From the beginning our vision has been to connect neighbors online to create stronger communities, so when I found the following comment it made my day:
“I’m so impressed with the effectiveness of the eNeighbors system, and the care and concern of our neighbors. Using technology to strengthen a community and to help neighbors is a good thing!” – Janet G.
(A screenshot of the full comment is below.)
From the Local Onliner:
“Neighbors Online,” a new study from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, has found that 20 percent are using digital tools such as email, texting and social networks to communicate with their neighbors. Twenty two percent have signed up to receive local issue alerts via email or SMS.
Be sure to check out the study from Pew.
The FCC recently conducted a survey called “Broadband Adoption and Use in America” that found getting local or community news was the second most common type of activity online, just behind buying a product. Using a social networking site was fourth. (See chart below.)
Of course, I’m happy to see that “local or community” news is listed second but it’s hard to believe that using a social networking site is fourth given that Facebook now has over 350 million users and is listed as the second or third most visited site on the Internet. This seems to highlight the problem with human reported surveys versus computer counted statistics.
As a measure of online activity for local and community news though, this survey may be the best data we have given the fragmentation of local publishers, which makes it difficult to measure this type of activity on a national level.
We claim that:
BUT, as a Board Member, your #1 concern is: “WILL THE MAJORITY OF OUR RESIDENTS ACTUALLY READ THE INFORMATION?”
A resident in an eNeighbors community wondered the same thing and posted a news article to find out “is any body really out there?” Screenshots below:
The following video found me on Facebook from an old high school buddy. The first time I watched it was on my phone.
Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Welcome to the World of Socialnomics
From TechNewsWorld: Neighborhood Watch 2.0:
City budgets are straining police forces in many cities, and in some cases citizens have seized upon social networking technologies to help guard against crime in their own neighborhoods. It’s unclear whether neighborhood watch efforts actually make people safer, but statistics indicate that neighborhoods with high levels of resident cohesion typically have less crime.
This is another example of how better communication (or cohesion) in a neighborhood can help make it safer.
In April I posted an article about content moderation, a feature of our website that allows a board member to review information posted by residents before it is published on the website. In it, I recommend that board members do not utilize this feature and allow residents to freely communicate, so long as no one is violating the Terms of Use or the law.
As a follow up to that post, I would like to provide board members with an alternative to content moderation in this post.
The video below is titled “How social media can make history” and it is 15 minutes and 48 seconds long. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, scroll forward to 12:27 into the video for the relevant part where Clay Shirky shares a story about MyBo.com, the social networking site that the Obama Campaign established during his campaign and how Barack Obama responded when the registered users of the site were not too happy with him about reversing his decision on the Foreign Intelligence Surveilance Act. He didn’t shut the site down, he didn’t make it harder to register, he didn’t moderate the content. Instead, he simply told them why he decided what he did and let them use the service to talk about it. The speaker in the video concludes with this statement:
“They [the Obama Campaign] had understood that their role with myBo.com was to convene their supporters, but not to control their supporters. And that is the kind of discipline that it takes to make really mature use of this media.”
The alternative to moderation or censorship is to operate transparently and openly by communicating. Let your residents know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
A partial transcript is provided below between 12:27 and 14:30:
“We saw some of the most imaginative use of social media during the Obama campaign. And I don’t mean most imaginative use in politics. I mean most imaginative use ever. And one of the things Obama did, was they famously, the Obama campaign did, was they famously put up MyBarackObama.com, myBO.com. And millions of citizens rushed in to participate and to try and figure out how to help. An incredible conversation sprung up there. And then, this time last year, Obama announced that he was going to change his vote on FISA, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He had said, in January, that he would not sign a bill that granted telecom immunity for possibly warrantless spying on American persons. By the summer, in the middle of the general campaign, he said, “I’ve thought about the issue more. I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to vote for this bill.” And many of his own supporters on his own site went very publicly berserk. It was Senator Obama when they created it. They changed the name later. Please get FISA right. Within a day so of this group being created it was the fastest growing group on myBO.com. Within weeks of its being created it was the largest group. Obama had to issue a press release. He had to issue a reply. And he said essentially, “I have considered the issue. I understand where you are coming from. But having considered it all, I’m still going to vote the way I’m going to vote. But I wanted to reach out to you and say, I understand that you disagree with me, and I’m going to take my lumps on this one.” This didn’t please anybody. But then a funny thing happened in the conversation. People in that group realized that Obama had never shut them down. Nobody in the Obama campaign had ever tried to hide the group or make it harder to join, to deny its existence, to delete it, to take it off the site. They had understood that their role with myBo.com was to convene their supporters, but not to control their supporters. And that is the kind of discipline that it takes to make really mature use of this media.”
Please comment with your thoughts below. What are the benefits of moderation? What are the costs? How do you operate your neighborhood website and why?
Some cool news today! eNeighbors reached 100,000 page views for the first time in the month of January.
Total page views was 115,711. Previously our best month was around 80,000 page views. We’ve signed up a bunch of new neighborhoods in the last few months which has been driving our traffic up.
We are starting to close in on some landmark statistics both around traffic/usage as well as application content within the neighborhood sites themselves. As our product gets more and more exposure in communities across the country, we are looking forward to exponential growth this year.
If you would like to get your neighborhood online with eNeighbors, you can find out more here.
From Wired:
Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine.
Does the net actually increase your face-to-face interactions with the people you live and work with? Or does it decrease your face-to-face interactions and isolate you behind a computer screen? Please comment.
Last night, a small Sheltie was lost in LionsGate, a neighborhood of 582 homes in southern Overland Park, Kansas. Unsure of what to do to locate the owner, the neighbor who found the dog decided to post a bulletin on the neighborhood website at 11:24am this morning and due to the urgent nature of the request an email was immediately sent to the 533 residents that are signed up to receive email alerts from eNeighbors.
At 1:39pm or 2 hours and 15 minutes later, we received the following email:
Subject: Dog safe at home
Thanks to our great neighbors and community of Lionsgate, the dog is home with owners. The email system works, thanks for sending it out so quickly.
-M. Kurtz
This is a great example of how an online neighborhood social network can leverage the power of the community to help the community and its residents.
eNeighbors Blog 