Front Porch Forum will be featured at the Knight Foundation Media Learning Seminar 2012 (Feb. 19-21, Miami, FL).
… community and place-based foundations leaders meet with journalism and technology experts… will provide new insights into the changing media landscape and emerging technologies while offering concrete examples of how foundations are helping to fill their community’s information voids…
Local online spaces can build up or tear down the sense of community in a place. Front Porch Forum is full of examples of the former. The New York Times reported yesterday about an example of the latter…
… But of late, more people in this hardscrabble town of 5,000 have shifted from sharing the latest news and rumors over eggs and coffee to the Mountain Grove Forum on a social media Web site called Topix, where they write and read startlingly negative posts, all cloaked in anonymity, about one another.
And in Dee’s Place, people are not happy. A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner’s owner, Jim Deverell, called Topix a “cesspool of character assassination”…
Ouch. More motivation to keep FPF moving in a positive direction.
I’m looking forward to speaking at the Block by Block Community News Summit in Chicago (Sept. 29 – Oct. 1). Sounds like a fantastic gathering of online community news publishers. I’m eager to share what we’ve been learning about community engagement through our work with Front Porch Forum, but I suspect that I’ll learn more from other participants than vice versa. Thanks to the sponsors for bringing this group together.
#VT – Seek assistance, offer help, get the facts. Try these websites for Hurricane Irene recovery resources:
VTDigger.com: http://bit.ly/opyKoS
#VTResponse: http://bit.ly/n130pD
Seven Days: http://bit.ly/noTigC
Google-VTrans Road Conditions Map: http://bit.ly/qEKdgl
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