Our Neighbors Forum adaptation of our Issues Forums model is taking off. Neighborhoods next to our established forums are asking, “Hey, what about us!” New volunteers are stepping forward.

The full story, especially our special Inclusive Social Media efforts in lower income, highly diverse/immigrant neighborhoods, is covered by a recent Twin Cities Daily Planet article. The quotations from participants are especially moving. The people who participate are what makes this work so powerful and rewarding. Thank you.

Inclusive Social Media

With our newly funded efforts (thank you to the Ford Foundation and the St. Paul Foundation) we’ve recently brought Boa Lee on as our Community Outreach and Information Leader for our St. Paul Frogtown effort (she is joining Marny Xiong who led our recruitment last summer and is helping monitor local news for the forum while back at college). Abdiaziz Farah, a college student at Augsburg College, is joining us in a similar outreach role for Cedar Riverside in Minneapolis. We will likely open another contract position (up to five hours a week) for Cedar Riverside in the Spring.

Ravi Reddi, a Community Technology Empowerment Americorps volunteer, with the Brian Coyle Center’s computer lab as adopted Cedar Riverside as his civic engagement project. Ravi is helping promote a “Day in Life of Cedar Riverside” style youth digital photo and video project with the forum. We’ve loaned three cameras, a video FlipCamera, and a webcam to the Center. Later in the year, we hope to have a photo or video of the day to share with the community via the forum from neighborhood youth.

Thanks our dedicated volunteers and previous funders (the Minneapolis Foundation and the Knight Foundation’s St. Paul donor advised fund) this effort is growing in strength and interest. Inclusive outreach takes real resources. While these funds were focused on two neighborhoods (and the new St. Paul Foundation $10,000 grant will in part support outreach later in the year for the East Side of St. Paul) they set the foundation for the establishment of all our existing and start-up neighborhood forums.

New Start-up – Join Now

• Minneapolis – Corcoran Neighbors – Forum Manager needed
• Minneapolis – Nokomis East Neighbors – Forum Manager needed
• Minneapolis – Longfellow Community
• Minneapolis – Northeast Neighbors – Open, needs more members for critical mass in larger area
• Minneapolis – Phillips Neighbors
• St. Paul – East Side Neighbors
• St. Paul – Summit-Hill Neighbors
• St. Paul – Summit-University Neighbors

All of these neighbor forums need your help to reach the required critical mass. Whether it is hanging posters at coffee shops or signing people up in-person at community events, there is no substitute for real on-the-ground outreach. Across our network, we know of not one single effort where “build it, they will come” worked. So get out there and recruit people one by one to reach the 100 members required to fully open a new forum. We pay someone (with money from your donations) to do the data entry because we want you to get out there with no hesitation. Our blog shares lessons on new efforts, these slides/webinar goes in-depth (on our general Issues Forum model which you need to adapt to the big “C” community instead of big “P” politics on our big city forums), and our wiki has a mess of self-help advice.

Open Neighbors Forums

• Minneapolis – Cedar Riverside Neighbors
• Minneapolis – Powderhorn Neighbors – Over 10% of households
• Minneapolis – Seward Neighbors
• Minneapolis – Standish Ericsson Neighbors – Over 10% of households
• St. Paul – Frogtown Neighbors
• St. Paul – Highland Park Neighbors

Don’t see your neighborhood listed above? If you are ready to volunteer as the Forum Manager, we can set you up in minutes. The more the merrier as we gear up to launch some city-wide outreach. Contact us with your neighborhood/area and a bit about your background. If you are a neighborhood association or district council ready to do some outreach, we are experimenting with start-up forums that will open once a volunteer Forum Manager (and 100 initial members) step forward. There must a local resident willing to volunteer as the leader (we support them and connect them with other leaders) to succeed and be truly community-owned.

Neighbourhood Forums in the UK

The transition to “neighbourhood” level activity actually started with our E-Democracy.org UK efforts. After our two initial pilot council-wide (supported with UK government funding) forum, we were approached by the local governments in Bristol and Oxford about trying the model at the neighbourhood level. Except in Headington where the launch leveraged the connection of a long-time neighbourhood connector, all of these forums would benefit significantly from a new round of in-person outreach.

