Category Archives: Community Building
National Night Out Award for FPF
South Burlington’s National Night Out celebration seemed a great hit today. I know our kids had a great time. And it was a real honor to accept the event’s community award on behalf of thousands of local folks who are using Front Porch Forum to build community within their own neighborhoods. (See here and here for past postings about this event and award.)
And here are a couple photos of us (Michael and Valerie) accepting the award from Vermont Governor Jim Douglas (top) and Police Chief Trevor Whipple and Sgt. Tom Fraga.
Thanks to all these folks for the recognition!
Like this blog? Attend the workshop!
I’ll be leading a workshop at the COMMUNITYMATTERS07 conference in Burlington, VT, Oct. 23, 2007. About the conference…
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.
Virtual Neighborhood: Building Local Community Online
Community does indeed matter. And virtual online connections are creating and enhancing real communities. This workshop will examine Front Porch Forum and other online services that foster community at the neighborhood level. Participants will investigate trends in social networking, local online and community building at the neighborhood level… and their intersection. These topics are examined in depth at http://frontporchforum.com/blog
Flickr gets social networking right?
An interesting piece on MediaShift by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo…
With the plethora of social networking sites, it’s easy to come to the quick conclusion that what we are doing on these sites — chatting up strangers, lurking on people’s profiles, spying on friends — is just a waste of time. But there is one site that is more than just an unhealthy habit: Photo-sharing site Flickr
is a photography school, art gallery and a sandbox for experimentation. On Flickr, bad photographers get schooled, mediocre ones get better and some even rise to the top as stars — all supported by an immense, and sometimes intimate, international community.
When Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield launched Flickr in 2004
The opening — much online social networking is a waste of time — caught my attention as a view shared by many folks I know, but seldom seen online or mentioned by Web 2.0 cheerleaders. I know some folks who are gaga over Flickr for just the reasons outlined by MediaShift. Read the full piece.
Is FPF a neighborhood mailing list?
KOB comments on the MediaShift site regarding the Front Porch Forum posting there…
Washington DC neighborhoods have been long served by mailing lists and some have more than 3,000 subscribers. The content, all user generated is, in sum, similar to Front Porch.
Front Porch sounds like an effort to give a little more structure to ad hoc mailing lists.
But I have to question Front Porch’s requirements, if I read this post correctly, to make its lists closed as well as require ID in a posts.
DC’s mailing lists aren’t closed. I subscribe to several. And you don’t have to include your name in a post. An ID requirement may discourage some people to post crime information or freely express concerns.
Front Porch is a reminder that mailing lists are very effective and popular. Neighborhood Mailing lists are so entrenched in DC that I’m not convinced that DC’s growing number of neighborhood blogs will necessarily unseat mailing lists as the primary source of neighborhood intel.
I agree with KOB’s support of DC’s neighborhood mailing lists. Blogs are great, but they’re one person’s view (or maybe from a few), whereas the mailing lists are from the crowd.
Front Porch Forum’s approach is a departure from DC’s neighborhood mailings lists though. Our aim is to help neighbors connect and foster community within the neighborhood. Our scale is roughly 10% of DC’s lists, that is, a few hundred households. Only residents may join and post. And all postings are clearly labeled with the author’s name, street, and email address.
I’m familiar with some of the DC mailing list (and other places like Austin, etc.), and many are popular and very helpful to a lot of people. But they don’t do much of what FPF’s neighborhood forums are doing… that is, helping nearby neighbors really get to know each other in person.
I lived in and participated on the Mount Pleasant mailing list in DC 10-12 years ago (prehistoric by internet time)… and it was great. However, I actually knew or had the chance to get to know less than 5-10% of those posting. In my FPF neighborhood, that’s reversed… there’s probably only 5-10% that I won’t ever meet, and with 90% of my neighborhood using the service that’s a huge shift.
