Author Archives: Michael
Where do social enterprises fit on the spectrum of organizations?
Front Porch Forum is a mission-drive for-profit business located in Vermont. Once a year, we ask our tens of thousands of member households to consider chipping in $10 to $100 as a contribution to help us maintain, improve and expand FPF. This is strictly voluntary… FPF is a free service. It’s also not a charitable contribution, nor is it tax deductible.
This puts FPF in a position unfamiliar to many… “is FPF a charity or a business?” We’ve heard that more than once. We know that the economy and world are more complex than that. That’s why this graphic found today on Working Wikily appeals to me. It’s from Canada’s Social Innovation Generation‘s Task Force on Social Finance report: Mobilizing Private Capital for Public Good.
I’d say FPF is in the “social purpose business” to “socially responsible business” range.
How many needed to make community planning successful?
Bill Roper asks today “What constitutes successful participation in your community”…
Over the years, we at the Orton Family Foundation have debated how much citizen participation constitutes success in our projects. This discussion gets complicated as the “how many” quickly and appropriately gives way to a deeper conversation about the “who” in the room and the opportunity and level of participation rather than just a simple head count…
As I often say, the only thing harder than planning in the midst of a crisis is planning without a crisis at all. So: when there is no crisis at hand and a community is trying to bring citizens together for authentic, thoughtful discussions about its future, what constitutes a successful turnout? From my observations, achieving 10 percent community participation is pretty amazing (even though it doesn’t sound so great). And if this happens two or three times in a row, there’s really something going on.
Another way I’ve tried to calculate success in the numbers is to find out how many people turned out for the most controversial issue in the last five years, (i. e. a development proposal, school bond, crime, etc.). If the community then meets or exceeds that number in the context of a proactive planning discussion, that equals success.
But I’m still not satisfied. This may be setting the bar too low.
In dozens of Vermont towns and neighborhoods, more than 40% of the households subscribe to Front Porch Forum, where planning-relevant discussion often occurs. In one town that we studied, about three-quarters had posted in the first year.
Of course, ongoing online exchange among neighbors is different than face-to-face planning sessions, but we have seen many times where community turnout swells for such gatherings once FPF is up and running well. Frequent communication among clearly identified nearby neighbors gets folks informed and engaged.
How best to attract neighbors to online community?
From Richard Millington at FeverBee…
Which of these communities would you most like to join?
- An online community for local residents to participate in the public consultation process and have their say on everything from planning permission, budget allocation and
- An exclusive online community for local residents to prove their knowledge and share top tips on which local services to trust, best places to eat/shop and trade goods.
- An exclusive online community to learn the latest gossip about your neighbours and discover who’s hot or not in your local community.
Most councils/local government authorities will say the first.
Most residents say the second option works best.
Most people would actually join the gossip community.
You can treat this as a dismal reflection of modern society or as a great opportunity. Increasingly I suspect the key to developing a successful local community (or any community) is to begin with the gossip, move on to offer value and then aim for engagement on matters that affect the entire community.
Vermont Citizens in a Connected Age Workshop Dec. 11
The Citizens in a Connected Age workshop advances the computer and Internet skills learned through the Vermont State Colleges and Vermont Small Business Development Center courses offered in each e-Vermont project town.
However, ANY Vermonter with basic computer skills can attend this workshop!
Learn About
- Website communication tools.
- Social media – strategies for incorporating it into a business, government or personal life, with computer lab time.
- Troubleshooting technology – how to diagnose a problem with applications.
- Data security – backing up data, protecting private information.
- Marketing a business online.
- Google applications – why use Google apps, with computer lab time.
- Weighing the risks and benefits of online financial transactions.
- Digital storytelling for educators.
- Best practices for e-government websites.
When and Where
- Saturday, December 11, 2010
- 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
- Castleton State College, Castleton, Vermont
- $10 registration fee – includes course offerings, refreshments and lunch.
- Options for online registration: pay by credit card online, or register online and pay at the door. We cannot accept credit cards at the workshop.
- Download the workshop poster (pdf).
For more information
Contact Joanna Cummings, e-Vermont Community Coordinator: joanna@snellingcenter.org
Visit
- The e-Vermont Community Broadband Project website: http://e4vt.org
- The Snelling Center’s e-Vermont website: http://www.snellingcenter.org/public-policy/e-vermont
Lowering the barrier to publishing… How low can you go?
Blogging VC Fred Wilson writes today about a dream of “giving every person a voice” via social media…
I had the pleasure of watching John Battelle interview Evan Williams to wrap the Web2 conference yesterday. John’s a great interviewer and it was a memorable talk. But the thing that stayed with me through the night and was on my mind as I woke up this morning was this part, as transcribed by Matthew Ingram.
Williams — who founded Blogger and later sold it to Google — said that “lowering the barrier to publishing” has been something he has spent most of his career on, and this is because he believes that “the open exchange of information has a positive effect on the world — it’s not all positive, but net-net it is positive.” With Twitter, he said, “we’ve lowered the barriers to publishing almost as far as they can go,” and that is good because if there are “more voices and more ways to find the truth, then the truth will be available to more people — I think this is what the Internet empowers [but] society has not fully realized what this means.”