• Bristol, England – Brislington
• Bristol, England – Greater Bedminster
• Oxford, England – Central and Southwest – Forum manager opening
• Oxford, England – Cowley
• Oxford, England – Headington and Marston – Our first “neighbourhood” forum, most active in UK

The Big Deal – Reaching Millions

While our city-wide Issues Forum model remains quite unique (it is very different from anonymous online  newspaper comments), at the neighborhood level, our “network” approach is joining ten of thousands of individual neighborhood e-mail lists, place blogs, Ning networks, Facebook Groups, etc. that operate in isolation. That said, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, some 4% of American adults say they belong to a “neighborhood listserv.” That is 8 million people. To us, that is a great starting point. If each list averages 250 members, that means over 30,000 people have stepped forward to connect their neighbors online (and as far as we can tell, few of them know each other or of similar efforts next door).

Based on our mission, we do seek to raise the amount of civic engagement and social inclusion in these forums. While “who can recommend a good plumber?” is completely legitimate neighborly communication, we work to leverage the attractiveness of these forums to introduce local public issues, promote government transparency (and information use), and public participation at all levels. More importantly, our sense is that most of the online groups serving neighborhoods are NOT in lower income, more diverse areas and these areas are clearly being left behind. This must be addressed. Our inclusion efforts are embryonic and extremely rare.

Looking forward, we want to help “move the field”  and double the number of people on such networks to 16 million people. We can cover perhaps 20 to 40 thousand people in a few years. Who will bring in the rest?

Will it be you? One neighborhood at time? Or some other approach?

Our friends at the Front Porch Forum in Vermont (check out this great article), NeighborsforNeighbors.org in Boston, and i-Neighbors research project are part of a family of other “network” projects exploring how to connect people who live near one another online each with various nuances. (See our wiki for an extensive collection of social media in local public life links.) These projects are on to something. It is a big world our there with lots of room for different models.

To us, the biggest gap is the lack of a dynamically up-to-date and comprehensive geo-coded directory of these local two-way spaces online (we are exploring possible partnership ideas with mySociety.org’s GroupsNearYou.com site, but that site is “manual” so to speak). If we can’t promote where to find these local sites nationally, it is nearly impossible to find them online for your area. Word of mouth is the only option and extremely limiting.

Locals Online? Participation 3.0, Neighborly

Locals Online

To help move the field, we are first working to connect the field through a simple online community for those who host similar effort at the neighborhood level online. Sound interesting? Join Locals Online and get ready to sign our draft invite letter.

Participation 3.0

As a non-partisan “civic engagement” project, we see these community forums as the highly engaging and attractive “community life” online path that will help us introduce the next generation of local online civic engagement to a critical mass of “e-citizens.” As our new forums are promoted and launched, in addition to building the social fabric of our communities, we will also be able introduce broader local civic opportunities to participate in our new Participation 3.0 initiatives. Most e-democracy projects fail based on the lack of outreach and participants. Our existing and growing network gives us a chance to try new ideas quickly. We can fail fast and try new ideas cost-effectively until we figure out what works.

Neighborly

While many individual neighborhood forums are private and restricted to residents, ours’ are designed to be open to all. Being public gives you a voice. It gives you power and the ability to help set the agenda in your community.

That said, we do see a space for semi-private or mini-public “nearest neighbor” networking online that is well outside the glare of Google search. We see a need for “public life” social networking that is not just about chatting with your friends and families on Facebook in private life. We highlighted our geek-led volunteer-based Neighborly exploration in last month’s e-newsletter. On Saturday, we had our third code-a-thon and the next one is planned is planned for the afternoon of Sunday, April 11. Join our online working group to get involved.

Neighborly is an experiment. If it works, starting in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the combination of semi-private nearest neighbor “circles” online covering a couple block, public neighborhood forums covering 5-15,000 households, city-wide Issues Forums covering whole cities, and new Participation 3.0 features (like public meeting agenda alerts and comments) we will establish the world’s most active and dynamic local online environment for community engagement, participation, transparency, and collaboration to date. Now that is exciting.

Programmers get ‘Neighborly’ at Hackathon

On Dec. 12, E-Democracy.Org invited programmers to join a local, Minnesota version of the Sunlight Foundation’s Great American Hackathon, which focused on ideas for making public data more accessible and useful for public, civic purposes.

