2007 | Ghost of Midnight

Missing Child updates on Front Porch Forum

Posted on Thursday, April 12, 2007 by Michael • No comments yet

Members have been using Front Porch Forum for neighborhood watch type activities for some time. Here’s something similar. Burlington police use a nationally available service that automatically calls all phone numbers within one or more neighborhoods to alert the community about a missing child… wonderful use of technology. (I can’t imagine how terrible this situation must be for the people caught up in it.)
The downside… after receiving this alarming call from a machine, with few details (you don’t know who the kid is typically… just that a neighbor boy or girl of certain description is gone), you get nothing more… no follow up. No “we found Billy and everything is okay.” The service can’t be used that way, only for emergencies.

So it was interesting to read the minutes from the March 2007 Neighborhood Planning Assembly meeting for Ward 5 today:

Corporal Fabiani informed the NPA of a localized “Child is missing” alert that was activated recently and was successful in finding the child safely. Currently there is no ability to make a similar phone call to cancel the alert. Suggestions were made that the Front Porch Forum could be used to alert neighbors of the status. Local TV and radio stations are already used.

That’s another great use of our neighborhood forums, and, in fact, this has been done at least twice recently, once in the South End and once in the Old North End to good effect. Put the word out on the forum and it spreads across the neighborhood.

New Forum Member Gets It

Posted on Thursday, April 12, 2007 by Michael • No comments yet

A new member of the Centennial Neighborhood Forum in Burlington, Vermont, writes today to her neighbors:

I’m very glad this exists… and it looks like many people are using it. The forum seems like a great supplement to “front porch” conversations, especially since the snow and cold often keeps us indoors (or playing far from the front porch)! Looking forward to conversations and meeting many more neighbors.

That’s what Front Porch Forum is all about!

Forums induce behavior change directly?

Posted on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 by Michael • No comments yet

As I reported in a recent post, some neighborhood forums are being used to elicit action from local leaders. In one case, the ONE East Neighborhood Forum’s ongoing discussion about college student noise and poor behavior as neighbors has been raging for weeks. And the City of Burlington and University of Vermont are now responding… that’s great!

And now another result… apparently the students themselves are starting to respond. Those who live off-campus in this neighborhood of lovely old homes (many of which have been split into multi-unit student dwellings) are joining Front Porch Forum too. They’re reading what the permanent residents are writing… about the late-night awakenings, the broken bottles, the “my kids’ swingset is not a toilet” remarks… it’s all starting to sink in for some students. This is a real neighborhood, full of real people, real families… time to shape up or move this behavior elsewhere.

I’ve been told of group discussions among students. One will say something like… “only students live here so we can do whatever we want… right?” Someone fires up the laptop and produces dozens of ticked off neighbors’ messages from Front Porch Forum. “Oh… I didn’t know. I’d never act this way back home.”

Ahh… to be 21 again. I, for one, didn’t know which way was up at that point in my life. [For the record, I now know which way “up” is… but with none of our young children consistently sleeping through the night, that’s all I’m willing to commit to right now.]

So, in addition to providing a place to vent and a way to organize neighbors to get an official response, Front Porch Forum appears to be directly effecting the parties involved… a civilizing impact.

P.S. I hear from some “official” type folks who have been working on this issue for years that they now can use Front Porch Forum postings as leverage to pry their higher-ups into action.

Front Porch Forum has Arrived

Posted on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 by Michael • No comments yet

Thanks to a couple Vermont women for bringing a Vermont Woman article to my attention today… that’s Melanie Brotz and Nancy Osborne. In the April 2007 issue, Ann Hagman Cardinal writes about Marci Young who has given up driving for environmental reasons… commendable! But here’s the part that caught my attention…

“I ended up catching a ride home [from Solar Fest] with friends I hadn’t known were going. That’s why we need Front Porch Forum!” she says, referring to the Internet-based neighborhood networking movement.

That’s right, we (all 4,300 members to date) are a movement! Alright! Love it.

