David Weinberger pointed to Andrew Hinton‘s slideshow today called Architectures for Conversation. Many fascinating points therein. Here are some that relate to our work with Front Porch Forum…
People Prefer Community for Information
I’ve been working with Breastcancer.org, and one of the things we learned was that the discussion boards they put up that were supposed to be mainly for informal knowledge sharing and socializing have turned into a vital community of practice for women with breast cancer and survivors.
It turns out that their forums follow a pattern that you can see in many other similar places — that the community ends up being not the secondary resource for knowledge, but for the majority of regular users, it’s the *primary* resource.
The official structure and info on the site serve as a useful anchor point, a framework, for the community — but the community is primary for them. Many of these women instead of going to the official part of the site to read an article on something, will go to the forum and ask “have any of you seen anything on X?”
This makes the medical establishment running the site kind of nervous… but once we discovered this, we’re now trying to figure out how to redesign to support it…
Many Front Porch Forum members have made it clear that they prefer asking their neighbors for advice, leads and information rather than other online sources. E.g., people have told me that they would rather ask their neighborhood forum for a plumber recommendation that an open regional service… even if the other service would likely pull from a larger crowd and perhaps yield “better” information. These folks trust the neighbors more than strangers AND they realize that this interaction with neighbors will lay another stone in the foundation of neighborhood community.
Cultivation’s Role
Speaking of Craig Newmark of craigslist…
But what does Craig mean by “get out of the way?” The fact is, he’s extremely involved in Craigslist. He spends many many hours a day *cultivating* that environment, by being a “customer service representative.”
“As part of my job, I put in at least 40 hours a week on customer service. I’m just a customer service rep. My two biggest projects are dealing with misbehaving apartment brokers in New York and lightly moderating our discussion boards.” Craig works hard to keep things moving well on this platform. But he doesn’t orchestrate everyone’s actions — he cultivates.
Basically, cultivating means finding the balance between encouraging activity (motivation) and shaping that activity toward healthy ends with moderation (‘dividing’ it, in a sense).
You have to love what you’re doing — or you won’t be able to care enough to be involved. You have to be willing to get your hands dirty by getting into the mix with everyone else. And you can’t fake it — you can’t assign someone who isn’t invested to be a cultivator. This is why, actually, it makes the most sense for a community of practice’s members to be the cultivators… even if there’s a pecking order of some kind (which is fine! hierarchies are helpful at times in the service of the practice & domain — but they tend to be much more fluid and meritocracy-based in Communities of Practice.)
This is the role, in many ways, that I’ve been playing for the past seven years… 6.5 with the Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum and the last half year with Front Porch Forum’s 130 contiguous neighborhood forums. It’s a light touch… but absolutely necessary and not a task to shrug off to an intern.
Goals at Forefront
About online community, Hinton quotes Clay Shirky…
“We are literally encoding the principles of … freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of … what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters.”
Nearly every day I come back to Front Porch Forum’s mission… to help neighbors connect and foster community within the neighborhood. Without that touchstone I would have been lured down dozens of ultimately wrong paths. We get loads of suggestions for more bells and whistles, partnerships, etc. The only ones that get serious consideration are those that contribute significantly to our mission.
Front Porch Forum, according to our happy subscribers, has great content. And it currently offers two forms of distribution… email and web. We’ll likely add an RSS feed in the future, and evolve from there. However, the use of email is an important ingredient to our initial success.
Since we’re aiming to serve any and all people who are online, we’re focused on the lowest common denominator technology… and that’s email. While it may be pass© for heavy-duty internet users, I’d guess that the majority of Americans use email on a regular basis… and way more than RSS, etc. We have many subscribers who are seniors using AOL dial-up on a Windows 95/98 box.
So it was interesting to just read the following from The Local Onliner…
Most of us get a lot of e-newsletters every week. Most of them are powered by Constant Contact. But, given the alternative means that local businesses have to communicate (blogs, RSS, videos, podcasts, etc.), is the era of the e-newsletter fading?
Constant Contact doesn’t think so. The 250-person, Mass.-based company has 100,000+ accounts. “We’re continuing to move up significantly,” says Senior VP Eric Groves. The majority of accounts are in the lower tier client base, paying $15 or $30 per month.
Read more here.
The Local Onliner reports today about Buffalo Rising, the monthly magazine in Buffalo, NY, and it’s efforts to combine its paper and online offerings.
Building the perfect template for hyper-local media has been the endgame for a number of companies – BackFence, American Town Networks, Pegasus News, and Citysquares, to name a few.
HyperLocal Media has been working at it as well, focusing on the synergies of a print/offline model to effectively sell advertising to the community. Since I profiled the company last June, it has built a custom headquarters in cheap-rent Buffalo, and continued finessing its tools and services with Buffalo Rising. In my view, the site is easily one of the best up and running…
Lots of interesting insights from these folks in this posting… read more.
The Local Onliner has a piece well worth reading today…
New York Times Digital Chief Martin Niesenholtz, keynoting the Yellow Pages Association conference this morning in Las Vegas, called local “a huge untapped opportunity in the directories arena that no one – including the portals – has yet tapped.”
… the winners in local “could come from many different directions: from the social networking side; from information businesses; from search; from startups; and, of course, from the directory players. So far no one has truly tapped and structured the input from local audience/s. When that happens, it will be a game changer. I have very little doubt about that,” he said.
During his talk, he told YPA that it is critical to fully embrace the social web. “There is tremendous knowledge and power locked up in our users, and traditional media businesses have failed so far to adequately exploit that.
Read the full post here.
Outside.In’s Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods was very interesting today. How inspiring to learn about the level of online community going on in these neighborhoods (including some former stomping grounds of mine!). I wonder how our little Five Sisters compares? I’d love to see the data. (Does anyone know if that’s available? I couldn’t find it.)
The Five Sisters (Burlington, VT) was named a top ten neighborhood in the United States in 2006 and many residents credit Front Porch Forum, a kind of neighborhood blog (to stretch the term), for contributing to the incredible sense of community here.
The Five Sisters forum has an astounding 340 members out of the 350-household neighborhood. Another 20 local officials (city councilors, state reps., school commissioners, police lieutenant, etc.) participate. In the past six months, 50% of the members have written… 630 postings total. Since these folks are actual nearby neighbors, a vast majority of the follow up occurs offline on the sidewalk or over the fence (that’s the point!). In this model, only residents of the neighborhood may read and write postings… it’s all about helping neighbors connect and foster community within the neighborhood.
The Five Sisters is the flagship of 130 contiguous neighborhood forums covering all of metro-Burlington and hosted by Front Porch Forum. In its first six months, about 20% of Burlington has subscribed to this free community-building service. Everyday folks, not just heavy web users, are making wonderful use of it. Front Porch Forum garnered a couple more community-leader awards last month and will be featured at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City on May 18, 2007.
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