If you’ve ever wondered what a Hackathon is, put aside all your pre-conceived notions of nefarious programmers staying up all night to crack some highly secured code – these events are very constructive efforts. Hackathon’s generally refer to events where programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming, and in this case, civically minded programmers were invited to begin a longer-term effort to provide a tool for neighbors to better connect online.

After a general morning session on open government with 30 people, about 10 local programmers jump-started the “Neighborly” effort, which generally aims to help nearest neighbors connect online in a private setting to be “good neighbors” as well as to give “block captains” (often engaged by community policing efforts or neighborhood associations) tools to help them effectively communicate with interested neighbors.

The vision is for an individual to share information with neighbors and be able to dynamically exchange announcements and discussions among those within the selected “neighbors directory.”

Participants were also able to participate in the Other Future of News event, which picked up where the Minnesota Public Radio Future of News event left off.

Other hackathon sessions to continue the Neighborly project followed the initial Dec. 12 event. In January, they met a second time and produced this important video.

The idea was also submitted into the Knight News Challenge and made it into the second round. The proposal we submitted is available.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more information, visit the conference site.

Transparency Camp

On March 27-28 in Washington, DC, this un-conference will convene a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, journalists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent, accountable and meaningfully accessible to the public. Just as E-Democracy.org played a role at the recent CityCamp, we will be in DC gathering ideas for the next generation of local online civic engagement.

For more information, visit the conference site.

Danube University Conference on eDemocracy

The eDem 10, 4^th International Conference on eDemocracy is set for May 6 at the Danube University campus in Krems, Austria. The conference focuses on trends occurring in the following areas: transparency and communication, participation and collaboration, architecture, various approaches and disciplines, and research methods.

For more information, visit the conference site.

Conference on e-Democracy, e-Government and e-Society
The World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology is sponsoring the ICDGS 2010: “International Conference on e-Democracy, e-Government and e-Society, in Paris from June 28-30.

The conference aims to bring together academic scientists, leading engineers, industry researchers and scholar students to share their experiences and research results about all aspects of e-Democracy, e-Government, and e-Society, and also to discuss the practical challenges encountered and solutions adopted.

For more information, visit the conference site.

International Conference on e-Democracy, Equity and Social Justice
The IADIS International Conference on e-Democracy, Equity and Social Justice is set for July 26-28 in Freiburg, Germany. The event is part of the IADIS Multi-Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems. This conference aims to encourage and foster efforts of researchers and practitioners by sharing cutting-edge research, innovations, models, theories and strategies that address issues and challenges related to cultivating online communities for grassroots democracy, equity and social justice.

The Call for Papers is open until Feb. 19.

For more information, visit the conference site.

Two new communities in the United States are in the midst of starting up local issues forums. Residents in both Westborough, Massachusetts and Chicago, Illinois both have start-up efforts. In Minneapolis, three new neighborhoods – Longfellow, Nokomis East, and Corcoran – are in start-up mode as is the East Side of St. Paul. While we still require 100 recruited participants to open, we’ve detailed a strategy to encourage a single volunteer to get started without requiring a start-up committee. So if you have the desire and the time to convene your community online, why not give it a try and take advantage of our support network.

Many local residents across the network of forums turned to their neighbors on the forums to deal with crimes and share information about local resources.

Click on the links below to read more conversations from the E-Democracy.Org forums.

• New Zealand – Canterbury

Hot Topic: Music Hill Riots
Hot Topic: Energy Supply in Canterbury

• United Kingdom – Brighton and Hove

Hot Topic: Local involvement
Hot Topic: alternative therapies

• United Kingdom – Bristol-Burlington

Hot Topic: The Old Happy Shopper…

• United Kingdom – Bristol-Bedminster

Hot Topic: Birds in Bemmy
Hot Topic: Modernising customer access to Council services

• United Kingdom – Knowle West
• United Kingdom – Newham

Hot Topic: Landlord licensing in Newham

• United Kingdom – Oxford-Central, South, and West
• United Kingdom – Oxford-Cowley  
• United Kingdom – Oxford-Headington and Marston

Hot Topic: Café application old Headington high street

• United States – U.S. Politics

Hot Topic: Tea Party issues (multiple topics)