Neighbors’ Forum-Talk spurs Action

Posted on Monday, April 9, 2007 by Michael • 1 comment

Regular folks are using Front Porch Forum to get the attention of local media and elected officials. Some examples:

1. Neighbors on the ONE Central Neighborhood Forum have several interesting threads going recently. One is about the state of the new beltline bikepath… trash, homeless folks, human waste, and various ideas for making it all better. Lots of good input and ideas. Relevant officials are tuning in. Mention of a grant for fencing. Progress?

2. Meanwhile, just up the hill a bit, the ONE East Neighborhood Forum has been focused on college-student noise in this residential neighborhood. Frustrations have been aired, the problem defined, history provided, solutions proposed… and now an official response. The City of Burlington and UVM issued a press release outlining all that they already do on this front and what they plan to add… a step in the right direction. One subscriber writes to his neighbors:

This Forum is the first time people have had a vehicle to express their thoughts, make suggestions and actually have an impact on a variety of topics; but it has been very interesting to see how local officials and social activists are reacting to the ‘elephant in the room’ – indignity over student behavior and the determination to put and end to it. This is an elephant, by the way, that has been in the room for decades now.

3. And the remarkable situation of city council Democrats lining up behind a Republican for council president, rather than a Progressive… several people have made their voices heard to their neighbors and councilors via their neighborhood forum. In fact, the Burlington Free Press almost mentioned Front Porch Forum in its April 8 article:

[Councilor-elect Ed] Adrian explained why he is voting for Wright in a message he posted on the Buell Street Neighborhood Forum. He said Wright, a state representative as well as councilor, has more experience than Ashe, would offer a balance to the Progressive administration of Mayor Bob Kiss, would be fair, would be unable, as one of just three Republicans on the council, to “stack” council committees, and, Adrian pointed out, Democrats, even with five of them on the council, don’t have a candidate for president this year.

[Councilor Joan] Shannon justified her vote for Wright in similar terms in a message posted on the Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum.

(The material referenced for this article should have been attributed to Front Porch Forum, rather than (or in addition to) the individual neighborhood forums.)

eBay vs. Garage Sales

Posted on Monday, April 9, 2007 by Michael • No comments yet

The Local Onliner brought an interesting couple articles to my attention today by New York Times writer Jonathan Berr:

“I was reminded of what made eBay a success while I was reporting the story,” writes Berr, in a separate story picked up by AOL Finance. “First, it’s still a very affordable way for many small businesses who don’t want to spend the money on search advertising to sell their wares on the Internet. eBay also seems to be replacing garage sales as the means that people use to get rid of their junk.” [emphasis added]

I find this last bit troubling. I assert we need more garage sales, not less. Let’s compare on a few fronts:

Community building:
Garage sale… Talk to the blue-haired lady a few doors down about her antique lamp and what the neighborhood used to be like. Buy a watered-down Dixie cup of lemonade from the four-year-old who may be cutting your grass in another ten years. Talk with real people, face to face as you shop… “do you think I’d use this bread machine?” Find a deal.
eBay… Email distant strangers about Barry Bonds bobblehead dolls. Sit by yourself and decide you must have it.

Sustain our environment:
Garage sale… Walk up and down the street. Pull loot home in little red wagon.
eBay… Box up bobblehead, big delivery truck picks up item from sender’s house, trucks and jet aircraft ship across country, another big panel truck rumbles into the neighborhood and leaves cardboard and plastic-entombed doll at your doorstep. The way our society looks back in befuddlement at the Salem witch trials and wiping out millions of buffalo, and other past obvious atrocious behavior… that’s how our kids/grandkids will view behavior like this… “what were you thinking, Gramps?”

Keep your money in the neighborhood…
Garage sale… Your $20 goes to the guy who lives a couple blocks away. He then spends it at the corner store, etc.
eBay… Your $20 is split between the distant seller, eBay, Visa, UPS, Staples (for the box), etc. and leaves your community behind.
We should all put more thought into our personal dot.com practices and avoid uses that cause more harm in the long run than good. Thus ends today’s sermon. 😉

Sex and Romance Drives Craigslist

Posted on Friday, April 6, 2007 by Michael • No comments yet

I’m often asked if Front Porch Forum isn’t an awful lot like craigslist Burlington. Besides the obvious Grand Canyon of a difference in scale and success (all hail craigslist!), I usually answer “no.” While it’s true that both are an online place to sell your used car among other things, they diverge from there.

