Innovation

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.

From within the soft body of a squid emerges a hard tooth-like beak, as described in this report from the journal Science. This beak enables the squid to eat mollusks and is apparently one of the toughest organic materials around, and yet it’s somehow merged with what the report calls the squid’s “soft buccal envelope”—the soft, fleshy part of the creature. How does this work? How does something so sharp and pointy connect to something so squishy? It turns out there’s no specific place where the hard part ends and the soft part begins; rather, the beak is composed of materials that exhibit a gradient from hard to soft. It is this essential adaptation that enables the squid to eat what it needs to survive.

I’m a pretty committed Denver girl. I’m a born-and-raised, bona fide Native (that word carries some weight around these parts, hence the capital “n”). In the last few weeks, I’ve been incredibly proud to call this city home, due to the many super cool things Denver has done recently.

Denver B-cycle launched on Earth Day, and is the first effort of its size to occur in the US. John Carney, Orton’s Director of Rocky Mountain Projects, and I volunteered for the launch, spending several hours standing around in uncharacteristically awful weather, encouraging fellow downtown commuters to try the new and remarkably high-tech bikes. Each bike has a built in GPS unit so the folks at B-cycle can track usage, from miles ridden to actual routes that riders take.

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.

The Maine Arts Commission has launched a new initiative called Creative Communities = Economic Development, which makes “substantial awards to communities that will allow cultural organizations to become strong partners in their communities’ development, leveraging collaboration between cultural, municipal and economic development interests.” Executive Director Donna McNeil says she was “tremendously inspired” by the Foundation’s Heart & Soul work in Maine (and by Bill Roper’s talk last year at the Friends of Midcoast Maine’s annual meeting). McNeil wants to give the arts and culture sector a voice in larger community economic development planning, where they are usually undervalued or overlooked.

The project will help put the State’s Quality of Place Initiative into action, “putting your money where your mouth is,” so to speak, by offering two $50,000 grants to Maine cultural organizations in partnership with a municipality. Successful applicants, “should be on the precipice of redevelopment with culture as a central player and demonstrate that these funds will function as a ‘tipping point.’” Other criteria include a commitment of leadership, collaboration, and public engagement, including youth.

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?

In 2002, author Dave Eggers and educator Ninive Calegari decided to establish a place for students to go after school to receive writing instruction and finish their homework. Eggers and company found a building to rent located at 826 Valencia Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. The building, however, was zoned for retail, so they had to come up with something to sell in order to occupy the space.

A friend involved with the project mentioned that the inside of the building looked like the hull of a ship and jokingly suggested they sell pirate supplies. Everyone had a good laugh at that, but eventually the idea took hold. Today, in addition to a non-profit tutoring center for students ages 6 to 18, 826 Valencia—named for the building’s location—is also San Francisco’s only independent supplier of equipment for the working buccaneer: eye-patches, peg-legs, hooks, planks and, of course, means to combat scurvy.