Hyperlocal yada yada… it’s about connecting
Interesting discussion led by Jeff Jarvis about local news online this week… does hyper local matter to 18-35 year olds or not? And, if not, then let’s just declare it dead and move on. Jeff goes the other way and says that hyperlocal is just very hard to pull off and that everyone is interested in it, regardless of age.
Yelvington.com jumps in today and really nails it…
One camp agrees hyperlocal is important. The other thinks local is dead and it’s all about hyper-me. Me, me, me.
Here’s the thing. For most people, there is no difference between hyperlocal and hyper-me, because most real people live very local lives.
I do not. Lately I’m acutely aware of how little I actually live where I live. I have a well-stamped passport, gold status on Skymiles, friends scattered around the planet. I dare not assume that other people are having the same 21st century virtual experience that I’m having with my wifi connections and my global-roaming text messages.
I get the point about hyper-me, I really do, but I also know that most people live locally. And for them, hyper-me and hyperlocal largely overlap.
Human beings need connections. We’re hardwired that way. But modern life gets in the way. TV and the automobile sell us connections but deliver isolation. Stand at a street corner and count the cars with drivers talking on their cellphones. They’re fighting back.
I’m looking at some proprietary research from one city where fully 38 percent of women who were interviewed reported that connecting was their biggest personal challenge.
Virtual connections through a social networking platform are better than no connections at all, but the real opportunity, I think, is in virtual connections that are combined with real connections. Physical-world connections. Hyperlocal space.
That’s what Front Porch Forum is all about. And I don’t doubt the research about women feeling challenged by connecting with other people in this day and age. Check out the unsolicited remarks from FPF members… it all boils down to developing lasting connections with real people… in FPF’s case, with nearby neighbors.
And, good for him for recognizing that he’s not Joe Average. I know of several (if not most) “local” efforts that are designed by national-focused people with little experience of living in community with neighbors, serving on school committees, running a fundraiser for the volunteer fire dept., etc. And they feel that way.
Many of these “local” online services are built for a national collection of locals, thus losing a degree of authenticity. Just like eating at McDonalds among strangers is a fundamentally different experience than bellying up to the counter of a local diner and talking about the Little League playoffs.
Parents Played Outside Three Times More than Their Kids do Today
Kevin Harris writes today…
Adults were three times more likely to play out when they were young, than children are today… released by Play England:
71 per cent of adults played outside in the street or area close to their homes every day when they were children, compared to only 21 per cent of children today.
There has been a decrease over the past thirty years in children’s access to the streets and outdoor areas near their homes. Increasingly their independent mobility is restricted by traffic and fear, which in turn causes them to spend much of their time indoors or at organised activities. The combination of an increase in vehicles on the roads, increased parental anxiety, and restrictions on children’s mobility in the form of child curfews and anti-social behaviour orders has reduced children’s outdoor play opportunities.
The qualitative research reported included focus groups with young people aged between eight and 18. From which comes this scary piece of news:
Ten of the participants said that they never played outside on the streets and areas near their home.
That’s ten out of 64 participants. And in the light of my recent note about the importance of unstructured time, this point is noteworthy:
In all the groups, children and young people said that having the freedom to choose what to do, and where to spend time, particularly in contrast to time spent in school, was very important. Even the youngest children talked about having this freedom and time away from parents and adult supervision.
There’s much more material here
This is all about England, but it sounds not too dissimilar from the ol’ U.S. of A. While I’m tempted to launch into a lengthy piece that starts with “When I was a boy… ” – I’ll instead just add my hearty “hear, hear!”
I don’t have anything beyond intuition to back this up… but I believe that Front Porch Forum works to reverse this unsettling trend. That is, a neighborhood with a thriving online FPF forum becomes a friendlier, more neighborly place, where parents get to know their neighbors over time and thus become more comfortable turning their kids out to play. Maybe I’m wrong… but it’s just this kind of thing that motivates us to make FPF work for more and more communities.
MacArthur Fellowship? Oh my.
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!
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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