Category Archives: Front Porch Forum
National gathering of community foundations feature FPF
#VT – Front Porch Forum is one of the successful services being highlighted today at the Knight Foundation’s Media Learning Seminar in Miami. FPF is pleased and grateful to be included in this prestigious event.
“We don’t need another newspaper, we have Front Porch Forum”
#VT – How fortunate we are in Bristol to have Front Porch Forum at our disposal. I certainly hope that someone is recording all these postings using some media that is not ephemeral (imagine if the Constitution had been recorded on 8 track?) as future generations may be able to use current Front Porch Forum postings the way our generations use the old Bristol Heralds- a view into a time gone by.
I was talking with a good friend the other day who had been considering starting up another newspaper that would deal with only local issues, much like the last several efforts to do the same but which all met an early demise. We don’t need another newspaper- we have Front Porch Forum which meets all those needs.
I just hope that future generations can enjoy this as much as we do and that they will be able to look back to our time and try to understand the issues that confront us in the same way that we use old publications in our quest to understand the issues of earlier times, and as George Santayana observed, “Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.”
Shared by Ted with his Bristol, Vermont, neighbors on their FPF today.
Monkton, Ferrisburgh, Enosburgh open Front Porch Forums
#VT – Welcome to the good people of Monkton, Ferrisburgh and Enosburgh to Front Porch Forum. Anyone living in these towns may now join their FPF at FrontPorchForum.com.
And a special thanks to the Monkton Community Coffeehouse, Enosburg Area Business Assn., Enosburgh Town School District, Town of Ferrisburgh, and others for sponsoring this expansion of FPF services. We now cover 90 Vermont towns. Here’s a map and complete list.
NYTimes: “Facebook… a major waste of time”
From today’s New York Times…
Facebook is the most popular social network in America roughly two-thirds of adults in the country use it on a regular basis.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t get sick of it.
A new study released on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center”˜s Internet and American Life Project found that 61 percent of current Facebook users admitted that they had voluntarily taken breaks from the site, for as many as several weeks at a time.
The main reason for their social media sabbaticals?
Not having enough time to dedicate to pruning their profiles, an overall decrease in their interest in the site as well as the general sentiment that Facebook was a major waste of time. About 4 percent cited privacy and security concerns as contributing to their departure. Although those users eventually resumed their regular activity, another 20 percent of Facebook users admitted to deleting their accounts.
Of course, even as some Facebook users pull back on their daily consumption of the service, the vast majority 92 percent of all social network users still maintain a profile on the site. But while more than than half said that the site was just as important to them as it was a year ago, only 12 percent said the site’s significance increased over the last year indicating the makings of a much larger social media burnout across the site.
The study teases out other interesting insights, including the finding that young users are spending less time overall on the site…
Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, which conducted the survey, described the results as a kind of “social reckoning.”
“These data show that people are trying to make new calibrations in their life to accommodate new social tools,” said Mr. Rainie, in an e-mail. Facebook users are beginning to ask themselves, “ “˜What are my friends doing and thinking and how much does that matter to me?,’ “ he said. “They are adding up the pluses and minuses on a kind of networking balance sheet and they are trying to figure out how much they get out of connectivity vs. how much they put into it.”
Vermont connection to The Simpsons?
#BTV #VT – Posted by Nicki Feldman on the Underhill Front Porch Forum today…
My brother, Ben Feldman, is 1 of 3 finalists chosen out of 25,000 for a contest on the Simpsons Television Show! The winner will have their illustration animated on the season finale.
I am being a shameless sister and asking if you would please vote for him…check it out!!
http://www.fox.com/thesimpsons/couchgag/
Thank you and stay warm : )
Social media — the new graffiti?
Graffiti was traditionally the only means love or hate-filled teenagers had of letting the world know about their passions.
Now, thanks to Twitter and Facebook, they can literally let the world know about it – and no-one will come along and remove it.
“Vandalising and spraying – the local council will just come and take it off,” says Kito, a youth worker of the Queen’s Crescent Youth Club. “They will wash it off. So you put it up, they wash it off, you put it up.
But if you put it up on your BlackBerry it’s yours, it’s your personal message and nobody bothers you.”
Vandalism is increasingly seen as a pointless activity. As one teenage girl at the Queen’s Crescent Youth Club put it: “If I get angry about something, I go on Facebook.”
