Category Archives: Front Porch Forum
Adrian Holovaty on who’s winning hyperlocal…
I think Front Porch Forum is winning. They’ve managed to get 90% of households in a #VT neighborhood to sign up for it, and the community contributions are high quality, useful and interesting.
Beyond that, there are a bunch of great neighborhood blogs in various pockets in the U.S., like West Seattle Blog and Uptown Update here in Chicago.
And finally, I’m biased, but I think EveryBlock is genuinely interesting and useful, especially with our recent community-focused relaunch.
Thanks Adrian! That’s great company for FPF to keep. (See StreetFight for the full interview.) As I’ve said before, EveryBlock’s relaunch is a powerhouse.
Front Porch Forum open to #VT expansion
Several sponsors have stepped forward to bring Front Porch Forum to their Vermont communities. These include a local chamber of commerce, a town, a college, a telecom, a family foundation, and a consortium of agencies and nonprofits.
WCAX asked me today if FPF was open to further expansion in Vermont, beyond our current 60 towns. Short answer… yes!
If you’d like to see FPF come to your town, join our waitlist. Additionally, if you’d like to help make it happen, contact us with ideas about funding sources and local boosters.
Connected Citizens – New Report
From Mayur Patel at the Knight Foundation this week…
Arthur Goyette knows the value of good neighbors. While his wife Betty was battling cancer, they brought countless meals to the Goyette home. When the neighbors learned that Betty had always wanted to ride in a convertible, they surprised the family with a loaned Chrysler Sebring. The couple drove down the block with the top down, surrounded by people waving and taking pictures.
Arthur marvels that he might never have met these people f it weren’t for the Front Porch Forum, an online network of neighbors.
The forum is a great example of how digital media and technology are changing how we connect to information and each other. The way we engage in public dialogue, coordinate, solve problems—all of it is shifting.
Networks themselves are as old as humanity, used by activists from Mahatma Ghandi to the Tea Party to impact society. Today, though, technology is enabling networks to emerge in new ways.
So Knight Foundation and Monitor Institute set out to look at the impact on communities, and ask, what do these emerging networks mean for community change? And, how can funders leverage them for good?
The result is our new report, Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril and Potential of Networks. Through more than 70 examples, we found networked communities pushing for open government, banding together to care for the elderly, enlisting volunteer coders to make online aid maps for earthquake ravaged Haiti, and more.
The report is a compelling read… lots of excellent examples and points. A couple snapshots…
FPF now in Johnson, Hubbardton, Walden, Worcester #VT
Front Porch Forum continues to expand its community-communication service in Vermont. Today, Johnson FPF launched and already 50 local households are on board. Other recent additions include Hubbardton, Walden, and Worcester.
See the full list of Vermont towns where FPF operates here.
FPF helps nearby neighbors connect and build community by hosting regional networks of online neighborhood forums. More than 25,000 Vermont households participate, including greater than 40% of many towns and neighborhoods.
Columbia Journalism Review covers 2 #VT websites
VTDigger.org and Front Porch Forum were written up by the Columbia Journalism Review recently. Good stuff. Congratulations to VTDigger. The piece starts…
As the name suggests, VTDigger aims to provide deep coverage of local issues in the Green Mountain State. “I wanted to follow stories in-depth,” explains Anne Galloway, the publication’s editor-in-chief. “Not all of our stories are investigative; but we want them all to go deep.”…
And about FPF…
Vermont-based social networking site Front Porch Forum has earned an intense regional following, partly thanks to its success as a venue for hyperlocal citizen journalism…
I believe FPF and VTDigger will be on a panel together May 12, 2011 at the annual VBSR spring conference. Come join the discussion with us.
EveryBlock Going Social
Congratulations to fellow Knight News Challenge winner EveryBlock on the rollout today of their impressively revamped web service. Per Mashable…
EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news site acquired by msnbc.com in August 2009, unveiled a new version Monday designed to encourage conversation and collaboration among neighbors.
“We’re shifting from a one-way newsfeed to more of a community-empowered website,” says EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty. “Instead of going to the site to passively consume information, we’re going to offer a platform for posting messages to your neighbors, to discover who lives near you.”
In addition to the neighborhood-specific news, business reviews, crime reports and real estate listings the site delivered previously, a slew of new features encourages users to share and discuss local news, meet one another and coordinate neighborhood activities. Users will be able to create profiles, post about events and other topics of interest, as well as find neighbors who “follow” the same places to connect with those with similar tastes. (Soon, Holovaty says, the site hopes to integrate Foursquare’s API, but for now it will show neighbors who follow the same places on EveryBlock.)
Adrian and his team are doing great work. He goes on to say…
“The web doesn’t yet offer an easy and effective way for people to post messages to their neighbors,” Holovaty explains. “Other social media tools are focused on people you already know — professional colleagues, friends, family. But how many people become Facebook friends with their neighbors?” he asks.
Front Porch Forum plays this role in our many Vermont pilot communities, and various blogs and e-lists do the same in hundreds of various neighborhoods across North America. The first proof of social media, of course, is adoption… do people use it? We’ll have to wait and see how EveryBlock fares on that front. The second proof — can they make it pay? — well, I imagine Everyblock has more breathing room with deep-pocketed MSNBC.com holding the purse strings.
UPDATE: This bit from the Nieman Journalism Lab includes several more write ups about EveryBlock’s news. The interview on Poynter is especially informative…
Holovaty answered a lot of questions about the redesign in a Poynter chat, saying that the site’s mission has changed from making people informed about their area as an end in itself to facilitating communication between neighbors in order to improve their communities. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram applauded the shift in thinking, arguing that the main value in local news sites is in the people they connect, not in the data they collect. At 10,000 Words, Jessica Roy noted that the change was a signal that hyperlocal sites should focus not just on the online realm, but on fostering offline connections as well.
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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