Of course, blogging in general and Twitter specifically are two juggernauts. If you have a smidgen of tech savvy, something to say, and a dose of extrovert in you, then these are two great options. And millions of Mother Earth’s 6-7 billion people are blogging and tweeting now.
What I haven’t seen is what percentage of internet users are blogging or tweeting… or posting on Facebook or YouTube, etc. I wonder how close these various services are to the ol’ 1:9:90 estimate… 1% of visitors post frequently, 9% have posted once or twice, and 90% never post… just lurk.
While this seems disappointing in light of Fred and Evan’s ambitions above, it’s a heck of a lot better than the pre-social media ratio. What could that have been? 0.1 : 0.0001 : 99.9? That is… 0.1% contributed almost all the content of the newspaper, 0.0001% wrote letters to the edit, and 99.9% just read the thing.
With Front Porch Forum, we aim to take this to where Fred and Evan dream of. In dozens of Vermont FPF pilot communities, more than half of the households subscribe. And it’s not uncommon to find participation ratios akin to 25:50:25. Put another way… 75% post! This is getting close to “giving every person a voice.”
UPDATE: Just came across an interesting blog post by David Sasaki that includes this chart…
Not all types of communications are equal
Richard Millington wrote today on FeverBee…
Not all types of communications are equal. When you meet someone in person you form a deeper relationship with them than thousands of online interactions.
We’re increasingly seeing a hierarchy of contact. At the lowest levels members talk via contributing content which others read. It’s slow, thoughtful and not interactive.
At the higher levels are immediate response, real-time communication and stronger context (i.e. talking by IM is stronger than chat-rooms – you had to add that person to your instant messenger).
- Members communicate in person.
- Members communicate by phone.
- Members communicate by voice-chat.
- Members communicate in IM/SMS.
- Members communicate in chat-rooms.
- Members communicate by social networks.
- Members communicate by forums.
- Members communicate via Twitter.
- Members communicate by blog posts/videos/UGC.
You do well when you try to get members communicating at the higher levels. Members form closer bonds and participation increases.
Front Porch Forum often starts with one person’s posting that is read by many. Then the fun begins… it sparks responses on FPF, as well as direct emails to the original author, phone calls, etc. And… highest on Richard’s list… that one posting leads to face to face conversation among neighbors on actual front porches (and sidewalks, country stores, playgrounds, etc.).
Measuring civic engagement
The California Civic Health Index 2010 was just released (PDF). A compelling attempt to quantify people’s involvement in their local community.
The term “civic engagement” has become one of the more vague in public policy discussions. More than any other national organization, the Congressionally chartered National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) has sought to bring clarity to this very important subject through survey research and promoting civic participation. Their annual “Civic Health Index” studies American civic engagement on activities ranging from voting to volunteering to many in between. For the last three years, NCoC has also focused on California for one of its state-level reports. To help dfine the term, this year’s report is divided into “political civic engagement” (voting and registering to vote, discussing politics with friends/neighbors) and “social civic engagement” (volunteering, having dinner with family, working on community problems).
Vermont shows up in some of the charts comparing all 50 U.S. states (plus DC, etc.)…
6th – Discuss politics with family and friends (44%)
3rd – Participate in one or more non-electoral political activities (39%)
mid – Voter registration (71%) and turn-out (64%)
13th – Eat dinner with family and household members (91%)
Further…
As technology rapidly changes the landscape of social networks and norms, this report looks at the kinds of connectivity Californians have to their families, neighbors, and communities. In a recent essay that questioned the impact of internet-based social networks on social movements, Malcolm Gladwell speculates that although online connectivity makes it easy to proliferate ideas, the kind of collectivist action that was a hallmark of our Civil Rights Movement and other important social revolutions depends more on strong leadership and close, in-person relationships between movement participants. Whether or not Gladwell is correct, it is certainly true that our community relationships, news consumption, and methods of conceptualizing solutions are rapidly changing with the advent of new forms of communication. As Californians work to effect change in their communities, proliferation of information and forms of social interactions both will play a large role.
Over the last few years, the rate at which Americans report working with neighbors to improve the community has increased: 8.3% of Californians say they work with neighbors to improve the community, slightly below a national average of 8.8%.
In this measure of engagement, California ranks 33rd in the nation. On a less formal level, 13.8% of Californians exchange favors with neighbors a few times a week, while the average for the entire country is 15.9%. These informal actions are greatly affected by geography: Californians who live in rural communities are far more likely to regularly exchange favors (21.9%) than those in urban areas (11.9%).
Facebook faces the (potentially impossible) task of…
An interesting take on Facebook…
This is a very interesting article (hat tip to Michel) on why Facebook (and for that matter other social media platforms too) want you to have more friends. In essence it is because more friends equals more activity which equals more content. Keeping the content coming is the key to a living social network. Like a shark, that must keep moving forwards to stay alive, social networks that start to run dry of content, start to die:
Online social networks are built on user-generated content. Without this content, these networks are the equivalent of dying blogs (or MySpace). That said, Facebook faces the (potentially impossible) task of keeping its users engaged and active. Account holders have lives outside of Facebook, what social scientists call opportunity costs, so these social networks need to incentivize participation short of paying people. What better way than to give us a large captive audience of acquaintances, colleagues, classmates, friends and family to share our content with.
About Blog
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
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