Category Archives: Citizen Journalism
Online tools to help local communities
Matt, on the LocalMouth blog, writes recently…
Personally, I think there’s great potential for simple online tools to bring local communities more closely together. It may be a struggle at the start to get together a critical mass of neighbours, and it may need a liberal dash of coaxing, but once you’ve got the ball rolling, people’s natural desire to communicate with others should take care of the rest. Good stuff will happen. ‘Good’ won’t always mean that people get along well or that arguments won’t take place. Far from it. When people are talking about stuff that matters, conversations are bound to get heated at times, and that’s where the delicate job of moderation comes in. But generally, I think, more communication between local people can be a very positive thing.
Right on! He goes on to list several UK websites that each focus in a different way on their local community… and Front Porch Forum.
I look forward to checking out the local sites he mentions. Thanks Matt!
State Rep. Uses Front Porch Forum to call for Boycott
Matt Ryan reported for the Burlington Free Press today…
Vermont campaign signs along Vermont 15 in front of the Essex Junction Shopping Center have prompted a departing state legislator to call on citizens to boycott businesses within the center — even though the businesses’ managers said they had nothing to do with the signs.
Rep. Peter Hunt, a Democrat from Essex Junction, wrote in a post on Front Porch Forum on Oct. 17 that he would stop shopping at Aubuchon Hardware, Rite Aid Pharmacy, Sherwin-Williams, Quality Bake Shop or “any of the individual store (sic) who have taken this political stance as long as they have these signs on Pearl Street.”
“I am disappointed that these business (sic) have chosen to a (sic) political stance to support candidates from one party,” Hunt wrote. “This is completely out of line.”
He concluded with, “I hope all of you will also shop in other stores.”
More than a dozen FPF subscribers have responded on our service, none in agreement with Rep. Hunt’s call.
Knight News Challenge 2009!
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is opening up the third round of its News Challenge.
We’re giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs.
If you have a great idea that will improve local online news, deepen community engagement, bring Web 2.0 tools to local neighborhoods, develop publishing platforms and standards to support local conversations or innovate how we visualize, experience or interact with information, we’d like to see it! You have the opportunity to win funding for your project and support within a vibrant community of media, tech, and community-oriented people who want to improve the world.
Deadline Nov. 1, 2008. The good folks at Knight have a hand in so many great projects that it’s tough to keep track. We’ll be submitting an application to take Front Porch Forum to the next level… the two paragraphs above describe FPF to a tee. We were honored previously this year to be involved in a couple Knight initiatives.
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Web 2.0 for the rest of us?
reports today on CNET News…
LONDON–Digg founder Kevin Rose had a message for the audience at the Future of Web Apps conference on Thursday: It’s time to grow up.
“We have to do better,” he said in his talk, called “The Future of News,” and said that it’s time for the social news site that he founded in 2004 to to expand beyond the geek set and get some real-world relevance. “Why click a button and make the number go up by one? Why does that matter?”
Digg, after all, gets more than 30 million monthly visitors, but Rose said that the site only has slightly over three million registered user accounts–those are the people actually “Digging.” That indirectly confirmed what Digg critics hve been saying all along: that it’s reflective of only a tiny and vocal subset of the Web, resulting in a heavy bias toward anything iPhone, anything Linux, anything Barack Obama, and plenty of wacky local news stories.
I’ve been fortunate to speak to many groups over the past year or so, and I frequently survey each crowd about technology and services that they’ve (1) heard of, and (2) use. Routinely, only one or two hands will go up for Twitter, RSS, LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr, Delicious, etc. to my first question. But almost no one ever admits to using these tech media darlings. Meanwhile, it’s not unusual in talks with local groups within our pilot area to have half of the hands reaching for the ceiling when I ask about Front Porch Forum.
Kevin Rose’s call above seems on target to me. When you offer a service globally, it’s not outrageous to find a million tech professionals and hobbyists to jump on board. But try raising an online crowd within a local community… especially one that stays plugged in over time… very difficult.
In our pilot area, more than 11,000 households subscribe to Front Porch Forum, including one-third of Burlington, VT. We have people in their 80s using FPF. I spoke with a homeless person the other day who’s on board. College students love FPF. And we have droves of non-techie grown-ups… folks who are too busy with their lives to look into why they should tweet or digg. Busy or not, they do know that Front Porch Forum is the place to turn to borrow a couple saw horses, find a babysitter, recommend a roofer, learn about a rash of break-ins, give away their couch, buy a bike, hear from their school board member about the budget, etc.