And now we see some interesting analysis of how craigslist is used, or at least what drives most of its traffic… anonymous sex and romance postings. None of that on Front Porch Forum (how many readers just nixed FPF with that statement? 😉 ).

Stephen Bagg at Compete supplies the chart below:

He adds:

Compete reports just under 17 million people visiting per month… Analysis of eight major American cities shows erotic services consistently garners the highest number of individual visitors for February – almost always twice as many as the next ranking category, averaging 265,000 people per city. Equally racy lists that consistently score high visitor volume are the section for casual encounters as well as personals for women seeking men. The most commonly frequented venue outside of this virtual red-light district? Cars for sale.

Local news, business supplies for sale, real estate and web design are probably better off advertising somewhere else since they contribute less than a whisper to the overall site traffic.

Avoiding the social issues and political debates that fall beyond this brief glimpse behind the Craigslist curtain, perhaps it isn’t shocking that the search for romance is extremely popular in the online space. Offering anonymity, privacy, and little room for embarrassment, Craigslist is an ideal marketplace for those looking for those willing.

So, Front Porch Forum is in some significant sense the opposite of craigslist… no anonymity, out in the open within the neighborhood. Thanks to MediaVidea for highlighting the original information.

Forum keeps Member on Trampoline

Posted on Friday, April 6, 2007 by Michael • No comments yet

It’s tough to put into words how wonderful it is to be the moderator of Front Porch Forum‘s 130 neighborhood forums in and around Burlington, Vermont. In addition to the sheer magnitude of the response (4,300 members, 8,000 messages in our first seven months), the quality is remarkable. In this catbird seat, I see good news flit by every day. While the big stories stand out (see many past postings), it’s the shear volume of the little day-to-day beauties that inspire my wife and I to keep going against the odds. Take this sample from this evening’s inbox:

It is with mixed emotions that I write this post. I am selling my house after living here for 15 yrs. Among the things that are the hardest to leave behind will be this forum. I have used it for emergencies (thanks to all who responded to my dire need for heaters) and for my craft sale announcements (one is coming up later this month) and to feel connected to my home on my frequent trips away. I want to publicly thank Front Porch Forum. Just having it makes me feel safer, like the netting around the trampoline, it helps me from feeling like I could fall off the edge. Thank you all. -L.C., Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum

See what I mean?

List of Neighborhood Online Resources

Posted on Thursday, April 5, 2007 by Michael • 1 comment

Steven Clift has some good insights into neighborhood community building via online tools at E-Democracy, including this list of existing neighborhood forums and resources. Lots of neighborhoods have self-organized online… websites, Yahoo Groups, blogs, etc. This hints at the hard-to-quantify demand for a more organized effort to provide this service, such as what Front Porch Forum is offering.

Urban Neighborhood Exodus still Lamented

Posted on Wednesday, April 4, 2007 by Michael • 4 comments

Hey! That’s my auntie in the Washington Post this week. What a wonderful piece of writing from Georgia Lewis. Here’s a sample. Read it all here.

The year I was 13 my family moved from decaying, downtown Buffalo to a brand-new house in the suburbs. It was barely beyond the city limits, but it was a world away from what I’d known: street games, front porches and sidewalks; crowded flats with immigrant families and their assorted relatives; pungent odors of ethnic cooking; people sitting outside at night, sharing stories and troubles, teaching one another how to crochet or can tomatoes or speak English.

Our new neighbors were American-born, middle-class, polite but distant. They drove cars and sat on their private backyard patios. No front porches, no sidewalks, no visiting with neighbors as you walked to the corner store. No foreign accents and noisy extended families. These were the things we left behind.

I understood that our move was part of the American dream. But it wasn’t my dream. I didn’t want to move up. I missed the communal life…

I wasn’t the only one lamenting our success. My grandmother wept quietly for months. My mother phoned our old neighbors daily. My sister went back to the dilapidated old high school for her senior year. My father must have been bewildered.

Yearly Archives: 2007

Missing Child updates on Front Porch Forum

Front Porch Forum has Arrived

eBay vs. Garage Sales

Urban Neighborhood Exodus still Lamented

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