Side-by-side neighborhood photographs taken this year and in the 1930s provide great insight… each pair worth 2,000 words, I guess. Check out Depression Era Streetscapes, a project of University of Vermont Professor Thomas Visser. The site covers much of Burlington, Vermont, USA.
Mia Moran of Channel 5 News WPTZ captured the essence of what we’re after with Front Porch Forum in a piece broadcast last night. And bonus points to her and cameraman Nick for braving our home during the toddler bewitching hour. If you have trouble watching this video (on WPTZ’s site), hold tight… I hope to have a more accessible version directly on our server soon.
And in another take on related matters, Peter Krasilovsky reports on two more city sites: Pegasus News in Dallas and CitySquares in Boston. CitySquares co-founder Ben Saren reports 300 advertisers paying a flat 25 cents/click.
To date, neighborhoods out of the downtown district do best, like Jamaica Plain and Harvard Square. “There is a lot more of a neighborhood mentality,” says Saren The more homogenized, high rent businesses in downtown Boston are less likely to pitch their tent with a local city site.
Saren, like Pegasus’ Orren, hopes to take his concept beyond his city’s borders. “Ideally, it would be a Tier 2 or Tier 3 market with a college orientation, like a Burlington or Tallahassee,” he says.
Hmm… I wonder how this would work in home-sweet-home Burlington.
Nearly a quarter of private-sector, non-farm jobs in Vermont are in micro-enterprises, according to the Association for Enterprise Opportunity and reported by Leslie Wright in the Burlington Free Press today. The number of such businesses grew about 8% from 2001 to 2003.
A micro-enterprise employs fewer than five people and requires $35,000 or less in start-up capital.
I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with several small-scale local entrepreneurs whose business fits that definition. Many are excited about working with Front Porch Forum to connect with people in the neighborhoods that they serve. They often complain about being priced out of conventional means, such as the Yellow Pages. Plus, many of these folks are doing business with their neighbors, so they’re interested in supporting FPF as a community-building resource.
Some places have a great sense of community, but most neighborhoods in America, me thinks, do not. A new book, Applebee’s America, seems to agree:
“Life is changing too damn fast,” Cindy Moran told us one day at an Applebee’s restaurant in Howell, Michigan. A single mother of two, Moran was one of the dozens of people we interviewed for this book to gauge the mood of the country. “It’s not easy being the kind of mother I want to be,” she said, carving a high-calorie path through a bowl of spinach dip while her daughter begged for more, “not with life stuck on fast-forward.”
Buffeted by change, people like Moran crave the comfort of community. They want to know their neighbors and meet people like themselves no matter where they live. They want to help improve their neighborhoods and their country. They want to belong.
Our Front Porch Forum experience concurs. The babysitter find, car sale, plumber referral, etc. through our neighborhood forums are almost bonus to the main event… connecting with neighbors. The Dallas Morning News recently ran a piece by the book’s authors:
In the next quarter-century, the nation is expected to increase its housing, office and business stock by 50 percent, and the great majority of that new building will take place in exurbs. But the rapid sprawl comes with complications that few people notice until they’re ensconced – including hellish commutes, overcrowded schools, disappearing open space, inadequate public works and social disconnectedness.
“My next-door neighbor is not friendly, and the rest of them I don’t even know,” Ms. Kromer [a housewife from Livingston County, Mich.] says. “They drive past my house, open their garages from inside their car, and disappear until their car comes popping back out in the morning.”
We’ve heard versions of this last quote so many times that we’ve lost count. Time to do something about it!
From an interview in .net magazine with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake:
Community building is also what got Yahoo! so interested in Ludicorp’s creation and although Yahoo! has got some of the best technical resources behind it, Caterina believes that skills and money don’t guarantee users. “The interesting thing about acquisitions of this kind is that you can’t just suddenly build a community. You can’t just go out and replicate all of the features and functionality of something you’ve seen, it doesn’t really work that way.”
According to Caterina: “The most difficult part is not the technology but actually getting the people to behave well.” When first starting the community the Flickr team were spending nearly 24 hours online greeting each individual user, introducing them to each other and cultivating the community. “After a certain point you can let go and the community will start to maintain itself, explains Caterina. “People will greet each other and introduce their own practices into the social software. It’s always underestimated, but early on you need someone in there everyday who is kind of like the host of the party, who introduces everybody and takes their coat.”
Thanks to Jason Kottke for the reference, as well as an additional example.
With the development of Front Porch Forum, I too have been spending time online with our early members helping to shape that sense of community… online community that is. So that the positive, constructive, civil tone we’ve achieved will carry over from the online community into the actual neighborhood. Some have suggested that this aspect isn’t scalable… I’m confident it will be. Already we have about 6% of our members self-selected as neighborhood forum volunteers to help make this happen. People are able and willing to step up when it’s their neighborhood.
Burlington Telecom is a young internet provider that is bringing fiber optic broadband all the way to the home. This is the latest and greatest technology and it’s cheap! BT also offers telephone and “cable” TV (no copper). And the kicker… this innovative high tech outfit is owned by… the citizens of Burlington. It’s a municipal utility. All “profits” stay local… no distant corporate CEOs to feed or bail out of prison.
In our market, we have a small number of broadband options. The primary cable option has been Adelphia, which was swallowed by Comcast. That change is just hitting the ground here and I’ve been hearing from customers about the switch. Some haven’t had a problem, others have.
Here’s word from one unlucky chap who lives in Redrock:
“The switchover from Adelphia to Comcast has been a nightmare setting up forwarding loops and non-delivery notices. I am in the process of deleting most of some 21,306 messages… to get the half dozen legitimate ones.”
Ouch! He went on to sound an increasingly common refrain:
“Burlington Telecom doesn’t serve us yet… We can’t wait until they get here.”
Full disclosure: I volunteer on BT’s citizen advisory council and was a beta tester when their residential service started last fall.
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