February 16, 2004
(Updated) Decentralizing Neighborhood Publishing On The Web
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
Sam Churchill over at Daily Wireless offers a comparison between the City's model of centralized neighborhood websites and an alternative distributed model. His thoughts were prompted by a recent event about which we wish we had known:
This comes to mind because last Thursday I attended a post-mortum meeting of PortlandOnline's Neighborhood Website. The city of Portland wants to use PortlandOnline.com as a model for all of the city's neighborhoods.
The model was rolled out in the North Portland community of Portsmouth, first. Among the features promoted was "backfence", a community bulletin board where neighbors could write about issues of local concern. It worked. People used it. The less successful element was the other content. It was rarely updated and not very relevant -- it came from city hall.
I opined that top-down, command and control architecture doesn't work efficiently for generating neighborhood content. People make a neighborhood. Empower them.
Readers will have to click through to gain the added advantage of the links Churchill scattered throughout that quote, as well as all of the surrounding analysis. Returning to the specific criticisms of the City's approach:
Neighborhood control of content (other than a chat room) appeared to be a foreign concept to Portland officials. They could not relate to Blogs. Didn't get it. Their argument seemed to be, why buy Commercial, Off-The-Shelf products if $500K is available from friendly foundations like Meyer and cable funders like Mt Hood CRC?
What is Churchill's prescription for creating "vibrant, cost/effective, city/neighborhood communications" as an alternative to the City's vision? A standardized weblog package for each neighborhood association; links back to the City's website and those of the other neighborhood associations; relevant content created by each of the neighborhood associations themselves, utilizing their own choices for editorial access, chat rooms, bulletin boards, or other features; revenues generated through use of Google's AdSense program; and syndicated feeds of content from neighbors, other neighborhood associations, or other sources.
Most, if not all, of the City's neighborhood associations have presences of one sort or another on the Web. But because of the barriers to entry which until recently blocked access to easily-created and maintained local and personal content, they don't tend to be very dynamic or very reflective of the distinct characteristics -- and character -- of Portland's many and varied neighborhoods.
Arguably, an underlying intent of trying to move neighborhood websites into the umbrella of the City's (relatively) new website likely is to bring a new set of tools for Web publishing and interactivity to the neighborhood associations. But Churchill is right when he argues that what is lost in such a move is a real sense -- even on a purely visceral level -- of each neighborhood's uniqueness.
In the midst of increasing tensions between City bureaucracy and Portland's neighborhoods, pushing all neighborhood association content into the City website might not be the best way to go. And with all of the power, flexibility, and creativity of low-cost (or free) personal tools for community and personal publishing and interactivity out there today, it's not impossible that neighborhoods are going to notice there are more exciting possibilities for them than those currently being offered by the City.
"Community content would be nourished," Churchill writes. "If PortlandOnline doesn't do it, The Oregonian and dozens of local, relevant and vital content producers will."
It's not about brochureware with a bulletin board add-on. It's about what all the sites Churchill mentions are already doing. Churchill has thrown down the challenge to the City to wake up and smell the power of distributed community-controlled content and conversations. We readily concur, and dare the City to take up that challenge.
That won't be easy. It requires abandoning centralization, enabling -- if not outright funding -- community control, and then stepping back and letting Portland neighborhoods make the magic happen.
Update
Noah Brimhall weighs in on this today, and he brings the Personal Telco Project into the mix. This is fortunate, because we had actually wanted to mentioned them because their experience here in Portland paints a relevant picture.
It's no particular secret that there are elements at City Hall which want to push wireless Internet access, believing it to be an issue both of quality of life and of business attractiveness. But while the City tries to figure all of that out, the Personal Telco people are running around getting it done.
More than that, however, is random bits of scuttlebutt that rather than trying to find effective and efficient ways to enable the Personal Telco Project to expand its acitivities, the City may be operating in a sort of clueless cloud, going not much further than to ask the PTP people how the City can do what PTP is doing, but within the context and confines of the sorts of stilted and stunted mindsets that bureaucracy tends to engender.
Not particularly encouraging, presuming this sort of grapevine information is true -- either for the fostering of the spread of wireless or, more relevant here, for changing the City mindset about neighborhood publishing on the Web.
Posted at 11:59 PM | PermalinkComments (3) | TrackBacks (2)
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Neighborhood Bloging and Wireless on 17 Feb 2004
There has been a lot of talk in the Portland blog community lately about decentralized neighborhood bloging. I think it all started with Sam Churchill's article on Daily Wireless. Then Portland Communique wrote about the issue. Then Alan over at...
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Neighborhood Bloging and Wireless on 17 Feb 2004
There has been a lot of talk in the Portland blog community lately about decentralized neighborhood bloging. I think it all started with Sam Churchill's article on Daily Wireless. Then Portland Communique wrote about the issue. Then Alan over at...
Comments (3)
Gary Marschke on 17 Feb 2004
Let me suggest that the real barrier to community generated content and vibrant association web sites is the significant lack of time and available expertise within the neighborhood associations themselves. The same core group of exhausted volunteers generally shoulder the burden of implementation leavng little time for new ventures.
That said, it seems like N.A.s have an opportunity to generate revenues (not unlike the advertising in the neighborhood newsletter but without the printing cost) while providing service and content to the neighborhood. Think of the potential and all the good things that could be done with that revenue at the neighborhood level. A smart entrepreneur might see this as an opportunity to make a buck and give back to their community by splitting the proceeds in exchange for doing the grunt work.
One might also want to check out a site I discovered through The One True b!X at www.news4neighbors.net/ where N.A.s are given space to post content of their very own and click through to others.
Sam Churchill on 17 Feb 2004
Nice story, Chris!
You and the other talented bloggers in Portland could have added MUCH to the meeting. I had no idea (until I was at the meeting) that www.portlandonline.com/*yourneighborhood* was planned to be a city-wide model. I thought it was a one shot deal. A test.
InnovationPartnership.org reads like a who's who of Portland elite. Up to and including Homer Williams (South Waterfront & Pearl developer).
They're names on a page for InnovationPartnership and make funding easy. It's pretty "clubby".
It's bullshit. Bloggers rule!
- Sam Churchill
DailyWireless: PortlandOnline Vrs The Blogs
(www.dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2078)
Elaine of Kalilily on 17 Feb 2004
Hey, b!X, why don't you put together a proposal to the city to pay you to help establish/coordinate/troubleshootneighborhood weblogs -- sort of what Gary suggests above. You need to find paid work; the city's neighborhoods need your community building and weblog expertise. Can't you work something out so that everyone benefits????