Category Archives: Neighborhood
Progression of Engagement
Joy Mayer is exploring some good questions around engagement and journalism from her fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. Her posting today looks at engagement from the point of view of nonprofit organizations, news media, and online social media… and I’ll add a look from Front Porch Forum’s perch.
First, a nonprofit-focused ladder of engagement…
Joy also writes…
When we talk about “engagement” in the news, often that includes the desire to motivate users to action of some variety:
• We want to take the casual readers and increase their loyalty and commitment.
• We want the loyal readers to start sharing our content with their friends.
• We want the sharers to take our polls and comment on our content.
• We want those easy actions to lead to more involved contributions of content.
Further…
There’s a concept widely held to be true in Internet culture called the 90-9-1 principle. It basically holds that if you have 100 people in an online community, 1 of them will contribute content, 9 of them will edit or modify that content, and 90 percent will be passive lurkers. Think Wikipedia.
Here’s yet another perspective… we see people use Front Porch Forum by the thousands in our Vermont pilot. Our version of the 90:9:1 ration looks more like 25:50:25 in our active areas, that is, we see astounding participation rates. And FPF members often follow this general progression of engagement…
- A person will sign up with Front Porch Forum for a direct transactional need, e.g., sell a car, find a lost dog, report a car break-in to neighbors, recommend a new restaurant or plumber, etc.
- Over months, he/she will become more connected with nearby neighbors and attentive to local goings-on due to daily light exposure to brief postings from clearly identified nearby neighbors.
- After feeling more connected and tuned in, and after watching neighbors step up to help each other and pitch in on community projects, he/she will become more involved locally… mentoring a school kid, leading a graffiti clean-up in the local park, attending a City Council meeting, organizing a block party, etc.
This third step is what FPF means by engagement… people getting hands-on involved in their community… their geographic, real-time, real-space community. One survey of FPF members found two-thirds had attended a local event due to FPF and nine out of ten reported increased local civic engagement!
Neighborhood Relevancy Increases Traffic
Interesting piece from Peter Krasilovsky today involving Vermont’s own Maponics…
Sorting content by neighborhoods and ZIP codes can boost usage considerably, as HelloMetro recently discovered. The 10 year old city guide gets over six million monthly unique visitors, and has 1,500 local sites. In a case study published today, it said it has received a ten percent jump in traffic after it started using a neighborhood and ZIP sorting service from Maponics. Twenty-five percent of that boost, or 2.5 percent overall, was directly related to pages organized around neighborhoods and ZIP codes.
The site says its problem was that it had too much content coming in from its 50 writers and various news feeds. But it didn’t sort enough by neighborhood. Searches for subjects, names and points of interest could only be done on a metro-wide basis.
The Maponics technology for sorting neighborhood data essentially solved that. Now, searches can be conducted by neighborhood and also include such features as city resources, shopping ,theater, communities, schools, jobs, and other categories. Altogether, 90,000 fully optimized neighborhood and zip-specific pages have been developed. There are roughly 45 neighborhoods per metro, it noted.
Does the Internet affect offline cooperation?
J. David Goodman writes in the New York Times…
Can Americans share? Or, at least, not steal?
That question hung over the rows of identical fire-red bicycles lined up last week for the start of Capital Bikeshare in Washington, the nation’s largest bike-sharing program.
Similar programs also began this year in Denver and Minneapolis, with another to start in Miami this fall. At the same time, start-up companies with names like SnapGoods, Share Some Sugar and NeighborGoods are trying to make money by using social networks to let people borrow or lend their stuff, either free or for a fee.
These companies are looking to join a familiar list — including Netflix, Zipcar and Pandora, the online radio service — built on access to goods and services, rather than ownership.
But the question is whether most consumers would ever accept time share ownership of a bike or a blender. After a bike share program began in Denver, one gubernatorial candidate in Colorado attacked the program as un-American.
But some scholars say that the Internet — by fostering collaboration on a communal, open platform — has changed the way Americans think about sharing and ownership. Collaborative habits online are beginning to find expression in the real world.
“I thought that online was an exception,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, whose coming book, “The Penguin and the Leviathan,” focuses on the explosion of cooperative endeavors, both online and off. “I now am more confident that the phenomenon is not limited to online but is a general phenomenon of human behavior.”
So far, he said, there have been no formal studies into whether the Internet has affected offline cooperation or attitudes about ownership…
This kind of offline sharing happens everyday in via Front Porch Forum in our Vermont service region.
Get to work with your neighbors and 350.org Oct. 10 #BTV #VT
Thousands of Vermonters have made Front Porch Forum into an incredible platform that connects neighbors & builds community. Every day members return lost pets, organize block parties, lend rakes, & exchange ideas about a recent city council meeting.
Building on all this activity, I’m excited to invite my fellow Burlington-area residents to participate in a Global Work Party on 10/10/10, being coordinated by our friends at 350.org. It’s a worldwide day to get to work on community solutions that fight climate change. This issue affects almost every part of our lives, and many of the solutions lie in small, locally connected neighbors getting to work together.
We hope you will take this opportunity to join hundreds of people in Burlington (and thousands of people across the globe) and commit to taking action on 10/10/10.
Here are some action ideas from 350.org:
— host a block bicycle fix-up
— weatherize your neighbor’s house for the winter
— launch or showcase your business’ sustainability initiatives
— harvest a local community garden
— host a local foods potluck or climate film screening
— and much MORE
Check out projects already planned for Burlington on 10/10/10 at http://www.350Burlington.org and sign up your own event at http://www.350.org
At 4pm on 10/10/10 I hope you’ll join me at 350.org‘s Celebration Rally at Battery Park. I’ll share a few words then about what’s next for the FPF community.
Dutch: Better a good neighbor than a far-flung friend!
From Briana Barrett at Neighbors on Purpose in Seattle…
Better a good neighbor than a far-flung friend!
-Dutch proverb
Health experts: Facebook friends don’t replace neighbors and family
When it comes to changing health behaviors, it takes more than a far-flung network of friends on Facebook egging you on. It takes a jostling herd, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
Social scientists have assumed that changing behavior would spread like the flu, which transmits best via individuals with lots of long-distance contacts.
But to change behavior, you need to be surrounded by the message — with neighbors, family and members in the community all reinforcing the same idea.
“For about 35 years, wisdom in the social sciences has been that the more long ties there are in a network, the faster a thing will spread,” Damon Centola of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose study appears in the journal Science, said in a statement.
“It’s startling to see that this is not always the case.”
Knowing how best to influence health behavior is important to health reform as the United States turns its focus to preventing disease, rather than treating it…
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.
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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