JB: Michael, the early promise of the Internet was as a global communications tool, but more recently the online world is blamed for pulling people away from their physical surroundings. So, can Front Porch Forum (FPF) help promote place and community?

MWL: Yes, it’s odd to think that the Internet might actually bring people closer together who live near each other. Everyone knows that the Internet can help you connect with someone in Bali who’s also interested in the same model train and that’s wonderful. But what about the guy next door? And at the same time, aren’t people spending more and more time online?  Isn’t that the opposite of building community in place? And that is a real concern. But there are some exciting new developments, including our project, Front Porch Forum, where people are using the Internet to build community—next door, down the block.

JB: What is Front Porch Forum in a nutshell?

MWL: Front Porch Forum is a collection of online neighborhood forums. In our pilot area, around greater Burlington, Vermont, we host 130 of these forums. So anybody who lives in Chittenden County, Vermont, may go onto our site, type in their street address, and be placed in the neighborhood forum that serves the area where they live. Front Porch Forums are private—they’re not open to the whole worldwide web—so they’re a place where neighbors can come on and post messages about simple stuff like a lost cat or seeking a plumber or announcing a school play or they might use the service to organize something, like a block party or a petition to get the municipal government to put in a stop sign or whatever it might be. Or it might be used for political back-and-forth. People use it for all sorts of things.

JB: How did you come to create FPF?

MWL: Several years ago my wife and I were new in the community (Burlington, Vermont’s South End), and we were so pleased to live in a wonderful neighborhood, now called the Five Sisters for the street names. It’s a well-regarded neighborhood and known to be very friendly, and yet we were having trouble getting to know the neighbors. And perhaps it was us, but I don’t think so. It was just that people were busy.

A couple of incidents sparked our desire to try something else. First my wife said, “When I was a girl, neighbors would bring a plate of homemade cookies over to the folks who had moved in.” And so we waited. And we waited. Three months went by and no cookies and my wife’s a take-charge kind of girl and so she said, “Well, I’ll make cookies and I’ll take them around.” And so she did and as she’s heading out the door with paper plates and cookies she says, “Oh, wait, I’ll put them on china and that way people will have to return them, so we’ll get two opportunities to talk with them.”

Well, people were very friendly and glad to get the cookies, but . . . we never saw the plates again. Of course, they’re not terrible people, just busy. So I said, “Well, I understand there’s some kind of neighborhood gathering this summer and when that happens, let’s see how that goes.” One day we came back from an outing and we saw people packing up barbeque grills on the street and putting away folding tables, and we asked, “What happened?” One of the neighbors said,

“Oh, we had our annual picnic.”

We were crestfallen.

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh, you didn’t hear about it?” he asked.

“No. How do you find out about these things?”

And he said, “Oh, well, I guess you gotta live here 10 years before you’re really on the grapevine.”

And I thought, well, we can do better than that and I’m not patient enough to wait around for ten years. So we went ahead with our second apprehensive “cookie attack” and created this concept of a neighborhood online forum. This was back in 2000. We made an initial investment of $15 at the local copy shop and printed up a stack of flyers and delivered them door-to-door. Our neighborhood has 350 households and right away ten percent signed up and then 20 percent and it kept growing. We live in a neighborhood full of active people with something to say. So people saw it as an easy way of being in touch. And then the commerce kicked in and free stuff and, you know; hey, I’m looking for a stroller, has anybody got one they want to get rid of and, you know—kid kind of stuff. And word-of-mouth kicked in.

It took off to the point where six years later we’re up to 90 percent of the households participating and when we did a survey, half of them said they’ve posted a message in the last six months, which is remarkable because with most online services, 99 percent of the people just read and 1 percent post messages; that’s the industry norm. And so it’s an unusually high degree of participation. And then in 2006 we won a national award. We were on a list of top ten neighborhoods in the country. It struck me as valuable that the reporter went around and talked to as many people as he could in the neighborhood. He came back to me at the end and he said, “You know, the one thing everyone said helped make this neighborhood special is the neighborhood forum. Nowhere else across the country in the ten different great communities was there a consensus on anything. They all had their own ideas. But this is the one place where there’s a common thread.”

It was at that point we decided to give this a shot and we launched Front Porch Forum.

JB: How do you measure success?

MWL: Ultimately, success is fulfilling our mission. And our mission is all about helping people connect and foster a sense of community in their neighborhood. So success to me is when someone comes up on the street and tells me a story, something about, “Hey, I sold my car.” And that’s great. We love that direct result through our service. Then they’ll say the next part of the sentence, and that’s real success: “And now I know more of my neighbors because four of them got in touch with me. And I had a discussion with each one and it turns out one guy lives right across the back fence. We never met each other before and now when we’re both working on our yards, we can strike up a conversation, not just wave from a distance.”

