Ghost of Midnight
… about neighbors, community and Front Porch Forum
Sharing Lessons of Front Porch Forum
We’ve been invited to speak at many events lately. Here are some that we were honored to accept (2008)…
- May 14: The World Wide Web Comes Home: How “Local Online” Is Changing Your Business at VBSR’s annual spring conference.
- May 29: Fulfilling Vermont’s e-State Potential: Building Community in a “Connected Age” hosted by the Snelling Center.
- June 18 Leading the Weekly and Community Newsroom: Connecting Neighborhoods Online at American Press Institute’s seminar series.
- October 5-8: TBD at Rural Telecon ’08.
Physical vs. Virtual Tools for Building Community
The Town Paper has a list of hundreds of mixed-use neighborhoods from across the United States and elsewhere. They write…
The acronym TND stands for Traditional Neighborhood Development, a comprehensive planning system that includes a variety of housing types and land uses in a defined area. The variety of uses permits educational facilities, civic buildings and commercial establishments to be located within walking distance of private homes. A TND is served by a network of paths, streets and lanes suitable for pedestrians as well as vehicles. This provides residents the option of walking, biking or driving to places within their neighborhood. Present and future modes of transit are also considered during the planning stages.
Public and private spaces have equal importance, creating a balanced community that serves a wide range of home and business owners. The inclusion of civic buildings and civic space — in the form of plazas, greens, parks and squares — enhances community identity and value.
In a way, Front Porch Forum is all about nurturing via the internet what these places try to do with bricks and mortar… a great sense of community.
Front Porch Forum Earns Grant
The Case Foundation announced the final tallies for its Make It Your Own Awards today. We’re delighted that Front Porch Forum finished sixth out of almost 5,000 entrants, earning a grant of $10,000. A remarkable 25% of the 15,000 voters cast a ballot for Front Porch Forum. We’re especially proud of our showing given our small population base (projects in major metro-areas claimed the top five spots).
In describing their program, the Case Foundation writes today…
Contrary to research that showed a decline in civic health and increasing social isolation, we saw that people want to connect with their neighbors, identify shared concerns, make their own decisions, and shape their own course of action.
Thanks to the 3,870 people who voted for us and to the Case Foundation for its support of Front Porch Forum!
Steven Clilft… neighborhoods online
Steven Clift offers an interesting post about neighborhood-level online efforts, including Front Porch Forum. We’re looking forward to participating in a May 7 session he’s convening in Washington, DC, at the Case Foundation.
Social Capital Lesson for Journalists
Steve Yelvington has a thought-provoking piece on social capital today… I think his intended audience is old-school journalists. Coupled with Robert Putnam’s fascinating talk at the University of Vermont the other day, and my everyday exposure to Front Porch Forum, ideas are peculating for me!
Civil, slower moving, respectful
Kirk LaPointe, Managing Editor of The Vancouver Sun, wrote recently about Front Porch Forum…
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Technology permits blink-of-an-eye contact and an all-day-wired-up-and-followed feeling: Twitter, Facebook and IM pretty well track your every, well, everything.
Then there’s Front Porch Forum, a service that is using technology — or some of it, anyway — to link neighbours and services in Chittenden County, Vermont. The main differences: You have to say who you are and where you live when you e-mail, and you have to wait for once-a-day delivery of the raft of messages coming from all over the neighbourhood. So, no aliases, no cloaking, no down and dirty discussions — just something civil, slower moving, respectful.
The challenge for the service, like all such services, is to make money. At the moment there are government sponsors and advertisers, but this is one service you can foresee moving from the free-to-fee territory. After all, it’s a legitimately great local utility.
Putting people to work…
I came across some “manhour” data today from a variety of sources. Got me thinking, so I laid it out in these graphs (each graph shows the estimated number of human-hours of labor required to complete each project)…
So how do we get more of those TV watching hours put to productive use? Plenty of problems to be solved out there. Thanks to Clay Shirky, Luis Van Ahn, Wikipedia.
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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