• United States – Las Vegas, NM

Hot Topic: Animal Safety and Care (carryover from September)

• United States – Minnesota-Politics

Hot Topic: Governor’s race and legislative outlooks (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Rural Voices

Hot Topic: Technologies (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Bemidji

Hot Topic: Energy and climate issues (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Cass Lake, Leech Lake

Hot Topic: Healing Run (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Cook County

Hot Topic: Health care (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota -Grand Rapids

Hot Topic: Governor’s forum/elections (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Minneapolis

Hot Topic: Policing the cops (multiple topics)
Hot Topic: Homelessness in Minneapolis (multiple topics)
Hot Topic: Snowplowing (multiple topics)

• United States – Minneapolis-Cedar Riverside

Hot Topic: Crime and policing issues (multiple topics)

Hot Topic: Car repair question

• United States – Minneapolis-Powderhorn

Hot Topic: Bartering network (multiple topics)

• United States – Minneapolis-Seward

Hot Topic: Reaction/events related to triple homicide (multiple topics)

• United States – Minneapolis-Standish Ericsson

Hot Topic: Credit unions vs. banks
Hot Topic: Weather (snow, icy sidewalks, etc) (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Roseville

Hot Topic: Speeding (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota-St. Paul

Hot Topic: Instant Runoff Voting (multiple topics)
Hot Topic: Candidates for police chief (multiple topics)

 
• United States – Ohio-Central Ohio 

 

• United States –St. Paul-Frogtown  

Hot Topic: Central Corridor light-rail (multiple topics)

• United States –St. Paul-Highland Park

Hot Topic: Snyders/Walgreens (multiple topics)

• United States – Minnesota-Winona

Hot Topic: Rail and transit (multiple topics)

E-Democracy.org was one of dozens of non-profit organizations that participated in the GiveMN.Org “Give to the Max” fundraising event in November 2009 that provided.

About 50 people from around the world donated to E-Democracy during the day-long event, raising more than $3,000. The funds will largely be devoted to E-Democracy.org’s participant support for more than 25 local Issues Forums and building connections in diverse communities. Our Participant Support lead Ed Davis (Ed works for us about 10 hours a week supported by your donations) is busy working to make all of our local forums available via Twitter and Facebook pages to reach more people.

Nearly 39,000 donors raised $14 million in the effort for Minnesota non-profit agencies.

Donations accepted and encouraged any day. They are crucial.

Whether you are launching a new Issues Forum or want to refreshing your membership, we’ve found nothing more effective than in-person recruiting. Nothing.

Because our forum are hyper-local, the only way to get to the 10% of households we now have in Cass Lake Leech Lake and the Minneapolis neighborhoods of Powderhorn and Standish Ericsson, is to sign people up on paper or stick posters up around town with a web address “tab” instead of a telephone number.

To make this job easier, we have some simple templates:

• Issues Forum Poster Template – PowerPoint – Customize and replace “link” with the short url we’ve assigned your community like http://e-democracy.org/frogtown
• Issues Forum Paper Sign-up Template US – and A4 version – Word – Adapt this form to your needs
• Advice for Using the Templates – See the links at the bottom of our Inclusive Social Media page and other blog posts on new efforts and neighborhoods specifically.

During our recent pledge drive, we promised that your donations would go in part to help grow our forums. So, if your community goes the extra distance and signs people up on paper, we will gladly pay Ed Davis, our trusty part-time participant support lead, to type up the results you Fax or scan in and send to us. Only the “home office” has the ability to upload members without the need for those sign-up to click through on a verification e-mail link. We’ve found that most people miss those requests, so be sure to ask our help with the upload rather than use the bulk invite feature available to Forum Managers or you’ll lose 80% of those signed up on paper.

Why does this matter?

In Cedar Riverside, with a large East African population, as part of our new Inclusive Social Media push, we recruited 50 new participants in one night at the community Multicultural Dinner on paper. This membership leap to over 200 clearly meant something as the community exchanged views and grieved over the tragic triple homicide at a Somali-owned store in the neighboring Seward area. While Seward has a large East African population (in large rental complexes and mostly white homeowners to the south), that forum too would benefit from a similar in-person outreach and community posters because those diverse communities are not yet well represented on their local forum.