Smartphones — new opiate of the masses?
Vandalism began to fall sharply in 2006/07 – about the same time as smartphone sales began to take off in the UK.
Research last year by Ofcom found 7% of teenagers spent less time socialising with friends since they got a smartphone.
Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest they also spend less time hanging around on street corners and vandalising things?
“There are so many things for kids now,” says Kito, a 30-year-old Camden youth worker. “Why waste their time vandalising when they could be on their BB [Blackberry] talking to girls or on YouTube putting up their music videos? They have got a lot of things to keep them occupied. They don’t need to be bored now.”
The average 11- to 14-year-old spends 13 hours a week playing computer games, increasingly on their smartphones, GameTrak figures show. If true, this would not leave a great deal of time for much else.
BYO Projects focuses on Vermont success story
#BTV #VT – BYO Projects is a collection of projects curated by BYO consulting staff and submitted by readers. They showcase projects that make the world a better place through creative problem solving, experience design, technology, and community engagement. Today, on MLK, Jr. Day, they focused on Front Porch Forum!
Front Porch Forum‘s mission is to “help neighbors connect and build communityby hosting regional networks of online neighborhood forums.”
Campaigns, Businesses and Nonprofits put FPF to work
#BTV #VT – 45,000 Vermont households participate in their Front Porch Forum now. Use FPF advertising and campaign postings to place your message into neighborhood conversations.
“Front Porch Forum is the finest tool ever invented for speaking directly to your constituents, or to potential voters. It’s direct, it’s personal, and it’s increasingly powerful as more and more homes come online. Where I used it in my last election, my vote totals visibly increased, because it’s less a form of advertising and more a kind of conversation — and that’s the way we should be doing campaigns in Vermont.”
– Philip Baruth, Vermont Senate Majority Leader
“We just conducted a survey, seeking respondents through many local news channels. Our Front Porch Forum campaign outperformed every other link by a huge margin! So huge in fact, that we needed to retool our workflow to manage the high number of FPF-generated responses. Front Porch Forum is amazing! It will always be an integral part of our ongoing community outreach effort.”
– Cal Workman, Greater Burlington YMCA
“We book with FPF because we feel it’s a great, cost-effective way to reach local consumers who are actively engaged with their communities and looking to support local businesses/organizations.”
– Elisa Garcia-Rey, Karen Fahey Advertising
“There is no doubt that Front Porch Forum was immensely helpful in making this year’s conference our most successful event ever.”
– Charlie Brooks, 15th Annual Vermont Breast Cancer Conference
Building community resiliency before natural disaster
#VT – Shared recently by Meg Allison, Moretown Elementary School librarian:
Moretown is a typical rural Vermont town, defined by her extraordinary landscape of hills and valleys, and peopled with caring, resilient, and proud people. When the rains of Tropical Storm Irene caused our rivers, the Mad River and the Winooski River, to rise and inundate our neighborhoods, when our village had to be evacuated, when our post office, town office, and elementary school filled with flood waters, when our bridges were compromised and roads washed away, we had one thing going for us that some other towns did not ““ a digital infrastructure and a citizenry who knew how to use digital tools to communicate, to organize, and ultimately, to continue our long-term recovery.
Moretown was the recipient of round two e-Vermont funding that established, among other things, Front Porch Forum, a robust digital network for our residents, digital workshops and training for our residents, computers and wifi access for our town library, and an invaluable partnership with Digital Wish, providing each of our 4th, 5th, and 6th graders and their teachers with netbooks and training for how to learn and teach with them.Without our own local news station, newspaper, or radio station, typical of so many rural Vermont towns, a platform such as Front Porch Forum proved to be vital when we needed it the most. Moretown only had Front Porch Forum for a few months and it was slowly growing. Town officials were embracing it and posting agendas for upcoming select board meetings, some neighbors told of yard sales and extra eggs from their hens to give away, but many weren’t sure of why we had it, or what its purpose was.That changed in the days and weeks immediately following Tropical Storm Irene.Within days, interest in Front Porch Forum exploded. Dozens and dozens of residents signed onto FPF as it became the number one way that town officials and neighbors communicated with one another. It became so important that minutes of our daily emergency response meetings posted onto FPF were printed and tacked to the Town Hall and other outlying areas of our town…
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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