Thanks seem hardly enough when conveyed to UVM Professor Susan Comerford for her remarkable words shared on a PBS.org blog this week…
Front Porch Forum is a postmodern return to citizen democracy which is nurturing the burgeoning hunger for community in our society. Feeding the mind and the soul, the neighborly interchange provides the information necessary to participate intelligently in the democratic process, develop deeper connections with those around us, and provides the support and care that meld individuals who live near one another into neighbors. This may well be the most important advance in community development strategies in decades. Communities around the country will be seeking this opportunity to strengthen their social infrastructure, to foster healthy communities, and to provide the support necessary for their citizens to live vibrant, connected lives. Michael Wood-Lewis deserves a MacArthur Fellowship for an idea as visionary and important as this.
An award of this magnitude would facilitate the hard work and creativity needed to bring the community-building success of our pilot area to other locales across the United States… marvelous to even be mentioned!
Yelvington writes today about the wax and wane of social networking site popularity…
Brands just aren’t what they used to be. A brand used to be something that stood the test of time. Now a brand is still powerful in terms of defining what a product is all about, but when it comes to loyalty, fuggetaboutit. Brands today are volatile.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the social networking space, where Orkut and Friendster are about as attractive as yesterday’s dog food. Myspace, the hot item just six months ago, is in a brand tailspin from which it may not recover; even the kids are sneering at it. And the new darling? It’s Facebook, which a year ago looked like a dead-end street…
Facebook’s founders supposedly have turned down offers approaching a billion dollars for the site. Smart or not? Facebook is certainly ascendant. The question I have is: For how long?
Amen. I think of hang-outs from my high school days… a particular hamburger stand for a couple months, until all the kid brothers and sisters showed up, then the crowd would up and move to the arcade on Saturday nights after the football game… then the pizza shop… then the 24-hour donut place (hmm… them’s good eats!).
I seem to recall that the arcade did NOT survive when the in-crowd moved on. Other places did fine and probably preferred that the teenagers got lost after awhile.
So I’m guessing that the “it” social networking site will continue to shift (I don’t know who’s after Facebook)… it’s not about bells and whistles, it’s about who’s there. That’s reasonable. Some sites will compete for the favor of the masses, while others will be content to develop niches.
I like Front Porch Forum‘s potential. It’s not about popularity, it’s social networking with your neighbors… online a little so it can happen in person a lot. I see it as a solid base that doesn’t try to compete with the trendies… part of any real community’s infrastructure. We’ll see.
Yelvington.com writes today about “good enough” technology…
Truly disruptive technologies tend to enter the environment at the low end, not the high end.
To incumbents, they may at first appear to be a joke. Two examples from the world of database technology serve as examples.
He lists a couple of examples, including…
The first is MySQL, a free relational database server that began as a fairly primitive tool.
“Real” database administrators — the guys with Oracle DBA certifications — sneered at it. A toy fit only for amateurs, it nevertheless was “good enough” to enable thousands of new Web-based applications (including the software that runs this blog). As it improved, it climbed the ladder of quality and eventually became the data engine behind Google AdSense, a truly disruptive technology.
This reminds me of the reaction we sometimes get from “experts” to Front Porch Forum. They hear all the hubbub from our members and visit the site expecting more flash. But it’s not new space-age technology, nor is it festooned with all the latest bells and whistles. It IS disrupting things in our one pilot area though.
I learned more today about a promising event coming this fall to Burlington (October 23-25, 2007)…
COMMUNITYMATTERS07 is the next annual gathering of the Orton Family Foundation and PlaceMatters, where a national network of practitioners comes together to learn, share, inspire and seed innovation in place, collectively elevating the art and science of planning for vibrant, sustainable communities.
Building on the success of the PLACEMATTERS06 conference held last year in Denver, COMMUNITYMATTERS07 will be coming to Burlington, Vermont for a three-day event that will showcase planning technologies and methods, foster discussions and collaboration among citizens and professionals, and improve the way communities make decisions about their futures. COMMUNITYMATTERS07 seeks to support and expand an emerging network of place-based innovators while focusing on challenges particular, but not unique, to the Northeast.
Good stuff and inline with Front Porch Forum‘s focus.
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