People do not just show up. They don’t Google local community forums. Word of mouth and e-mail invites work best with those “who already show up.” We can do better than that.

The recent Cedar Riverside experience demonstrates the value of our funded start-up efforts to bring out real diversity and the practical and reasonable limits of the all-volunteer effort in Seward and other communities. That said, if you have the volunteer time and interest, recruiting in-person and with posters around the community is something you can do now to make a real difference. Also, if you think a local community foundation or donor might support some funded aggressive outreach for your forum, we can help support those local efforts with training and support.

The Issues Forum model is always evolving. While real names and civility remain central, over the last few years we’ve being going even more local – be that at the neighborhood level or in smaller rural towns.

Now that we have 25 forums across 15 communities, our central support costs are now measurable and growing. The successful fund drive helped secure participant technical support (provided by Ed Davis) well into 2010 and he is now putting in extra hours to help make our forums readable via Twitter and Facebook as well as our standard e-mail, e-mail digest, web forum, and web feed options.

Carol Hayward, formerly an e-democracy expert for Bristol City Council in the UK and now based in New Zealand, helped us rework the text for our Issues Forum Guide for our Blandin Foundation funded Rural Voices initiative in Minnesota. We are cutting it back from the original 60 page version commissioned by UK government and adding new material from our recent webinars.

Let me fess up here and say, I just haven’t dug in with my full edits, but that is no reason not to share the working drafts.

Why? We are adapting the model in real-time.

The reality is this – E-Democracy’s “home office” primarily serves as a support team for our local volunteer Forum Managers. They are the lynch pin. They facilitate each forum and help bring it to life by seeding topics when discussions are light. The local “teams” or committees that we form with start-up efforts – do just that – they help launch a forum and then go mostly dormant. The local committee or chapter model, while still an option for local communities, is far more labor intensive to sustain as a fully functioning “club” than focusing ongoing support on the one person (typically) who does the heavy lifting locally anyway.

We do see a vital need to define and support additional volunteer roles such as outreach and information seeking and discussion seeding, but we are in the process of refining our support materials to acknowledge the primacy of the local Forum Manager as the clear local leader and their discretion in what kind of local support team, committee, or full chapter with elected officers, etc. they desire. If these reforms are adopted by the Board, Forum Managers will be able to replace themselves directly, consult their virtual team (going back to the start-up committee which has an internal online group) on a replacement or local help they need, appoint volunteers with titles or simply just do what they do best – facilitate their local forum and seed topics of discussion from time to time. We will also be considering a network-wide appeals committee on rules violations instead of doing this community by community (we’ve had one official appeal in the last two years).

Over the last year, with over 25 Issues Forum Managers (current and retired) in a private mutual support network, they are providing increasing amounts of advice and support to each other. So, along with our civility/rules framework and technology hosting, the primary reason for a new community to join us is to connect with your forum leader peers to support local online engagement as a team and not in an isolated manner with everything on your shoulders.

What this also means is that we can now open ourselves up to far more failure! And success in more communities.

If you, and you alone, want to try starting an Issues Forum in your community or neighborhood, and are confident you can recruit the required 100 participants to open, go for it. While we prefer a local start-up committee that helps shape your forum’s charter and circulates paper sign-up forms at community events (the easiest way to get to 100 participants by far), the “committee” requirement should no longer be a stumbling block to give an Issues Forum a try. This does mean that we will have many more forum start-up attempts that do not reach the critical mass required to open. We will have forums that are abandoned by their Forum Manager with no local support base to find the next volunteer. However, in the end we will end up serving many more communities and participants successfully by making it far easier to get started. The odds are that if at least 100 people are interested in participating, most of the forums will have ongoing posts and there will be at least one person willing to take over when the current Forum Manager seeks to move on. Whether “most” is 95% or 51% only time will tell.

With the White House’s release of the Open Government Directive, we hope some of that momentum will reach the local and state level. We’ve started a wiki page of raw data sets from Minnesota government (unlike Utah and California, Minnesota (where we are based) has no equivalent to the Federal Data.Gov public data catalog.

Minnesota Public Radio recently asked listeners to weigh-in on “What sorts of government information should be easier to get?” Check out their responses.