Front Porch Forum was featured on KillerStartups.com today.
Kate in Burlington’s Old North End wrote a lovely “call to shovels” today post-blizzards, encouraging neighbors to help clear troubled sidewalk spots as a show of community spirit (it’s the city’s responsibility here). Great idea.
Her opening line caught my eye too…
I don’t usually post, but I read every single ONE Newsletter I get.
I surveyed one Front Porch Forum neighborhood last year and found that 98% of respondents claimed to read or skim every issue of their neighborhood forum. And 50% had posted a message in the last six months.
This high degree of readership must contribute to the impressive results FPF’s initial advertisers are reporting.
i-Neighbors.org keeps rolling along apparently. While the website doesn’t provide much information about how the service is doing as a whole, news stories surface occasionally. Here’s one from Michigan today…
A lot of problems could be solved if neighbors got to know one another, according to Bob Gutchek.
Gutchek, who lives on North Monroe Street, can recall at least one time when he might have prevented a robbery. But he didn’t know what his neighbor looked like.
”People are afraid to get to know other people,” said Gutchek, who tells people to call him ”One-legged Bob.” ”Mom and dad told us ‘Don’t talk to strangers,’ but that doesn’t work anymore.”
That’s why you can find Gutchek on ”i-neighbors,” a free Web site that helps turn next-door strangers into neighbors.
Users on www.i-neighbors.org can log onto a page made specially for their ZIP code, where basic statistical data – including population, area code, average household income and average property value – are listed along with other neighborhood descriptions users post.
The site provides different tools for individuals to communicate, including personal profiles, a neighborhood calendar, local business ratings and reviews and e-mail addresses.
Bay City’s 48708 ZIP code lists ”Sector 20,” which has only about four users – including Gutchek. Bangor Township, ZIP code 48706, also has a profile on the Web site.
Users living in a zip code without a profile can create one.
The Web site might prove to be a good way to mobilize neighborhoods and prevent crime, said Bay City Police Officer Don Aldrich, who helped create the local Bay City profile on i-neighbors.org in November.
”We’re getting with the times,” he said. ”The thing was, people didn’t want to leave their house and go to another meeting to hear about crime and get to know their neighbors.”
The Web site provides a way for neighbors to communicate with each other about possible problems, or e-mail Aldrich, who has registered himself as a member of the Sector 20 community.
”We can share information – the neighbors can share tips with me,” he said. ”Things road patrol officers might know about.”
But www.i-neighbors.org should not be used instead of 911 in emergency situations, he said.
With online social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook, and virtual worlds becoming a popular place for people to communicate, i-neighbors allows places like Bay City to keep up with the current technology trends.
An obstacle, however, is that many people in Sector 20 might not have access to the Internet, Aldrich said.
Getting involved in the nationwide Web site was also inspired by the ICANN – I Can Create a Nice Neighborhood – program that has existed in some Bay City neighborhoods.
If the local response to i-neighbors.org is good, there might be a chance for a more locally made ICANN-type Web site, Aldrich said.
Since the Web site started more than three years ago, it has been well received by many communities across the country, according to founder and director Keith Hampton, communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Web site began as a way to study how the Internet can affect relations within a community.
”The big question was would the Internet isolate us or give us more options?,” he said. ”We found that those communities that adopt the technology and use it tend to know their neighbors more.”
The site takes most of the guess work out of meeting your neighbors – there are no fences or physical obstacles to get through, and neighbors can send each other an e-mail whenever it fits their schedules, Hampton said.
”It opens up a whole new range of communication,” he said.
Gutchek, once a member of the local ICANN group, has high hopes for neighbor camaraderie over the Internet.
”The biggest thing with this is to be able to communicate with neighbors,” Gutchek said. ”As long as people work together, it will work good.”
Congratulations to Jim Willis for pulling his Red Bank, NJ neighborhood together with a Front Porch Forum-like effort. From RedBankGreen…
Jim Willis rolled into town three months ago eager to do some community building… It’s what he did in his job as director of eGovernment services in the Rhode Island secretary of state’s office, where he went on a four-year tear putting previously hard-to-access information at the public’s fingertips via the web.
On the personal side, Willis is equally passionate about what he calls “social capital”… Willis subscribes to the belief that traditional social life in America has been frayed by a number of forces —€” the rise of television, the emergence of two-earner household, and technologies that make it easier to interact electronically rather than in person.
