25 new Neighbours Issues Forums!
http://neighbours.cc
http://www.facebook.com/christchurchneighbours
Thanks to ...
John Veitch and Andrew Groom on the ground for leading the effort as
interim Forum Managers and more. John in particular for his crucial
in-person outreach with has signed up hundreds of members.
Richard Waid, Dan Randow and the rest of the OnlineGroups.Net team in
Christchurch
Ed Davis for helping out with group set-up and more.
Bailey McCann for helping with banner ads we will offer to sites to
run pro-bono.
And the growing list of volunteers on the work group:
http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/chch-team/memberdirectory
Join the team to volunteer remotely:
http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/chch-team
You can donate to help support further in-person outreach here:
http://forums.e-democracy.org/christchurch/donate/
Now, it is quite likely that many of these forums will not spring to
life, in fact last week I was hoping that just four would work really
well to show the way. My sense now is that we can and will do better
than that.
While we broke all of our rules to set up forums "for" neighbourhoods
before a local Forum Manager and 100 members were recruited, it does
offer us some lessons on starting a campaign for multiple forums in a
community during moments of greater need or perhaps with funding for
outreach. I am pondering how we might set up forums with just X number
of local people interested and then use city-wide outreach to build
numbers toward securing a Forum Manager, etc. Pondering.
So, thank you to Christchurch as well for this important learning opportunity.
Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
ย Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org
ย Follow me - http://twitter.com/democracy
ย New Tel: +1.612.234.7072
P.S. I received a request for advice from someone help with ICTs and
community "self-help" in Japan and cited the Christchurch example. The
scale of the Japan crisis makes a direct transfer of lessons
difficult, but as I pointed out:
Self-help is at the core of our model ... governments provide one-way
info, command and control to save lives at the beginning, but when
rebuilding begins no one is positioned to convene and host effective
local people for open engagement online (and often in-person as well)
in that process.