Category Archives: Good Government
50 million U.S. adults don’t use the internet!
How about your #VT town? From Greg Sterling today…
I was alerted to this intriguing data point by ValPak’s Twitter feed: according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 21% of US adults do not use the Internet. That works out to about 50 million people (figuring the US adult population is about 240M).
Interesting data to keep in mind… 79% is a huge proportion… but it’s not 100%. It makes Front Porch Forum‘s high take rates all the more remarkable… greater than 40% of households subscribe in dozens of neighborhoods and towns in our pilot region.
And it makes projects like e-Vermont that much more important. Check out e-Vermont’s new website and, if you live in Vermont, get your community to apply for the second round of grants by Nov. 17, 2010! From e-Vermont…
e-Vermont’s new web site, www.e4vt.org, is the central spot to keep updated on the e-Vermont Community Broadband Project. This two-year initiative is helping rural Vermont towns take full advantage of the Internet to create jobs, drive school innovation, provide social services, and increase civic involvement. e-Vermont is not stringing cable or fiber, but is working to make better use of broadband where it is available.
The new e-Vermont Partnership, led by the Vermont Council on Rural Development, is already working together with selected communities statewide to provide digital tools and in-depth training. Twelve more towns will be selected by the end of 2010 to be part of this project. The new website has details on how to apply prior to the November 17 deadline. It also carries updates on the exciting work in the first 12 e-communities, and includes a calendar of upcoming workshops and conferences that will share what is being learned in these pilot towns with communities around Vermont.
For further info, you can also reach e-Vermont at 802 225-6091, or Helen_at_vtrural_dot_org.
Northeast Rural Summit to Feature FPF
This promises to be a great event hosted by USDA RD and VCRD…
The 2010 Northeast Rural Summit: Generating Rural Innovation and Regional Partnership ~ April 12 and 13, 2010 at the Burlington Hilton Hotel
Visit the Summit Website to Register or for more information
Join national and regional USDA leaders, state agency leaders, non-profit and business leaders from throughout the northeastern United States for two days of strategic planning around four crucial directions for the rural northeast:
- Food Systems: Local Foods Development and Regional Foods Systems
- Energy: Advancing Efficiency, Generation and Fuel Development
- Broadband: Global Opportunities & Rural Lifestyles
- Rural Economic Development: Investment in Innovation
The Summit is designed to share best regional and place-based practices and build strategic partnerships among state Rural Development offices and rural leadership organizations throughout the region.
It’s a real honor to have Front Porch Forum featured April 12 at this event.
FPF Expanding to more Vermont Towns in 2010!
Front Porch Forum will be expanding to more Vermont towns this year, thanks to federal stimulus funds. Contact VCRD (below) to get your town on the list!
This is part of the e-Vermont project… an exciting mix of resources coming from a great collection of entities to two dozen Vermont towns. Here’s the skinny…
From: Vermont Council on Rural Development
RE: Broadband Stimulus Fund Project
Date: March 25, 2010
Contact: Paul Costello, VCRD Executive Director
802 249-8051 or 802-223-6091$2.5 million Stimulus Grant Launches e-Vermont: the Community Broadband Project
MONTPELIER, VT – A $2.5 million federal Stimulus Grant from the federal Agency of Commerce, announced today, completes the funding to launch the $3.7 million “e-Vermont Community Broadband Project.” This major campaign to stimulate broadband use in 24 Vermont towns will be produced by a partnership of organizations dedicated to expanding broadband access and its practical use. The e-Vermont Partnership will be led by the Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD) over the next two years. VCRD is a non-profit organization dedicated to the support of the locally-defined progress of Vermont’s rural communities. Additional support for this project came from Vermont philanthropists and corporate associates.
By reaching the bedrocks of Vermont communities-schools, businesses, municipal government, libraries, health and social services groups-the e-Vermont Project will drive the benefits of the digital age to parts of the state that have been left behind, both economically and in digital culture, and are just now getting broadband services.
In addition to VCRD, the e-Vermont Partnership is made up of the Vermont State Colleges, the State Department of Libraries, Vermont Small Business Development Center, the Snelling Center for Government, Front Porch Forum and Digital Wish. Their application has been financially supported by the Vermont Community Foundation, the Jan and David Blittersdorf Foundation, the Evslin Family Foundation, UVM’s Center for Rural Studies, the Vermont Rural Partnership and by donated services and equipment from Dell, Microsoft, and Comcast.
“The federal stimulus money provides a tremendous opportunity for Vermonters to ensure that our communities take full advantage of broadband technology, including advancing the bottom line of our businesses,” said VCRD Executive Director Paul Costello. He emphasized that none of the 24 towns are selected yet, but will be through a competitive application process that will be announced soon.