Willis grew up in Colts Neck and moved back to the area after 14 years in Washington, DC, Cincinatti and Providence… But leaving Providence meant giving up a neighborhood with “astounding social and economic diversity,” Willis says —€” not to mention great block parties. And he and his wife decided, “if we didn’t find it here, we were going to make it,” he says.
Soon after arriving, Willis began planning an email newsletter for his new neighborhood, an electronic venue for people to share information and insights about everything from the availability of babysitting services to updates on the water-line replacement work now underway in the area to notices of free stuff about to be put out on the curb.
Willis said he encountered some suspicion when he first went door-to-door to pitch the idea and collect email addresses. Some people wanted to know what he was getting out of it, and others worried that their inboxes might soon be hit with more spam.
But it wasn’t all resistance out there. In fact, he says, of the first 40 responses he got, “20 were just full of enthusiasm.”
One inspiration for what he’s doing is Front Porch Forum, a community-building organization that claims to have brought 25 percent of the population of its home city — €” Burlington, Vt. — into online discussions in its first year.
Willis has adopted several of the Front Porch Forums suggestions. One is to keep the newsletters fluff-free, or people won’t value them. Another is to build the readership to an optimal size, which turns out to be about 150 active members. And, perhaps most important, no one can post anything anonymously, which obviates the “flame wars” that occur in forums where anything goes.
He’s also sharing the workload that goes into providing content for the emails. “I don’t want to write it,” Willis says. “I want neighbors to want to do it, and I’ve got people stepping up.”
“This is for neighbors by neighbors,” he says.
Already, one parent has suggested organizing a play group for kids of a certain age. One neighbor volunteered to get in touch with Parks & Rec to get the lowdown on what improvements are planned for East Side Park, and another has said he’ll reach out to Police Chief Mark Fitzgerald about organizing a neighborhood crime watch.
The East Side Park Neighbors Newsletter, Willis wants it known, is not meant to isolate the neighborhood from the rest of Red Bank. In fact, he says he’s willing to share the software and know-how behind the newsletter to anyone in town who wants to adopt it for similar efforts.
He thinks that offer might be of particular interest to residents of the West Side, whom he’s seen coming together anew in the wake of the Best Liquors controversy and concerns about crime and housing conditions.
Whether his idealism proves infectious remains to be determined. Calling the police chief and writing up a short report can be a burden for people with full-time jobs and kids.
“I’m going to try to help him if I can,” says John Gosden, a Harrison Avenue resident for nine years who has a particular interest in the upkeep of the park.
“It kinds of brings people together as a community,” he says. “It’s actually a very busy park.”
Willis thinks it will take some time to work the bugs out and get the newsletter established. Already, he’s sent out two issues, but problems with spam-bocking software in the email programs of many intended recipients kept the first one from getting though.
But that’s a fixable problem, says Willis. The bigger challenge is fostering a sense of community.
“If we accomplish one thing, I’m hoping we diminish that cynicism that keeps people from talking to one another,” he says.
Mark Glaser has an interesting piece about hyper-local newsites at his PBS.org blog. He includes mention of Front Porch Forum, which is appreciated, but I would characterize FPF differently… FPF is not an email list.
Front Porch Forum is collection of online neighborhood forums that cover 100% of a metro area. While FPF uses email as its primary distribution channel now, it’s also available over the web and we’ll be adding other channels over time. FPF is not about the technology, it’s about convening and maintaining neighborhood conversations in every part of a metro area.
From Sebastien Provencher today…
“It is surprising. There is a crucial sense of community lacking in the metropolitan areas.” –William O’Hare, co-author of a new study (.pdf) released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, talking about the plight of poor kids in rich US states. (found in the December 10th 2007 issue of Time Magazine).
In my opinion, urbanization in the 20th century has reduced the sense of community in large urban areas. We don’t know our neighbors (and neighborhoods?) anymore. It actually has become awkward to introduce ourselves to our neighbors. But, as Man is really a gregarious creature (we like to live in “tribes”), I’m a firm believer that the local social web will, in the future, help re-build the social tissue in large cities. These new web tools will allow us to maintain a basic privacy layer while removing some of the awkwardness in the system.
I agree with the diagnosis, but I’m not as certain with the prescribed cure. Front Porch Forum is one effort working on a solution.
A fascinating article in the New York Times was brought to my attention today (thanks Hubert) about Babajob.com…
Babajob, by contrast, connects India’s elites to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through social networks.
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