Community Orienteering

Today, the Orton Family Foundation posted a press release featuring Community Almanac, a new tool co-developed by the Foundation and The Open Planning Project. Community Almanac’s site describes itself this way: “It’s where you and your community share stories about the heart & soul of the place you live. It’s a lasting record of the place you love—the place you call home.”

Like social networking services such as Twitter, Community Almanac is a fledgling tool that has potential both evident and unrealized. In other words, it’s been developed with a motive in mind: to help people share and experience stories about their communities, for posterity and to revive a sense of place and belonging—all critical functions given the disconnection and disintegration many communities are experiencing today.

But the ways in which Community Almanac hasn’t yet been used, and could be, are arguably its most exciting features: in classrooms as a documentary tool; by local planning boards as a way to gain consensus about top planning priorities; for residents to exhibit why and how a particular part of town could be developed or preserved. And I’m sure this is the tip of the iceberg. If an online service with a 140-character limit can, in short order, drive media traffic, a different online service for posting locally produced multimedia stories has only to land some gung-ho users to change the way citizens across the country engage with their cities and towns.

If you haven’t yet, check it out now and start an almanac for your town.

Read Orton’s full press release.