Communications

A little update from the underbelly of the Orton Family Foundation BlogFrog: we’re trying to lighten up.

Not quite a newsflash, I know, but critical in a number of ways. Orton Staffers, by and large, come from a land of case studies, research papers, periodicals and publishing houses. We’ve been writing essays all our lives (I’m not promising they were any good, but that’s moot in this case), and while the French word for essay—essayer—means to try, we don’t try out enough stuff on our blog. We don’t experiment enough or test ideas or ask enough questions. In short, we aren’t connecting with you in a way that elicits as much exchange as we’d like.

In the well-meaning spirit of legitimacy and professionalism, we revise and tweak and polish, then re-revise and hyper-tweak and over-polish, until our posts end up...well, too cautious, declarative and earnest and not at all spontaneous, inspired or experimental. We tend to skirt layered, issue-laden topics and avoid controversy altogether. In fact, I’m wondering if we’ve ever gotten around to actually expressing our opinions. Being considerate is one thing; being timid is entirely another.

On the flip side, there’s a fine line (or maybe it’s a fat line that just looks fine from inside our blogging brains) between spontaneous and vapid, experimental and baseless, narcissistic and personal, spirited and plain silly. After all, we’re a foundation with a national reputation and a history of helping small cities and towns build and revitalize vibrant, enduring communities; we’re serious about our work insofar as it really, really matters to us because it also really, really matters to the health, sustainability and livability of this country. So when you come to Cornerstones, you won’t be reading posts about what we did on our family vacations—unless, that is, they happen to inform our work and its impact on the ground.

You will, on the other hand, be finding posts that grapple with the challenges we face each day in our Heart & Soul Project Towns. You’ll find posts that look at land use planning through a new lens, and others that champion examples of truly innovative change. And you’ll also hopefully discover that what we’re really about is disrupting old, defunct, destructive patterns and fostering new, inventive, productive ones. In the land use planning and community development worlds, we’re all about causing a stir. So we’ll try to let a little more of our radical sides show and not worry so much about phrasing and tone. And research. And facts and sources. And what the academics might say or the lawyers or the...(you see what I mean).

So, this is me, brandishing my digital sword from the outer reaches of the blogosphere! (See? I’m even mixing metaphors—frogs...swordplay... Why not? OMG, we’re totally stepping out!) We have made ready for our advance into the messy, interactive, unpredictable yet rewarding world of online discourse.

“Onward!” my boss yells from his office amid stacks of CommunityMatters Conference planning materials.

“Tally ho!” our CEO shouts as he heads out the door on yet another bridge-building venture.

“Giddy-up!” and “Yee-HAW!” and “Right ON!” and “Boo-yah!” and “Let’errrrrrrip!” we howl from our Projects and Communications mounts.

Look for us out there in the Wild West Web, pounding our Orton flag into uncharted soil and scouting for friendlies to join our Heart & Soul mission to save communities across the country from suffering the slow death of chockablock, one-size-fits-all, character-deadening assimilation.

CHAAAAAAAAAARGE!!!!!

Michael Wood-Lewis’s recent article on The Huffington Post highlights the great strides that Front Porch Forum (FPF) has taken since he launched it with his wife, Valerie, in 2006. In this article, Michael crystalizes the great irony of the Information Age: “In an era where national and global information is broadly available online, it seems that few of us know our neighbors and what's going on down the street.” Ain’t it the truth.

Front Porch Forum’s goal dovetails well with the Foundation’s—to help small cities and towns navigate growth and change while enhancing what they value most. FPF does just this, but on a neighbor-to-neighbor scale; residents can share announcements about key local meetings and events, encourage participation in projects, or simply post items they want to buy or sell—all via their email inboxes. Forum members are always surprised what they learn about people they’ve lived next door to for years.

The concept of “slow” is taking on new meaning. Its new use is probably best known in conjunction with the “Slow Food” movement, which is defined in Wikipedia as follows: “Slow Food...strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and promotes farming of plants, seeds and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem.” There are organizations dedicated to spreading the concept, some with an international focus and others with a focus on a particular country, such as Slow Food USA.

Recently, I heard about another variation on this approach, called “Slow Money.” This concept, promoted by the Slow Money Alliance, is described as follows: “Founded by Woody Tasch, a pioneer in merging investing and philanthropy, Slow Money’s mission is to build local and national networks, and develop new financial products and services, dedicated to investing in small food enterprises and local food systems; connecting investors to their local economies; and, building the nurture capital industry.”

