All posts in the topic East Side, Summit-U ... Highland, Frogtown, who is next?
Summary
- There are 6 posts — by 5 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Michael Samuelson at 2009 Aug 20 21:52 UTC
With the opening of the Highland Park Neighbors Forum and the big Frogtown push, we've received volunteer interest about setting up forums for the East Side and Summit-U. Anyone want to help them or lead efforts in your neighborhood? At this point, these efforts need to be volunteer driven, so it is you who can make a difference for your community online. Drop a note to - <email obscured> - or http://e-democracy.org/contact - with your area of interest and what you'd be willing to do. We don't follow strict official boundaries (but prefer district council boundaries as best possible) and _local volunteers_ determine the actual geographic scope they wish to cover. These forums add "community life" even a bit of "freecycle" to the public issues in the city-wide forum. If SPIF is big "P" politics, the neighborhood spaces are big "C" community. The more people who come into the network at the neighborhood level the larger SPIF will become (in our four Minneapolis neighborhood forums I would guess only 10-20% of people are subscribed to both the city-wide and nhood forums pointing out the power of going even more local to reach a broader cross-section of the community). Also, if you want to help fund raise to support some paid outreach, it is amazing what Marny Xiong and her volunteers are doing in Frogtown to get the word out (posters, tabling, mentioning the forum at public events, etc.). While volunteers can do this, this is this heavy in-person lifting that brings inclusive outreach to the next level. (Oh, and because people and others donate to E-Democracy.org, we pay someone to do the data entry from our paper sign-ups and centralize customer support as best we can as well to allow local volunteers to focus on forum content and facilitation.) Cheers, Steven Clift
It seems like the District Councils might be a perfect venue for promoting,
developing the new forum.
I disagree.
I think the district councils are one of several venues to be used. Its a quick
and easy way to tap into people who are already involved. There are times where
issues facing the district council may be worth talking about among a greater
group, and other times where the district council will be the subject of
discussion. I'd rather not see these forums turn into electronic district
council meetings. The district council may have a point of view that is
different than other vocal members of that community. This is a chance for
other voices to be heard.
My suggestion is that the volunteers reach out to district councils, CDCs,
active block club members, parents who are active in the parks through their
kids sports, the neighborhood gossip, the neighborhood paper and newsletter
publishers and their local business organizations. At least that's what I'm
doing.
You want a well-rounded list of participants or it quickly devolves into small,
cliquish group of sycophants.
Eric Mitchell
Phalen
Eric has a point. However, I think he overstates the impact the District councils have. Yes they have a number of dedicated volunteers. If you can get a DC to support a local forum there will be a lot of people who will work toward making it work. However, as part of the St. Paul team we tried to engage the District Councils in expanding the St. Paul Issues forum. We got little, if any, support form them even with some notable DC leaders on this forum. We even attempted to argue that DC support would help develop local support of the local council. Maybe now that the we have had some success it is the time to move ahead. Although I would like to get confirmation from the district council members and leaders Mike Fratto St. Paul, MN Please help those who don't get enough to eat. http://oyh.org http://hungersolutions.org The future depends more on what we do between now and then Than what we did in the past.
With greater Frogtown (Thomas-Dale - District 7) and Highland Park
we've had very positive relationships with the District Councils.
In Highland, their staff helped promote the forum and board member Tim
Puffer really spearheaded getting forum managers in place. In District
7, where I have been more active due to the small grant resources
available, they have been great but are also legitimately concern
about any potential confusion with their own online efforts like their
new e-newsletter.
In short, I can't imagine a forum breaking through in an "e-democracy"
sense where we want to launch a "neutral" forum with a mix of public
issues and community life (not just a mini-freecycle or craigslist)
with opposition from the local District Council. Ideally, like we have
in my Minneapolis neighborhood of Standish and Ericsson, you want a
synergistic relationship where E-Democracy.org deals with the
complexity of hosting open two-way online exchange among diverse
people and all sorts of government/neighborhood institutions "serve"
the public with information, answers to questions, and a bit of
dialogue. Most of the value in the forum however will clearly be
generated by the participants themselves. At a minimum you want the
District Council to link to the forum from their homepage with
whatever disclaimer makes them feel comfortable and to mention it in
their print materials.
What is working out especially well in Minneapolis is direct
participation by local elected council members and their staff. With
most neighborhoods typically represented by one councilmember, they
know that *these are their voters* which seems to align their
political compasses toward engagement. It helps that the very local
forums are much more about "community" than the city "politics" Erik
Hare posted about recently.
Ideally, we'd see local librarians citing resources on the shelves
related to forum topics, park staff promoting events and classes, the
police answering specific questions about crime instances, local
school officials sharing updates, district councils asking for
pre-meeting comments on upcoming meeting agenda items, council
members/their staff making a call to somewhere in the bureaucracy and
typing up what they found out, etc. This does and can happen, but
there is a lot of education required to get folks who serve us with
our tax dollars to see this as an integrated part of their job that is
cost/time efficient compared to how else they might spend their time.
(A future grant idea is to create such training materials/sessions.)
We've found the deeper the forum's penetration, the harder it is to
avoid. So if we took my neighborhood forum's close to 10% of
households subscribed and extended that across Minneapolis and St.
Paul as a whole, that would be 30,000 participants overall connected
*everyday*! Wow.
The key to our model is at least one person to lead as the volunteer
forum manager, a mix of people willing to do some real recruitment
work (we create custom paper sign-up sheets for new forums), and at
least a handful of participants who like *share* information, even
produce a little bit of news or ask an interesting question, on a
regular basis to make the model work.
Cheers,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.org
From: Eric Mitchell <email obscured>>
Subj: Re: [SPIF] East Side, Summit-U ... Highland, Frogtown, who is next?
Date: Thu Aug 20, 2009 12:45 pm
"You want a well-rounded list of participants or it quickly devolves into
small, cliquish group of sycophants."
Yah, just like the St. Paul Forum has turned into.
Sammy from the Midway
Need help? Please contact technical support and we will follow-up in 24-48 hours.
Hosted by E-Democracy.Org. Powered by OnlineGroups.Net using the open source web-based mailing list manager GroupServer.