Steve Hendrix wrote in The Washington Post today about the widespread use of neighborhood email lists in and around Washington, DC. Read here for lots of interesting examples. (Thanks to E-Democracy.org for the tip.) Also noted…
According to the Pew Center‘s Internet and American Life Project, 55 percent of Internet users subscribed to e-mail group lists in 2006 as a way of maintaining ties with the community or hobby groups they belonged to, up from 32 percent in 2001.
Yahoo, which provides free hosting services in exchange for implanting small ads at the bottom of each message, says it handles more than 8 million groups with more than 100 million members.
So there’s a huge demand for neighborhood email lists and a huge number of people are not yet served. Further, the leading provider in the sector now, Yahoo Groups, is decidedly user-unfriendly and not accessible to lots of people with low computer skills (based on personal experience trying to guide many folks onto and around various Yahoo Groups that I’ve been involved with).
This adds up to great potential for Front Porch Forum.
Just got an invitation to a gathering at Google NYC! It’s the speakers’ cocktail party for the Personal Democracy Forum. Photo ID required to get into the party… guess we’re not in Vermont anymore. 😉
Front Porch Forum is on the agenda, alongside some A-List political bloggers (Huffington Post, TPM), successful dot.com entrepreneurs (craigslist, Wikipedia), Presidential campaign online directors (Edwards, McCain, Joe Trippi), best-selling authors (Thomas Friedman), etc. Very exciting. The conference is May 18 at Pace University. I’ll write about the experience here.
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.
Can vibrant social networks limit the negative effect of Alzheimer’s disease? Refrigerator Rights points to a medical study…
Dr. David Bennett summarized the work by saying it this way:Â “Many elderly people who have the tangles and plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease don’t clinically experience cognitive impairment or dementia,” said Bennett. “Our findings suggest that social networks are related to something that offers a ‘protective reserve’ capacity that spares them the clinical manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease.”
That’s a sizable claim. We’ve always felt intuitively that positive social networks like Front Porch Forum contributes to good health. I seem to recall that Bowling Alone presents evidence along these lines as well.
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