I’m looking forward to more online offerings aimed at the rest of us… not just the heavy tech consumers. Of course, it’s tough for the traditional and new media, as well as funders, not to be dazzled by shiny bells and whistles, especially when these sites attract a sizable group of early adopters from the global masses. This top-down approach has worked incredibly well for Google and a host of others. And it will continue to draw most of the media spotlight and funding.
I’m eager to see more efforts coming from the other direction — the grassroots on up and out — such as we’re doing with Front Porch Forum… the Craigslist and Angieslist approach. That is, get traction in one metro area, then spread to others.
New Media Guru in Vermont Oct. 4
New media thinker and do-er Dan Gillmor will speak at the UVM Center for Rural Studies 30th anniversary bash on October 4, 2008 starting at 5:00 PM. I’ve been fortunate to hear Dan speak and follow his online writing for the past couple years… great stuff. And now he’s leading the newly formed Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Front Porch Forum is tickled pink to be involved (albeit in a small way). Come to the conference all day… or at least catch Dan’s talk at 5:00 PM and the panel he’ll moderate after that.
-Author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People (2004; O’Reilly Media)
-Director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
-Director of the Center for Citizen MediaAt the newly created Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Dan Gillmor is working to help create a culture of innovation and risk-taking in journalism education, and in the wider media world. He is founder and current director of the Center for Citizen Media and previously founded Grassroots Media, Inc. From 1994-2004, Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont (’81), Gillmor received a Herbert Davenport fellowship in 1982 for economics and business reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. During the 1986-87 academic year he was a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.
And I seem to recall some former Vermont professional connection of his. Hmm…
Information + Communication + Civic Engagement = ??
Keith Harris in the United Kingdom writes today that “What’s missing is communication, not information” on his blog Neighbourhoods. Some of his points…
This is very definitely work in progress but maybe the argument is something like this:
- for various reasons there is a crisis of local social connections which causes evident damage
- examples of local communication (post-its on windscreens, notes on lamp-posts, message graffiti and so on) point to the inadequacies of existing communication channels, especially in contexts of high mobility and the erosion of local life
- online networks can augment (not replace) other channels of communication and stimulate more interaction (I never understood why this should ever have been in doubt)
- we need to find out what research has been done and where the gaps are, showcase good practice and clarify the lessons. This will help the system-builders, and then
- we have to go to to the housing movement and local government with incontestible arguments that this stuff works and should be developed. Might that do it?
This reminds me of some of the conversation that the Knight Foundation has been sparking through its various efforts. Knight is pushing easily accessible information at the local level as a needed element to sustain our democracy in the United States. Hear, hear! But others, including me, have pushed to have civic engagement be part of that mission as well. And here’s Keith telling us that communication trumps information.
I think we need all three to feed our democracy… an engaged citizenry that can communicate with each other and develop, access and share information. I’m thrilled that Front Porch Forum is on the cutting edge of all this.
“The possibility of human-sized communication”
We keep stumbling over pieces about the value of “local” in the digital universe (and vice versa)… right out of Front Porch Forum‘s playbook. Today it was a couple of journalists…
Mark Potts writes in part…
Anyone who questions that people are interested in talking about their communities hasn’t dug in to the plethora of listservs, Yahoo groups and organization sites that already provide coverage of many local communities.
And I definitely recommend reading Howard Owen’s full post. Here’s his opening…
Some people think the web makes the world bigger. I say, it makes it smaller. Some people say the web makes us neighbors with people in Kenya or the Ukraine. I say it makes us better neighbors with the family next door.
There was a time in United States history when newspapers served as a centralizing force for drawing communities together — and then came television, and cable, and satellite — all the forces that did nothing to humanize communication, but made mass communication more mass and less personal.
The Internet brings back the possibility of human-sized communication.
At a time when too many glass-eyed Americans turn to network TV for their “Heroes” and get “Lost” in whatever flimflam Hollywood is dishing out this season, the Web opens up new possibilities for people, local people, people who share a common interest in a common community, to partake in conversation and pursue change with conviction.
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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