Category Archives: Media
Coyotes in Suburban South #BTV #VT
Traditional media frequently uses Front Porch Forum for story leads. Today it’s the Burlington Free Press covering coyotes in suburban South Burlington…
In the wake of a rabid coyote attack last year on several people in Westchester County, N.Y., coyote-spotters have maintained a lively dialogue on the Butler Farms Front Porch Forum.
Chuck LaBombard, who has lived in the Oak Creek development for 11 years, is one of them.
“The coyote population has continued to increase during the past decade and I get it. We live in their territory,” he wrote in a January post.
“To occasionally see them on the golf course or in back of the development is one thing. To routinely see them on our sidewalks is totally another,” he continued. “Imagine if a child s pooked them or a lone adult was in the wrong place at the wrong time. My 11-year-old daughter is becoming afraid to play in her own yard… front or back! I am not a house-on-fire kind of person, but I am concerned!”
LaBombard and other neighbors have found no easy fix, and Police Chief Trevor Whipple has cautioned them against frontier justice in a crowded neighborhood: Firearms discharge is illegal within city limits…
Neighborhood Sites Can Awaken Community Involvement
[This posting originally appeared on PBS MediaShift/IdeaLab and Huffington Post.]
“When I was first on my own I used to bemoan that my fellow renters could hardly be bothered to return a wave but someone kept stealing my newspaper…,” wrote author Laura Grace Weldon in a recent blog post, What Makes A Street Into A Neighborhood? “Then we moved to a little house. It was silly how hard it was to meet the neighbors. They’d wave but that’s about it.”
Along the same lines, Sarah Byrnes wrote in YES! Magazine that “In the past, neighbors knew each other and engaged more naturally in mutual aid, sharing common resources and helping those in need. Nowadays, our mutual aid muscles are out of shape and pretty flabby.”
The National Conference on Citizenship’s Civic Health Index has attempted to bring science into the discussion by measuring things like the percent of people in a place who discuss politics with family and friends (44 percent in Vermont, for example). They found that 9 percent of Americans work with neighbors to improve the community, and 16 percent exchange favors with neighbors a few times a week.
Local Sites Drive Engagement
In their new book, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John McKnight and Peter Block provide strategy and tactics culled from decades of community organizing. The book is chock full of hands-on, face-to-face ideas for pulling neighbors together. The Internet gets a mention, but it should get more.
A recent study from the U.K. by Hugh Flouch and Kevin Harris found incredible civic engagement impact from neighborhood-focused websites. Among the findings reported by residents who use these websites:
- 95 percent feel more informed about the neighborhood
- 92 percent feel useful information gets shared efficiently
- 82 percent feel people pull together to improve the neighborhood
- 69 percent feel an increased sense of belonging within the neighborhood
How is this possible? I’m guessing that the sites studied offer highly relevant (that is, very local) content, don’t waste people’s time, and emphasize relationships and communication among “participants” over simply feeding news to passive “readers.” These sites likely move away from social media’s 90:9:1 principal, which posits that 90 percent of visitors are lurkers, 9 percent pitch in a little, and 1 percent create the vast majority of a site’s content.
Sometimes even the 1 percent of the content that appears to be user-generated is actually supplied by paid contributors, such as the recent case with Yell.
Front Porch Forum
I see a different pattern with our Knight News Challenge-supported Front Porch Forum. We host a pilot regional network of online neighborhood forums in Vermont with the simple mission of helping neighbors connect and get involved.
In one rural town, we found that half of the community had subscribed to FPF after one year and, remarkably, 66 percent had posted. Instead of 90:9:1, we saw a ratio closer to 34:44:22. In another study in Burlington, Vt., where half of the city subscribes to FPF, 90 percent reported that their local civic engagement had increased due to this online service.
Finding quality, timely and accessible local information is a daunting task in our current environment, with traditional media’s convulsions and new media’s fits and starts. But that’s only half the battle. An informed yet isolated and disconnected populace does not make a democracy. We need more efforts like those covered in the U.K. study above that get people connected to neighbors and involved in the places where they live.
That’s our mission at Front Porch Forum and we’re excited to find growing interest in turning online words into offline local actions. Please share examples in the comments.
Hiding in Plain Sight
Vermont Public Radio commentator Andrea Learned chimed in today with a piece called “Sustainable Waldo.”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to nudge more people toward sustainable living practices. While switching out light bulbs and recycling as much as possible are both easy ways to start that process, what comes next? … we may now need to focus on places where sustainability is hidden in plain sight… Remember the “Where’s Waldo” books? Darned if he wasn’t right in front of your nose and you didn’t see him. So where are some sustainability Waldos?
One great example might lie in urban density and community transportation planning issues… Gardening is another activity where sustainability may be hiding in plain sight.
And what about neighborhood involvement, as supported by services like Vermont’s own Front Porch Forum, which host networks of online neighbor-to-neighbor help and information. Communities built on stronger interpersonal relationships and citizen interconnections help build more long-term, sustainable views on big, challenging issues. Whether or not citizens see this as sustainability doesn’t really matter. They are responding to powerful, sustainability-promoting, shared values.
She’s got a point! Sometimes we talk about FPF’s larger community benefits… but most of the time when chatting with folks, we focus on the direct and obvious benefits… use FPF to find an affordable plumber or ride to Boston, to report a car break-in to neighbors, to sell a bike or give away a stroller.
Vermont’s own FPF featured in U.S. News & World Report
U.S. News & World Report focuses on giving back in its Nov. 2010 issue, including an article examining Front Porch Forum! Thousands of Vermonters have been doing great things through FPF since 2006… kudos to all!
I can’t find the piece online yet, but here’s a PDF version:
UPDATE: Here’s the online version!
#VT Police and Social Networking
Andy Bromage writes in this week’s Seven Days about VT police use of digital tools… interesting stories. He closes with…
Burlington police do closely monitor the neighborhood Front Porch Forums, replying to questions and concerns posted by residents. But they do not maintain a Facebook page because, in Schirling’s words, “It is one more thing to maintain with limited resources, and our website is quite comprehensive.”
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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