Vermont’s congressional delegation have been strong supporters of the e-Vermont concept. Senator Leahy pointed out: “The impact of e-Vermont will yield both short-term and long-term community development benefits, creating new jobs, educating children and using technology to improve Vermonters’ lives.”e-Vermont Partners worked closely with Vermont’s stimulus office through the application process. According to Governor Douglas, “This effort is a key part of the SmartVermont strategy. In order to reach our goals in e-Education, e-Health, e-government, and e-Energy, we need to remove all obstacles to Internet use for Vermonters. Even when the problem of access is solved, other challenges like lack of equipment and training remain.”
e-Vermont will help municipal, school, community and business groups in rural Vermont towns design and implement campaigns to expand the use of digital tools and resources to serve a wide variety of local needs including social networking downtown marketing, community engagement, business development, and school innovation. Local committees in these towns will work with VCRD staff to customize a two year plan from a menu of e-Vermont programs and services such as:
-e-government – training and consultation on podcasting, on-line meetings, community scheduling, website development
–Front Porch Forums that link neighbors to each other and to local services
-Computers and training for libraries and senior centers
-Free Netbook computers for 4-5th graders and extensive teacher training to imbed technology in the curriculum
-Specialized classes ranging from basic computer literacy to advanced applications to meet the range of community and business needs
-e-commerce classes and one-to-one counseling for local businesses
-Building community calendars, business directories, buy-local maps, arts and crafts tours, sports schedules, ride shares, and a variety of new locally-driven digital applications
-Expanding on-line computer health information and opportunities
-Expanding the use of web-based tools to facilitate community engagement and advance locally-designed initiativesThe e-Vermont project will learn from each of the selected towns and share these best practices in the uses of digital tools through symposia and conferences statewide.
Municipal leaders and other local organizations that are interested in adding their community to the list of towns to be considered should contact VCRD at 802-223-6091 or by email at info@vtrural.org. Details on the applications process will be announced soon and posted at www.vtrural.org
Cooperation vs. Competion or Regulation
Scott Heiferman’s tweet led me to take a closer look at the work of recent Nobel Laureate (economics) Elinor Ostrom. She studies how cooperation works best in some cases… better than competition or regulation… our two dominant forms of organizing markets. From a Forbes article…
Garrett Hardin called his famous 1968 essay on shared resources “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He argued that a shared village grazing pasture would tend to get overused and eventually destroyed. But even Hardin later acknowledged that shared common resources did not inevitably have to end in destruction, saying that he should have called his essay “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.”
And from Fran Korton’s interview at Shareable…
Fran: It’s interesting that your research is about people learning to cooperate…
Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we’re talking about is how people work together. We’ve used an immense array of different methods to look at this question “case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy’s work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together.
Fran: Many people associate “the commons” with Garrett Hardin’s famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”… What’s the difference between your perspective and Hardin’s?
Elinor: Well, I don’t see the human as hopeless. There’s a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.
If you are in a fishery or have a pasture and you know your family’s long-term benefit is that you don’t destroy it, and if you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if the community doesn’t have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won’t organize, and there will be failures.
Fran: So, are you saying that Hardin is sometimes right?
Elinor: Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say “No, that’s not right. I’ve not disproved him. I’ve shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong.” But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.
At the Workshop we’ve done experiments where we create an artificial form of common property such as an imaginary fishery or pasture, and we bring people into a lab and have them make decisions about that property. When we don’t allow any communication among the players, then they overharvest [the commons]. But when people can communicate, particularly on a face-to-face basis, and say, “Well, gee, how about if we do this? How about we do that?” Then they can come to an agreement.
That last bit there about communication leading to better community decisions… love it. It’s so obvious. I guess that’s why it takes a non-economist Nobel Laureate in Economics to explain it to the economists of the world. And, for what it’s worth, her observation jibes with what we see at Front Porch Forum too. FPF leads to better communication among neighbors, more face-to-face conversation, and, in many cases, better community decisions.
Congratulations Dr. Ostrom!
Bill McKibben covers FPF for Yankee Magazine
Amazing! It’s not every day that an author of Bill McKibben‘s statue writes a feature story about Front Porch Forum… let alone with a subtitle of “How New England can save the world!” But there it is… in the March/April 2010 issue of Yankee Magazine. Here’s a snippet…
Susan Comerford, a longtime community organizer and now associate dean for academic affairs and
Credit: William Duke
research at the University of Vermont’s College of Education and Social Services, calls it “the best community organizing tool that’s come along in the last 30 or 40 years.” To understand its importance, says Comerford (who started posting on the forum the day she needed a recommendation for a carpenter), you have to think about what’s happened in the American economy in recent decades.
“It’s not that people care less about community,” she notes. “It’s that the economy has shifted how much people have to work to keep up their standard of living. You don’t have one of the two partners home during the day making all those social connections, providing some sense of safety to the neighborhood. People have less disposable time than they used to.”
In a world like that, a system that lets you sit down for 10 minutes at the end of the day and learn what’s happened to your neighbors should, in Comerford’s view, earn Wood-Lewis one of those MacArthur “genius” grants.
UPDATE: The media coverage of Bill’s look at FPF is growing. Check it out here, starting March 1, 2010.
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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