Thanks to Richard Millington at FeverBee for this tip today…
If you’re eager to build online communities, the best article you can read is Sense of Community by McMillan and Chavis. This article holds more useful advice (and a great practical framework) for developing an online community than any other.
It was written in 1986. Which means, unlike the post-twitter articles, it gets better every year.
If you’re lazy, here’s an easy-reading version.
Mike Ives profiles Vermont filmmaker and author Eugene Jarecki in Seven Days this week. Jarecki’s 2006 documentary, Why We Fight, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
And he has a new book out…
… he told Jon Stewart recently, he hopes The American Way of War will inspire a sense of common civic engagement that withered during the Bush years. “I’m on a real mission,” he explained to the Comedy Central host. “The worse thing that’s happened is, we’ve become disengaged… ”
And…
Jarecki is trying to make a difference in his community. Neighbors say the Big Picture Theater & Caf© in Waitsfield, which Jarecki co-founded in 2006, is an important civic space for residents of the Mad River Valley.
Good stuff. Many of Jarecki’s Mad River Valley neighbors have asked us to bring Front Porch Forum there… we hope to in 2009… working on pulling pieces together now. In Burlington, where we’ve been operating for two years, a survey found 93% of respondents claiming that FPF led to increased civic engagement for them… real, face-to-face, in the community kind of stuff.
I, apparently, don’t get out much. This holiday season I’ve found myself in places I rarely visit… suburban America, shopping centers, traffic, food courts, gyms with equipment lifted from the Star Ship Enterprise, watching relations spend a good chunk of “family visiting time” instead stroking their electronic tethers… it’s a shock to the system. I feel like a foreigner in my own culture. What’s become of walks in the woods, caroling, writing and receiving Christmas cards, baking simple hand-me-down recipes?
I was caught staring many times… oh, I’m afraid to say more right now. I’ll let Scott Heiferman, quoting Rev. Billy, do it for me…
Rev Billy: … a good New Year’s Resolution would be to be able to shout the truth, and then to be able to hear such a crying out from others, too. We have to hear the cry from within ourselves as well as hear it from an orator in public space. I believe that the criers are out there, but we are so dulled down, emptied, hurried, shell-shocked by advertising, iPodding, Facebooking, sitting in traffic, waiting in line… all we do every day to pursue Consumerism… If we remain consumers, fans, tourists, demographic groups, investors – and not sensual citizens, we will never make our way back… And we will die or we will live – it is our choice. If we die, we might die standing up with our eyes open, buying something we don’t need with money we don’t have. That is modern Hell.
Right now, in 2009, we have an opportunity to defend ourselves against those who find every detail of our lives a potential profit center. The corporations have stumbled, they are smashed on their own greed. We have a unique window of opportunity – maybe have a few weeks or months in 2009 – in which to cry out. All the fake happiness and sorry of advertising is less powerful now. Remember how the supermodels and giant celebrity heads on the cityscape seemed to shrink down after the world trade towers crashed? They were suddenly so ridiculous. The spell of Consumerism was broken for a time. Now it’s happened again. And what are we doing? We are trying to clear our heads. We get up on one elbow. We know what we must do. We need to slip to dance, hear the music, and hold hands. This year, we pledge to find the power again by being human.”
I found Corey Bergman’s recent blog post interesting. In part…
I’m reading a book (that has yet to be released) called “Wired to Care” by Dev Patnaik…
Back in the late 1950s and early 60s, Maxwell House began slowly substituting tasty but expensive “Arabica” beans with bitter but inexpensive “Robusta” beans in its coffee, Patnaik writes. After all, customers were complaining about the increasingly high prices. Maxwell House made the transition slowly, conducting consumer research along the way, and the vast majority of its coffee drinkers were unable to detect the difference. This kept prices under control, customers happy, and the business continued to run at a respectable profit. Other coffee makers did the same.