So it’s a little thing on the one hand, but it’s huge on the other. It’s regaining . . . really in a very fundamental way, a sense of place.

JB: So a lot of the activity starts online and winds up in backyards and homes? It goes from virtual to actual?

MWL: Yes. Conversations start online and then they move onto the sidewalk or they go from the virtual to the actual front porch. One of the conventional ways to measure success in the dot com world is all about traffic and how many people visit a site and how much time is spent on a site, how many clicks and click-throughs. And those are all important, but ultimately that’s not what our mission is about at all. Our mission is about people turning their computers off and going outside and going to the corner store, going to the post office, going to the school, and connecting with their neighbors.

Time and again we see that one posting might result in one or two responses on our service, but then might result in 10 or 20 or 100 exchanges off our service, so sidewalk conversations, people emailing each other directly, phone calls, public meetings. You know, one little message often sparks lots of community discussion.

JB: Tell us how Front Porch Forum has helped someone in your neighborhood?

MWL: There was a couple who were moving across the street, out of a rental upstairs apartment into a house a few doors down and they were going to do it themselves. And they have two young children. They’re all set and they realize at the last minute they’re going to need help with a few things. So they thought, well, let’s see if this works. They put a note on Front Porch Forum, just in their neighborhood, saying, hey, Sunday, two o’clock, if you could help us out, we could use a couple strong backs.

Well, Sunday two o’clock rolls around and 36 neighbors show up and move the entire house in an hour and a half. People got busy. They weren’t just having a party. In the old apartment, people were going in and pulling the picture hanging nails out of the wall and spackling—they were just doing everything. They ended up setting up the crib in the new space. That night the couple went to bed and they couldn’t fall asleep. The couple ended up staring at the ceiling, asking themselves: What just happened? All the boxes were broken down in the garage and ready to go to the recycling center. But the kicker again here isn’t just the wonderful direct result. It’s the secondary piece that is even more wonderful; now they can take a walk around the block and recognize 36 of their neighbors.

That’s the kind of thing that happens, and that’s neighborhood. That’s not solving any world crises or anything like that, but it’s a fundamental building block.

JB: Roughly, what’s the size of a Front Porch Forum neighborhood?

MWL: It turns out that scale is critical in designing these neighborhood forums. If you design it small—for us, that would be 20 or 30 households—it’s simply too small to sustain conversation. If you design a neighborhood large—2000 to 3000 households or bigger—then it’s too big to bring about the personal connection. So the sweet spot seems to be 200, 300, and up to 500 households, big enough that you definitely would share something in common with some of the other people online. You may know a lot of them, or you may not.

JB: Is Front Porch Forum part of a larger trend? Are there others working on this?

MWL: Yes, it is. If you look at the life of the Internet, people talk about the first big wave being communication—with AOL, Netscape—and the next big wave being commerce—with eBay, Amazon—and that was followed by search—Google, Yahoo!—and now more recently we’re all in the middle of social networking—Facebook, MySpace and others. All the future lookers are asking, “What’s next?” And many people are coming up with the answer: local.

Everything to date has primarily focused on the global. Most of us, however, spend the vast majority of our time within a few miles of home working, going to school, sleeping, eating, recreating, whatever. And so the notion is, well, what about local? And, in fact, there’s millions if not billions of dollars being invested in local, online efforts right now. And the big players are turning toward local—Google and Yahoo! and others. But most of them have what feels like the equivalent of Wal-Mart-as-a-local store approach. Wal-Mart’s a local store in that each store is located in a particular town or county. But, of course, it doesn’t feel very local. Yahoo! is a local service in your town, but its server is based somewhere else harvesting data from databases. It’s very impressive, but it’s not here in town. It’s not a trusted, local meeting spot. And so, Front Porch Forum is a much smaller subset of global.

JB: What’s next for Front Porch Forum?

MWL: We want as many of our neighborhood forums as possible to be successful. So we’re going to continue to encourage word-of-mouth. We depend on residents out there to get excited about it and tell their neighbors. And that’s how it’s worked in all of our successful neighborhoods. And we provide the service if they provide the local participation. So we want to help continue that and have that happen in every Burlington area neighborhood forum. We also are eager to spread this service to other communities and so we’re hoping to get to other parts of Vermont and from there even further. We’ve seen other examples of online services spread themselves too quickly and shut down. There are a number of those. We want to be careful and locally successful, primarily, because that’s our mission. We created this service for the benefit of the community where we live. And we want to continue that.

Visit Front Porch Forum at www.frontporchforum.org.

John Barstow is Director of Communications for the Orton Family Foundation, and has been involved in the writing and publishing worlds for nearly thirty years. He lives in Middlebury, VT with his family.