From an interview in .net magazine with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake:
Community building is also what got Yahoo! so interested in Ludicorp’s creation and although Yahoo! has got some of the best technical resources behind it, Caterina believes that skills and money don’t guarantee users. “The interesting thing about acquisitions of this kind is that you can’t just suddenly build a community. You can’t just go out and replicate all of the features and functionality of something you’ve seen, it doesn’t really work that way.”
According to Caterina: “The most difficult part is not the technology but actually getting the people to behave well.” When first starting the community the Flickr team were spending nearly 24 hours online greeting each individual user, introducing them to each other and cultivating the community. “After a certain point you can let go and the community will start to maintain itself, explains Caterina. “People will greet each other and introduce their own practices into the social software. It’s always underestimated, but early on you need someone in there everyday who is kind of like the host of the party, who introduces everybody and takes their coat.”
Thanks to Jason Kottke for the reference, as well as an additional example.
With the development of Front Porch Forum, I too have been spending time online with our early members helping to shape that sense of community… online community that is. So that the positive, constructive, civil tone we’ve achieved will carry over from the online community into the actual neighborhood. Some have suggested that this aspect isn’t scalable… I’m confident it will be. Already we have about 6% of our members self-selected as neighborhood forum volunteers to help make this happen. People are able and willing to step up when it’s their neighborhood.
Burlington Telecom is a young internet provider that is bringing fiber optic broadband all the way to the home. This is the latest and greatest technology and it’s cheap! BT also offers telephone and “cable” TV (no copper). And the kicker… this innovative high tech outfit is owned by… the citizens of Burlington. It’s a municipal utility. All “profits” stay local… no distant corporate CEOs to feed or bail out of prison.
In our market, we have a small number of broadband options. The primary cable option has been Adelphia, which was swallowed by Comcast. That change is just hitting the ground here and I’ve been hearing from customers about the switch. Some haven’t had a problem, others have.
Here’s word from one unlucky chap who lives in Redrock:
“The switchover from Adelphia to Comcast has been a nightmare setting up forwarding loops and non-delivery notices. I am in the process of deleting most of some 21,306 messages… to get the half dozen legitimate ones.”
Ouch! He went on to sound an increasingly common refrain:
“Burlington Telecom doesn’t serve us yet… We can’t wait until they get here.”
Full disclosure: I volunteer on BT’s citizen advisory council and was a beta tester when their residential service started last fall.
Rob Maurizi just forwarded this piece from Time magazine (Europe Edition) by Grant Rosenberg about Peuplade:
Just two months old, Peuplade enables users to find like-minded Parisians in their own neighborhood, or even their own building, to schedule a range of activities, including after-work drinks, jogging groups and block parties. Already some 40,000 people have signed up and participated in more than 1,100 events around town. A rollout in other French cities is planned soon.
That’s an amazing start! Rosenberg goes on:
Beyond recreation and socializing, the site also promotes exchanging small services like babysitting and visiting isolated senior citizens. “In Paris, we don’t have the habit of really knowing our neighbors,” explains one of Peuplade’s founders, Nathan Stern, a sociologist by training. “Our website is about establishing community interaction not based on looks, background or politics, but by virtue of being nearby.”
That last quote could be said for Front Porch Forum too. Now where did I leave my college French? Peuplade looks impressive, but it’s impenatrable to the likes of my English-speaking self.
An article in The Birmingham News by Hannah Wolfson last month (thanks to Keith Hampton for pointing it out) outlines neighborhood-level online activity around Birmingham, Alabama. The stories she relays are happening with Front Porch Forum neighborhoods too… very similar.
They’re part of a growing movement across the metro area, where residents are turning the Internet into a virtual back fence, sharing issues ranging from break-ins to home sales to the latest gossip.
“People are hungry for this. People are concerned about their community,” said Robin Schultz, who founded Bluff Park’s Web site in August after an armed robbery at a nearby Piggly Wiggly. “They just don’t have a way to address these concerns, and the Internet provides an avenue for people to communicate in their little portion of the world.”
“Everybody’s so busy these days,” said Matthew Coleman, a resident of South Avondale who started an online forum for his neighborhood in July. “Most everybody has access to the Web, so it’s a good place to store phone numbers and have a list about who’s a reliable contractor and who’s not. It’s like a small little neighborhood library.”
The Front Porch Forum model works great in residential areas dominated by families, and now we’re seeing it work in more urban, rural and small town settings. The need to connect with neighbors appears to flow across many parts of U.S. society at this time. More from the Birmingham article:
Such groups help neighbors form closer bonds, said Keith Hampton, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication who has been researching neighborhood forums for eight years.
He said the forums work everywhere from dense urban locations to far-flung suburbs.
“People in the United States do not spend a lot of time socializing with their neighbors,” he said. “It’s been in decline for 30 years. I would like to think that this is an opportunity to change that.”
The article goes on to mention neighborhood online efforts that cover small condo developments, up to larger suburban neighborhoods of 830 houses. While some of the internet groups seem to focus on business (condo association meeting minutes), the more vibrant ones address the human need to connect with those around you:
Mark Coby, who started a Web site for the Inverness Homeowners Association, said the need for more community contact became clear to him after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “You could start at home by knowing your neighbors a little bit better,” he said. “Today it’s real easy not to even contact your next-door neighbor if you don’t have some kind of common bond,” he said. “It’s kind of nice to know who lives in your neighborhood.”
Finally, people think there’s more opportunity for this kind of activity:
Buoyed by his success, Allen’s now trying to link all 99 of the city’s neighborhoods and help those who don’t have a Web site build one. “The more we get out the information, the better armed we are,” he said.
Seems like multiple overlapping versions of the internet are evolving… corporate, commercial, entertainment, social, blogosphere, etc. And now, increasingly, local. Unlike most of the other uses of the internet, I think the local version begs for people to not be anonymous, not rant quite so abusively, and not swing too far into vices… in other words, the local internet calls for people to be neighborly, civil and known.
So, I appreciate Bill Simmon and Cathy Resmer‘s comments about such things.
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