen involvement
= citizen-centered work
= public engagement
= citizen participation
= public dialogue
= collaborative governance
= public deliberation

Different people define these terms in different ways – and in most cases, the meanings are blurry and overlapping.

The primary reason for this language confusion is that this field developed in different places, in different fields and issue areas, simultaneously.

And a list of coalitions of people and groups working on this issue…

The professional infrastructure for deliberation and democratic governance is growing as fast as the field itself. There are four networks that serve deliberation practitioners and researchers in different ways:

The Canadian Community on Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2) is a Canadian network that attracts many people from the U.S. and other countries to its biannual conferences. C2D2 convenes practitioners and advocates of related fields, such as intergroup dialogue and conflict resolution, in addition to people who work in deliberation and democratic governance.

The Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) is an alliance of practitioners and researchers representing more than 50 organizations and universities, all of whom share an interest in deliberation and democratic governance. More a think tank than a membership organization, the DDC develops publications, builds connections between different fields, and convenes meetings targeted at particular issues and areas for collaboration.

The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) is a network of practitioners that has particularly strong representation in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Many of the members of this association are planners and development specialists who have used democratic principles to involve citizens in land use and development decisions.

The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD) is a network of over 700 organizations and individuals. Like C2D2, NCDD convenes practitioners in many related fields, such as intergroup dialogue, in addition to people working in deliberation and democratic governance. The NCDD website offers a comprehensive assortment of over 2,000 tools, best practices, and links related to participatory democracy, public engagement, collaborative action, and conflict resolution at all levels. The NCDD listserv reaches over 10,000 people.

… internet activities like the Front Porch Forum are direct competitors to community newspapers…

… subsidizing these forums and spreading their access is hastening the demise of [community newspapers]…

… you enable the neighborhoods to believe that news of their community is being covered by the siting of trash being dumped on the side of the road, or of a neighbor who attended a meeting and reported on the one item of real interest to them…

What happens with these types of forums is news is filtered out to the community by those with an agenda. School boards or planning commissions, for example, could designate a member of the board to write the report of the meeting and put it on the forum. The potential to have that report cover what the board wants and how it wants is huge, and it is not, in the end, in the public’s best interest in cases that may be controversial. (Given, that much of the news coming out of such meetings is not controversial and such reports could be unbiased and with no consequence.) But in cases that are controversial, how is the community best served if what happens is that Front Porch leads readers to believe they don’t need the local paper except on those few occasions of controversy. That is, they cancel their subscription and only buy it at the store on those weeks when a professional reporter comes to town to report important issues. That type of thinking, of course, hurts circulation and undermines the advertising base.

… activities like these are no small threats to community newspapers…

… you might reconsider how to carry on this part of your mission. Partnering with the local paper may be one way to do that.

Here’s my response…

Small town community newspapers are crucial to local civic health.  And many of these newspapers face a dire future.  This should be a big concern for anyone focused on local social capital and civic engagement.  It’s one of the reasons I’m working on Front Porch Forum.  You should be congratulated for your forward thinking in this area.  I would be interested in seeing innovative proposals from community newspapers for new sustainable business models to support local journalism.

Front Porch Forum’s mission is to help neighbors connect and build community.  Any sharing of news among neighbors is incidental… it’s one of many things that neighbors do when they have access to an easy communication channel.  We don’t directly compete with newspapers, we help and complement them.

In fact, in Chittenden County, news stories bubble up out of neighborhood conversations on FPF.  In dozens of cases, The Burlington Free Press, Seven Days, WCAX, VPR and others have used Front Porch Forum to get leads for their news stories.  We’re happy to play this role (assuming proper attribution).

And forward thinking newspapers use FPF to attract more readers.  For example, Seven Days has been running weekly messages on FPF about its stories drawing significant traffic to its website.

Further, many of our subscribers travel an arc from (1) getting direct results from postings (e.g., found lost cat, gave away a stroller), to (2) feeling more a part of their community due to these interactions and routine reading of neighbors’ postings, to (3) increased involvement in the civic life of their town (e.g., volunteering at Green Up Day, serving on a committee).  This heightened sense of what’s going on in the neighborhood leads to people being more tuned into local issues… thus FPF helps nurture an environment loaded with more potential readers of the local newspaper.  It’s up to the each newspaper to capitalize on this opportunity.

For example, in Burlington’s New North End, past monthly Neighborhood Planning Assembly meetings typically drew five or six people, in addition to the committee members.  Once the committee started using FPF, attendance ballooned to 50 or 60.  This wasn’t just because FPF was a better way to announce the meetings, rather it’s been the regular neighborhood-level discussions stirred up via FPF that have increase awareness and interest in local issues.  So when the meeting is announced, many people are tuned in and caring enough to show up and participate.

We’d be thrilled if one of Burlington’s newspapers approached us with ideas for tying into this exciting development.  Perhaps we could even work up a proposal and seek funding together.

The decline of the newspaper industry is closely tracked and widely discussed.  Here’s one such recent piece that warrants careful reading.

Here are some other respected resources about the upheaval in the newspaper business…

• http://citmedia.org/blog (spoke at UVM recently)
• http://www.buzzmachine.com
• http://www.yelvington.com
• http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist

Many factors contribute to the current status of the newspaper industry, including past business decisions, the current economy, volatile changes in the advertising world, the effect of the internet, participatory and decentralized journalism, etc… suffice to say, it’s complex and the sea change underway now has been a long time coming.  It’s hard to imagine that supporting a small local civic-engagement dot.com experiment has much of a role in this larger, centuries-running drama of the American newspaper.

The newspaper publisher appears to have some misconceptions of how Front Porch Forum works.  FPF is open to all residents of its service region, those with agendas (of any stripe) and those without.  It’s a discussion among clearly identified nearby neighbors about topics of their choosing… like a block party with name tags.  Newspapers, on the other hand, bring their own agenda, determine the topics, and limit who can speak.

While some FPF members may quit their local newspaper subscriptions, as he suggests, that’s not our intent.  If that happens, I submit it has more to do with the readers’ perceived value of the newspaper than with FPF.

Finally, we’re humbled by the recognition and awards from the following organizations bestowed on Front Porch Forum for its cutting edge work in building social capital and civic engagement, including…

• American Press Institute
• Wall Street Journal
• Morning Edition
• PBS
• John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
• Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
• Personal Democracy Forum
• Case Foundation
• Sunlight Foundation
• National Night Out
• PlaceMatters
• Action Coalition for Media Education
• Snelling Center for Government
• Orton Family Foundation

Thanks for the opportunity to comment on this subject and I’d be glad to continue the conversation with you, newspaper folks, or others.  I have much to learn and remain openminded and flexible.