Image: Joyce Geleynse

I am encouraged right now. I’m wrapping up my reading of Stick Your Neck Out: A Street-Smart Guide to Creating Change in Your Community and Beyond by John Graham, President of The Giraffe Heroes Project. This book has lots of inspiring stories about individuals taking risks to make a difference in their communities, and it provides some concrete tips on beginning and sustaining these efforts. It’s an easy read that helps to fuel the possibilities.

I’m also a regular reader of Rich Harwood’s blog and appreciate his regular acknowledgements of individuals making a difference. He often takes popular culture or nationally reported incidences and finds the golden nugget or the silver lining, gently but cogently urging us to work from the better place within. And I watch with admiration as Steve Clift of eDemocracy and Matt Leighninger of Deliberative Democracy work away to foment change at a collective level.

Photo: eddejesus.wordpress.com

Think about the last planning meeting you attended. Did you notice that practically everyone in the room was between the ages of 40 and 65? And that they were having the same conversation they had five years ago? Here’s an idea for moving the discussion forward—why not involve more young people? It’s not just that the next generation has to live with the decisions we make today, it’s that our decisions will be better for it.

I’ve heard many excuses for why younger generations are not part of the process. They don’t care. They’re hard to reach. The issues are too complex for them to understand. What do they know that we don’t? Funny…these excuses sound a lot like the ones people use for not making more of an effort to include other marginalized populations in a community.

Photo: cityofmanor’s photostream on Flickr

I am a proud resident of a small town. I live in Bethel, Vermont, with approximately 1900 other people and about as many cows, four restaurants, two markets, one school and no stop lights. Most of my neighbors get their news in the local paper and share their views at the dump on Saturday mornings.

Still, Bethel is actually pretty progressive, as far as rural, small town technology goes. We don’t have a Twitter feed or a Facebook page, but the Town does have a basic website, kept up to date with phone numbers for the town offices and PDF files of Select Board minutes.

Still, I can’t help feeling a little tech envy when I read about places that are exploring high-tech ways to open up government, provide people with access to all sorts of municipal data and resources, and make it easier than ever for elected officials to involve and communicate with their citizens:

• NeighborworksAmerica reported on seven new ways that social media is improving neighborhoods: from neighborsforneighbors.org, a Boston non-profit that created social networks for every neighborhood in the City, to thisweknow.org, which makes it easy to compare data between cities.
   
• New York City just concluded its Big Apps competition, making reams of municipal data available to citizens and inviting them to create applications using it. The winners make it easier for New Yorkers to find a subway entrance, rate taxis and learn about their schools.
   
• Cities from New Haven to San Francisco are jumping aboard SeeClickFix or using 311 lines and iPhone apps (like this one in DC), enabling citizens to quickly report issues like potholes and crime hotspots, and enabling governments to quickly take action.

Being the new kid on the Heart & Soul block has been easy in a lot of ways. People are welcoming and open and seem genuinely interested in hearing from me. But in other ways, breaking in to this world has been nearly impossible. How does one gather information about a field that’s so unique that its players frequently don’t even know they’re in the game?

I find myself observing a lot, hesitant to contribute until I know more. I frenetically Google while on conference calls. I browse what I hope are relevant blogs and news articles, always looking for something to pique my interest. Because the Foundation is in the business of connecting the dots, there is no well-worn trail littered with crumbs for me to follow from one innovation to the next.

Photo: ©surreal32

This year’s annual question at the online salon Edge.org is (wait for it...) “How is the Internet changing the way you think?” Last year’s, incidentally, was “What will change everything?” The year before that: “What have you changed your mind about? Why?” Sense a trend here? As Barack Obama succinctly put it in his run up to office: CHANGE.

It’s this year’s flavor of change that I’d like to focus on now (but go ahead and save the other questions in your mental Bookmarks Toolbar; they’re worth exploring). Here at Orton, we’re working on building our online presence, our collective digital psyche, and we have by no means “found ourselves,” let alone matured. So, for the sake of experiment—and because I always did love the pragmatic no-nonsense orderliness of the scientific method—I’m going to offer myself as a guinea pig:

EGO: Self, do you struggle with what communications scholar Howard Rheingold calls “shallowness, credulity, distraction” while online (as quoted in Sharon Begley’s article in Newsweek)?

ID: Wait...what?

EGO: And, as a consequence, do you struggle to “discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu?” (Also Rheingold.)

ID: Just a sec. Someone’s IMing me on Facebook. Ha, it’s Rian. Such a funny guy.

SUPER EGO: Will you please focus?

ID: Right. Of course. Go on, Ego. You were saying? Shallowness, credulity...struggle to deploy something?