Category Archives: Community Management
Raffle Winners!
Congratulations to our 22 Front Porch Forum “Nine Words for 2009” raffle winners and thanks to our prize donors!
1. Michele Sandquist, Bolton — Higher Ground
2. Jeremy Brotz, Burlington — ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center at the Leahy Center for Lake Champlain
3. Emily Eschner, Burlington — Sleepy Hollow Inn
4. Kurt Kaffenberger, Burlington — Vermont Frost Heaves
5. Krista Nickerson, Burlington — The Grass Gauchos
6. Susan Rutherford, Burlington — Gardener’s Supply
7. Zach Usadi-Henrickson, Burlington — Burlington Telecom
8. Laurel Maurer, Colchester — Seventh Generation
9. Colin McNaull, Hinesburg — The Grass Gauchos
10. LindaLou Parker, Essex Junction — Trading Post for Little Folks
11. Laurie Darling, Milton — Aikido of Champlain Valley
12. Patricia Bezalel, Shelburne — PhotoGarden
13. Lori Peckham, Shelburne — Woolen Mill Health Club
14. Peter Baldor, Richmond — Woolen Mill Health Club
15. Joe O’Brien, Richmond — ReCycle North
16. Tim Barritt, South Burlington — Sleepy Hollow Inn
17. Loretta Marriott, South Burlington — Higher Ground
18. Max Henson-Stroud, Westford — Trading Post for Little Folks
19. Chuck McGill, Westford — Sweet Clover Market
20. Kevin Stephens, Williston — Higher Ground
21. Liz Dallas, Winooski — Aikido of Champlain Valley
22. Petie Shea-Gamache, Winooski — Woolen Mill Health Club
Online community management skills are essential
Matt Thompson posted on his blog today…
I’ve been parroting Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” model so much recently that I forget how many people still haven’t heard it…
BTW: This principle dovetails nicely with Caterina Fake’s philosophy that you build a real community by greeting each early user at the door. Among the most essential skills that I believe must be taught to tomorrow’s journalists is community management — a skill entirely lost in today’s discussions about newsroom training. Technical training will be obsolete in a year. But the best community managers on the Web today employ principles refined over a long history of community leadership.
The value of community management to Front Porch Forum‘s early success becomes more apparent every day.
Zip Codes and Polygons
Defining physical boundaries of neighborhoods is a cornerstone of Front Porch Forum. So we’re interested in local boundaries generally. Vermont-based Maponics shares a good primer today about ZIP Codes and carrier routes (and they have neighborhood polygons too)…
The ZIP Code and carrier route coding system was specifically developed by the United States Postal Service (USPS) in order to make mail delivery more efficient. This means that what the average person refers to as a “ZIP Code”, is actually a collection of addresses that have the same 5-digit code assigned to them. The USPS then further splits up each of these ZIP Codes into smaller blocks of addresses: carrier routes. A carrier route literally corresponds to the group of addresses that an individual mail service employee is responsible for delivering to each day.
There are roughly 43,000 ZIP Codes in the US. These are divided into approximately 600,000 unique carrier routes with, on average, 15 carrier routes per ZIP Code. Fifty percent of these are PO Box-based carrier routes which do not have actual delivery areas.
ZIP Codes and carrier routes do not tie in to any other US geography. Because of this, they frequently cross city, census tract, county and even state boundaries. The USPS does not provide maps or map data for ZIP Codes and carrier routes. Businesses looking for postal map data to inform their sales territory tracking, direct marketing and other initiatives have to turn to private map data compilers for this information.
Read the full post…
Front Porch Forum in Two Slides
Here’s Front Porch Forum boiled down to two slides…
Lessons for Social Software
I’ve admired Clay Shirky‘s work since first meeting him a couple years ago at a Personal Democracy Forum. Somehow though, I had missed his excellent 2003 piece “A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy.” So thanks to Rich Gordon for pointing to it this week.
Clay’s speech lays out commonalities across social software, pulling lessons from the past few decades… and pre-Web 2.0 explosion. It reads, to me, like a text book version of the lessons we’ve learned “the hard way” in hosting Front Porch Forum.
My wife, Valerie, and I started FPF in 2000 as a stand-alone online neighborhood forum. We leaned on our neighbors to help us develop the rules of engagement… some firm (e.g., no anonymity), others soft (like a generally civil and constructive tone). In 2006, we launched a network of 130 online neighborhood forums blanketing our pilot area of Chittenden County, VT, and continued to evolve our rules based largely on member feedback.
Some of Clay’s points from 2003 that strike a chord…
So there’s this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it’s subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we’ve seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.
He cites some research too about groups defeating their own purpose by veering off course… three patterns…
Sex talk… the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members
Identification and vilification of external enemies
Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets… something that’s beyond critique.
And…
You can find the same piece of code running in many, many environments. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. So there is something supernatural about groups being a run-time experience. The normal experience of social software is failure. If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law. There’s a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure. And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category.
Clay’s tips for developing and running social software…
- You cannot completely separate technical and social issues
- Members (“super users”) are different than users
- The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations (serve the group over the individual)
- Design for handles (similar to identity) that the user can invest in
- Design some way in which good works get recognized
- You need barriers to participation. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
- Find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations.
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!
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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