Category Archives: Social Networking
Ask your Community vs. Find it Yourself
Greg Sterling writes today about social networks as a way to cut through the tangle of information on the web…
Community is something of an antidote to these phenomena. Community has definite limitations and flaws but it also offers a way to navigate the sea of too many choices online.
We’ve been talking about this with Front Porch Forum for some time. Seems like there are two kinds of people in the world… those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t. 😉 Whoops…
Another two kinds… people who live and breathe online and those who use it as a tool when needed. Advanced users jump all over the growing mass of online services to find whatever, whenever. The rest of us would just as soon ask some real and familiar/trusted people… “does anybody know where I can get X?”
Reminds me of the old male-female stereotype about asking for driving directions.
Front Porch Forum Earns National Award
We just learned that the community-building accomplishments of Front Porch Forum are being recognized with a national award! Hooray! Congratulations and thank you to the thousands of local people who contribute to the success of this service.
The Orton Family Foundation and PlaceMatters will present the award as part of the CommunityMatters07 national conference that will take place on Burlington’s waterfront Oct. 23-25. We’re truly honored by the “Innovator in Place” award and it provides a welcome boost to our efforts. Thanks to the Orton Family Foundation and PlaceMatters.
Michael and Valerie Wood-Lewis
Front Porch Forum
Here’s the press release from Orton…
Orton Family Foundation Awards
2007 Innovator in Place to Michael Wood-LewisMIDDLEBURY, Vermont –The Orton Family Foundation takes great pride and pleasure in naming Michael Wood-Lewis winner of the 2007 Innovator in Place Award. Michael and Front Porch Forum http:// frontporchforum.com, his free on-online service, excel at building social capital and community capacity for change.
In choosing Michael, the Foundation decided he best fulfilled the spirit of the award, which aims to honor successful grassroots community activists and leaders not typically recognized for their efforts. Michael accepted his $3,000 award at a reception at the ECHO Center on Burlington’s waterfront during the COMMUNITYMATTERS07 conference.
“Some argue that the Internet isolates people, further tearing the social fabric,” said Orton Family Foundation President and CEO Bill Roper, “but Michael proves the opposite can be true. His innovation, civic spirit and commitment enable the kind of friendship, trust and interdependence among neighbors that the Foundation believes are key to vibrant, sustainable community. His tool is enhancing Burlington’s heart and soul.”
Michael Wood-Lewis, with his wife Valerie, founded Front Porch Forum in 2006. In its first year, the Forum’s trend setting use of the Internet at the neighborhood level brought 25 percent of the citizens of Burlington, Vermont (pop. 38,889), into community discussions. The free on-line service hosts 130 adjacent neighborhood forums covering every part of Chittenden County. About 7,000 households have subscribed, and hundreds more join every month.
“We hear from people all the time who lament not knowing their neighbors,” said Wood-Lewis. “When Front Porch Forum kicks into gear, those connections begin to form. It’s a wonderful thing to watch take root, grow and blossom.”
Neighbors put Front Porch Forum to good use, connecting with neighbors and building community by posting all sorts of messages: borrow a ladder, refer a plumber, look out for a lost kitten, organize a block party, discuss traffic calming, report a break-in, announce a school play, debate zoning, and on and on.
In addition to direct results (“Kitten Found!”), it’s the growth of community offline that is the true measure of Front Porch Forum’s impact. Each message comes from a clearly identified nearby neighbor, so over time participants get to know each other better. This familiarity spills over from the virtual to the actual front porch.
The webs spun by Front Porch Forum that connect people are strengthened by 250 Forum Neighborhood Volunteers who champion the forums in their own areas and 140 local elected and public officials who participate across their jurisdictions. Police and other government officials use the site to better respond to problems in their area.
A remarkable Burlington innovation actively cultivating the development of rich, vibrant community, Front Porch Forum is exploring replication options and has a waiting list with more than 150 communities represented. Michael Wood-Lewis’s groundbreaking social innovation is a blueprint for community development of the future.
Michael’s previous experience includes steering a regional trade association to a position of national prominence. He also led a consortium of municipal leaders from across the country in developing environmental technology. He is active on the advisory board of Burlington Telecom, a cutting edge municipally owned “fiber optic to the home” utility, providing data, voice and video. Wood-Lewis brings to bear an unusual combination of technical background (MS engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), business experience (MBA), and 20 years of community organizing.
CONTACT:
John Barstow
Director of Communications
The Orton Family Foundation
152 Maple Street, PO Box 111
Middlebury, VT 05753
www.orton.org
Local… the fifth horseman?
Russell C. Horowitz offers today that the Internet has…
seen four major consumer- and/or merchant-focused movements that have created or transferred hundreds of billions of dollars of value.
They are…
- Communications. Businesses that primarily focused on the consumer, navigating online, email and messaging.
- Commerce, which massively impacted both consumer and merchant-driven markets.
- Search, … exponentially expanded merchants’ ability to acquire customers more efficiently.
- Social networking. While we have yet to see how the model evolves, it is obvious that these businesses are impacting online consumer behavior.
Local will be the fifth – and it will impact consumers and merchants alike.