By 1964, coffee sales declined for the first time in the history of the U.S. Younger people weren’t becoming coffee drinkers. Why? To a first-time coffee drinker, it tasted horrible. Coke and Pepsi sales began to skyrocket. Coffee continued its decline. Then a man named Howard Schultz took note of the espresso bars in Italy and launched a little company called “Starbucks,” bringing back Arabica beans with a new way of doing business. Young people began to drink coffee again. The industry had been reinvented.
Bergman goes on to say something similar is underway with local TV news.
From the Local Onliner…
Local media is so fragmented that its becoming increasingly important to aggregate classifieds from several sources. GoogleBase and Oodle go a long way in this regard… But other classified aggregators are coming up the horizon, too.
One site that recently launched is iList, a San Francisco-based company that has received $1.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. It offers users the ability make their ads portable to all their friends who are tuned into them on all the social sites…
The authenticity of users is especially pushed – something that is coming up more and more. Users won’t see the site’s authenticity star until they verify their identity via cell phone SMS.
Thanks to Dave West for sharing this link…
The City of Decatur, Georgia is evaluating the use of a virtual world interface to “encourage community networking, improve civic engagement, and promote economic development.”
“Virtual Decatur will provide an environment in which residents, businesses, institutions and visitors can interact and connect… it is it is imperative that the project go beyond the features of traditional virtual environments. The overarching purpose of this project is to allow users to interact with the City in new and innovative ways that are not possible in the real world.”
Possible features of the proposed Virtual Decatur might include:
• Opportunities to gather citizen input on policies, topics of interest, city services, and happenings
• A Virtual City Hall Tour with multimedia capabilities.
• Opportunities to earn coupons for use in real stores/retail establishments.
• Streaming video of public meetings, ideally with a chat room feature that allows viewers to comment.
• Access to visitors information (store hours, directions, weather, etc.)
Well… I’m all for experiments, so I’m hopeful that the good folks in Georgia will go ahead with this and then report out results for the world to see.
In a way, it sounds like, as Dave put it, “Front Porch Forum 2.0.” Hmm… The purpose of Front Porch Forum is to kidnap peoples’ attention while online and redirect it back to the neighborhood, and, ultimately, get them face to face with neighbors for block parties, crime watches, yard sales, meals on wheels, city council hearings, etc. That is, FPF is a gateway to real neighborliness and civic engagement (not just virtual facsimiles). Perhaps the project above will do the same… or perhaps it will prove to be another way to avoid face-to-face contact with the people we live around.
I’m hoping for the best! Good luck to Virtual Decatur.
Greg and I serve on a telecom board together and he’s made great use of Front Porch Forum in his own neighborhood. So it was lovely to find his posting headed for the next issue (No. 500!) of his forum. Thanks Greg!
Congratulations on #500!…
I wanted to be a part of the 500th Anniversary Edition of the South Union Neighborhood Forum!
Congratulations to Michael Wood-Lewis and family for an incredible vision and sticktuitiveness (I guess the real word is indefatigability, which I have trouble pronouncing) that we here in Burlington have been the fortunate beneficiaries of for many years.
I hope you, the subscriber/reader, always follow up when Michael passes on a request to support Front Porch Forum through surveys, grant applications, underwriting advertising and so on. We want to be certain that FPF will be around for many more years to come…
Happy Holidays!
Greg Epler Wood
From Scott Heiferman again…
RevBilly: “The Revolution in the Hello… we’re sluggish now from our deep sleep – we will go to the neighbor that we daily padded by with our iPod, go up to that person and slow down. Taking in that so ordinary and so fantastic neighbor – the revolution is here… If we walk in our streets again we re-magicalize them. Touching each other for a moment, “Hello!” – in that moment the architecture around us seems to change… Say hello to a neighbor and trade names and a new economy begins. Can we sense the release from debt and the launch into real wealth when we find a stranger who was always nearby but was lost in our consuming?”
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