Robert Putnam will speak at the University of Vermont on April 28, 2008, sharing a lecture titled “Civic Engagement in a Diverse and Changing America.”
Putnam’s Bowling Alone was a ground-breaker documenting the decline of many facets of American community life. Steve Yelvington writes about Putnam briefly this week… here.
Rich Gordon writes in more detail about Putnam’s more recent work, part of which Putnam summarizes as “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ – that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
UPDATE: Just got the following details…
2008 Mark L. Rosen Memorial Lecture
Robert D. Putnam
‘E Pluribus Unum: Rebuilding Community in a Diverse and Changing America’
Monday, April 28, 7 PM – Free and Open to the Public
Silver Maple Ballroom, Dudley H. Davis Center
Reception immediately following
Co-Sponsored by UVM Political Science Department and the Vermont Humanities Council
Professor Putnam is Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. He has written a dozen books, translated into seventeen languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy work and Bowling Alone rank high among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last several decades.
Various entrepreneurial gurus (Marc Andreessen, Paul ) point, when asked for the most important ingredient for a start-up, to the market. That is, it doesn’t matter how clever your technology is, or your marketing, or how brilliant your team is if there is no demand for what you provide. If you’re working in a market that does have a healthy amount of demand for what you deliver… success is more likely. The existing market is the most fundamental driver of all. So goes one view.
Front Porch Forum is in the business of helping people get to know their neighbors… and to enhance the sense of community within neighborhoods. Ample evidence points to a growing desire from people who want just that (which I’ll save for another post).
And here’s a new documentary from England on the subject…
My Street
After 14 years of living on the same road Sue knew practically none of her neighbours. Intrigued by what stories might lie on her own doorstep, she began knocking on the 116 doors on her street and meeting some of the 300 people who are her neighbours.What she found were remarkable stories, from millionaires living next door to people on benefits, to convicted drug smugglers and classical composers. Sue meets party animals and recluses, the very young and the very old, hears stories of success and tragedy and sees how illness and loneliness, hope and happiness have left their mark on the lives of her neighbours.
More from Kevin Harris about this.
Steven Clift made an interesting proposal on MediaShift Idea Lab at PBS.org the other day…
Why not declare a night once a year in late January as “National Night On”? (“On” as in “online.”)
Go for it Steven! And he went on to write…
What bugs me about the Internet, even the rise of social networking, most of the investment tends to reinforce existing ties – friends and family – and the tools that build new ties are more about professional networking (LinkedIn) or dating. There is a huge difference between publicizing private life online and creating open and accessible online spaces for local public life. There are a few projects like E-Democracy.Org’s neighborhood forums in Minnesota and England, the Front Porch Forum in Vermont, and the Annenberg School’s i-neighbors, and many independent efforts trying to create larger neighborhood-wide exchange, but nothing that I know of designed to be peer-to-peer two-way is essentially block-level based.
A growing number of “social networking + local online” efforts are in that first group mentioned above… making it easier to keep up with old contacts. This can further exacerbate the very problem that Front Porch Forum and others are designed to address… isolation from the people you live next to. FPF is all about helping neighbors get to know each other and build community within the neighborhood.
Marc Andreessen (go UIUC engineering!) writes today about a group of neighbors in Seattle creating an online social networking using Ning to address concerns over a recent crime wave…
From Bill Gossman and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
“I’ve lived here 11 years and never seen anything like this,” said Bill Gossman, a Magnolia resident who about two weeks ago started a neighborhood Web site [on Ning] that he dubbed sleeplessinmagnolia.ning.com.
The social network, Gossman said, has received 55,000 page views and brought together 550 block-watching neighbors to share information, tips and experiences…
That’s great. It’s an example of the kind of thing that people are doing with Front Porch Forum all across our pilot city of Burlington, VT (30% subscribe already). Crime and neighborhood watch activities are common… as well as lots of other uses.
Ning, in addition to having amazing resources, provides “white label” social networks… that is, build your own. While Front Porch Forum provides the network/forum for 100% of the neighborhoods in its service area… and it’s designed to address the real problems of isolation and individualism by helping nearby neighbors connect.
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