Each of these movements has created hundreds of billions of dollars of company value and Local will be at least as transforming. Local will not be winner take all and will be realized through the collaboration of many companies.
e-Neighbors Research: email lists build community
A new academic paper has just been published in Information Communication & Society (iCS) that’s really fascinating…
Neighborhoods in the Network Society: The e-Neighbors Study
Keith N Hampton, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
October 2007
Professor Hampton has worked in the “e-neighborhood” arena for the past several years and some of his research is available on his website.
This new paper presents findings from a study that provided neighborhood-level online social networking opportunities for four Boston-area neighborhoods… one apartment complex, one gated condo development, and two suburban neighborhoods. Each was provided a neighborhood email list, and a neighborhood website with a bevy of bells and whistles.
The short of it (and I’m condensing and skimming, so likely missing some key points!):
- The suburban neighborhoods made better use of the offer, then the condo development, and the apartments were dead last.
- The email list became popular in the active neighborhoods and grew from year one to year two of the study, while the web tools got almost no traction
- Different issues got different play… “Studies of community email lists have consistently found that their use is primarily for information seeking and household aid, but they are occasionally used to express opinions and discuss politics, civic duties, and collective action (Hampton, 2003, Mesch and Levanon, 2003).”
- Neighborhood organizer types love this kind of tool… “Neighborhoods that already have an interest in building community, with the neighborhood context to back it up, are most likely to profit from a neighborhood email list.”
- New neighbors and others outside of the inside crowd more readily jump onto this more democratic grapevine… “Within neighborhoods, those who have smaller networks on average, and consequently are the most likely to have a deficit of power and access to information, are the most likely to participate.”
- While non-posting lurkers get the information, they don’t get the social boost… “the benefits of an email list are only available to those who actively participate, by sending messages to the neighborhood list. Lurkers experience no change in their network size as a result of observing.”
- Active participants see their neighborhood social network grow.
- Folks left out of neighborhood social networks due to poverty and other issues will be even worse off if they aren’t able to participate online; they need support… “For those of lower socioeconomic status, residential mobility is a reduced option as they undergo changes in life-cycle and family status, and when mobility does occur, it is less likely to provide access to a neighborhood context that supports the formation of local social ties –with or without the advent of new media. Unless traditional community networking initiatives, those that provide a neighborhood email list, a technology infrastructure, and training, continue and expand the work they have done in less privileged neighborhoods, the “social network gap” between rich and poor, inner city and suburb, will continue to grow.”
Overall, much of what I read jibes with our experience running Front Porch Forum in our pilot area since fall 2006, and our flagship neighborhood forum since 2000. It’s great to get some confirmation from a respected researcher. Also, lots of details and insights that may guide FPF’s development. Thank you Professor Hampton and colleagues!
LifeAt – Social Networking in Residential Buildings
TechCrunch reported today…
New York-based LifeAt
wants to create a social network around your residential building. Do you need one? Nope. But maybe you’ll use it anyway. And perhaps you’ll even get to know some of your neighbors. The building managers control the network and post information about the building itself. Residents sign up to get news about the building, interact with other users, etc.
LifeAt is in the ballpark. Front Porch Forum knows all about the demand for neighborhood-level online service. Time will tell if they’ve got it right.
Topix Local Forums Pass Milestone
Newspaper-owned Topix.com reported today that their…
number of daily, active(1) local forums on its site now exceeds the total number of daily newspapers(2) in the United States for the first time. Topix local forums were first launched in December 2005 as part of the Topix’s broader user-generated forum functionality. Since that time, Topix local forums have grown at a rapid pace, reflecting Topix’s ability to meet pent-up demand for local news and to successfully generate local engagement and online participation.
Ranked a top 20 news site(3) since June 2007, Topix draws more than 12 million unique visitors every month and 70,000 forum posts per day. Topix local forums, which span all 32,500 U.S. zip codes, give local residents, especially those located in rural areas that are underserved by major media outlets, an opportunity to discuss and share the news that matters to them. Beyond daily local forum activity, Topix has generated user activity across 20,000 local forums with 16 million forum posts and 3 million users across the site.
(1) “Active” defines user forums with at least one post per day
(2) 1,437 Editor & Publisher (http://web.naa.org/thesource/14.asp )
(3) ComScore, -June, 2007
So… 32,000 or so local forums? And 1,500 of them have at least one post/day? About 5% of them are active? Do most of those 70,000 posts/day fit into the 1,500 active local forums… 40-50 posts/local forum/day?
About 30 of Front Porch Forum‘s 130 neighborhood forums have at least one posting/day… that’s in metro Burlington, VT, population 150,000. Our average neighborhood forum averages one posting every two days.
Smalltown buys Local2Me
Smalltown announced today that it just bought Local2Me. Here are some of the reports about it…
As I’ve written in the past, I admire Smalltown’s narrow and deep focus on their initial five California towns. Local2Me is in the same geographic area as Smalltown. From Local2Me founder Michael Olivier…
The Local2Me service launched in 2000, and over the last seven years community members have posted over 31,000 neighborhood messages in 90 towns about wide-ranging topics, from great pediatric dentists to Halloween costumes for sale, trustworthy appliance repair, neighborhood crime issues, anti-raccoon measures, and more!
Each of these services has some similarities to Front Porch Forum. Although it’s probably more apples to oranges than anything, FPF had about 15,000 messages in its first year operating in one small metro area (including 19 towns).
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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