Small Towns Go High Tech

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.

Up until recently, this type of innovation has been mostly limited to urban areas, and conventional wisdom held that small towns just wouldn’t have the resources or even the citizen interest to pursue such high-tech initiatives. One such initiative, GovFresh.com, is a one-stop-shop for news, applications, and examples of communities taking it back to the people with tech tools. Most of its examples are indeed urban, but at least one small town is turning that wisdom on its head.

Next American City recently did a story on Manor, Texas, a small town of 6500 that has set up its own “laboratory for innovation” and is leaving a lot of larger cities in the dust. A new, interactive website called Manor Labs allows citizens to suggest municipal improvements and vote them up or down. Citizens who participate receive points called ”innobucks” that they can redeem for prizes or put toward implementation. Manor has also started placing ”Smartcodes” (two-dimensional barcodes) on objects all around town. Scan a code with your mobile phone and you can immediately access municipal information; a code attached to a park gate, for example, will give you info about park hours and rules.

Next American City author Christian Madera makes the important point that most small towns don’t have the resources to pull off anything close to what Manor has done—but nor do they have to. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense for individual communities to develop their own flashy platforms; it can be much more effective for towns to enter the new media game using existing services and platforms. Facebook and Twitter are great examples for general outreach and communications. SeeClickFix is perfect for communities that want to crowdsource local problems and solutions (Open311 is another, somewhat different option). And matchmaking sites like serve.gov help to connect people with relevant local organizations and interests.

I suspect it’ll be some time before Bethel has a presence on Facebook, and even longer before Smartcodes start popping up on our dairy barns and dirt roads. But the best thing about many of these new media applications is that citizens don’t need to wait for their towns and governments to catch on; most existing platforms allow any user to create an account, dive in and start using them. If you invite a few friends, and they each invite a few more friends, it won’t be long before the mayor and council members are jumping on the bandwagon—or the iPhone, that is.