Many of the neighborhoods that use Front Porch Forum end up with some of their local officials on their online forum. Ten neighborhoods in Ward 5 of Burlington, Vermont, for example, have the following on board: 2 state reps., 2 city councilors, 2 school board members, and various city officials, such as a police lieutenant and a community development specialist.
Officials report to their constituents on hot topics. If they wander too far off the path and get into politics (vs. reporting on things), then they usually hear about it directly or through the neighborhood forums (so that lots of other citizens see the rejoinder too)… so they tread carefully. Taxpayers also toss questions to the officials through the forums… “I wonder if our city councilor can report on the status of the construction along Pine Street?”
Today The Local Onliner reported on an interesting development:
OhioElects performs targeted searches of state, local and national political Web sites as part of its broader political coverage. Hundreds of sites have been crawled and indexed in the site’s first go-round. The site itself hopes to serve as a portal for all types of contextual political advertising.
Further, I recently accepted an invitation to participate in a session at Harvard later this month focused on the internet’s role in local politics. The event is co-hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Sunlight Foundation. I don’t think it’s online anywhere yet.
Much of Vermont is rural and therefore not uniformly well served by the bigshots of broadband, such as Verizon and Comcast. Peter Freyne interviewed the Speaker of the Vermont House, Gaye Symington today:
“It’s clear now, that waiting for the private sector to focus on Vermont and hook us all up to broadband is simply not a viable option.” The Speaker said the state should look at what the City of Burlington is currently doing – steadily proceeding to lay fiber to every door in the city (Burlington Telecom) providing broadband, telephone and cable TV service: “We’re dealing with something that’s on the scale of rural electrification. There’s going to have to be some creative thinking here that goes beyond just tax incentives and waiting around for the private sector.”
Side-by-side neighborhood photographs taken this year and in the 1930s provide great insight… each pair worth 2,000 words, I guess. Check out Depression Era Streetscapes, a project of University of Vermont Professor Thomas Visser. The site covers much of Burlington, Vermont, USA.
And in another take on related matters, Peter Krasilovsky reports on two more city sites: Pegasus News in Dallas and CitySquares in Boston. CitySquares co-founder Ben Saren reports 300 advertisers paying a flat 25 cents/click.
To date, neighborhoods out of the downtown district do best, like Jamaica Plain and Harvard Square. “There is a lot more of a neighborhood mentality,” says Saren The more homogenized, high rent businesses in downtown Boston are less likely to pitch their tent with a local city site.
Saren, like Pegasus’ Orren, hopes to take his concept beyond his city’s borders. “Ideally, it would be a Tier 2 or Tier 3 market with a college orientation, like a Burlington or Tallahassee,” he says.
Hmm… I wonder how this would work in home-sweet-home Burlington.
Nearly a quarter of private-sector, non-farm jobs in Vermont are in micro-enterprises, according to the Association for Enterprise Opportunity and reported by Leslie Wright in the Burlington Free Press today. The number of such businesses grew about 8% from 2001 to 2003.
A micro-enterprise employs fewer than five people and requires $35,000 or less in start-up capital.
I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with several small-scale local entrepreneurs whose business fits that definition. Many are excited about working with Front Porch Forum to connect with people in the neighborhoods that they serve. They often complain about being priced out of conventional means, such as the Yellow Pages. Plus, many of these folks are doing business with their neighbors, so they’re interested in supporting FPF as a community-building resource.
Burlington Telecom is a young internet provider that is bringing fiber optic broadband all the way to the home. This is the latest and greatest technology and it’s cheap! BT also offers telephone and “cable” TV (no copper). And the kicker… this innovative high tech outfit is owned by… the citizens of Burlington. It’s a municipal utility. All “profits” stay local… no distant corporate CEOs to feed or bail out of prison.
In our market, we have a small number of broadband options. The primary cable option has been Adelphia, which was swallowed by Comcast. That change is just hitting the ground here and I’ve been hearing from customers about the switch. Some haven’t had a problem, others have.
Here’s word from one unlucky chap who lives in Redrock:
“The switchover from Adelphia to Comcast has been a nightmare setting up forwarding loops and non-delivery notices. I am in the process of deleting most of some 21,306 messages… to get the half dozen legitimate ones.”
Ouch! He went on to sound an increasingly common refrain:
“Burlington Telecom doesn’t serve us yet… We can’t wait until they get here.”
Full disclosure: I volunteer on BT’s citizen advisory council and was a beta tester when their residential service started last fall.
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