Comments on: Civic life, online and off

By: Lance Bennett

Lance Bennett — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:39:22 +0000

I agree. Mapping is a super technology for connecting community activities and issues. Surdna Foundation is funding a national youth community resource inventory. It would be good to automate this in the future — that way it can be continuously updated — and feed into other things.

By: Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:17:19 +0000

Community map mashups are one good way to contact online tools and literally where you live. Where can you skateboard without being busted? Where are public toilets? Places to hang out without being hassled? Cool places to eat? Music venues that let minors in?

By: Deen Freelon

Deen Freelon — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:30:53 +0000

Interesting points, Lance. It may be that larger community sites such as Facebook and Youtube tend to facilitate only limited forms of civic engagement such as political discussion and bumper-sticker-style expression since civic engagement is not their core focus. The value-add of civic sites may be at least twofold in that case: 1) they offer specialized online tools that non-civic sites don’t, and 2) local civic sites allow individuals in a given community to connect and work together on issues of mutual interest. But there may be a tradeoff here: if only those youth already convinced of the value of civic engagement are likely to visit civic sites on their own, larger community sites will be comparatively more likely to attract disengaged youth who might be responsive to targeted engagement efforts. I can’t wait to see the results of our first user surveys on this question . . .

By: Lance Bennett

Lance Bennett — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:03:06 +0000

The strategy outlined in the successful youth news site seems important: make it inclusive of lots of interest areas. The idea of feeding content back to print publication is an interesting twist. I would like to know why this is so attractive.

At present we tend to distinguish between civic sites and social and commerce sites. Part of the reason may be that the social and commerce sites are not designed to facilitate large scale (and often not even small scale) political organizing and action.

At the same time, keeping civic sites active requires addressing more than just politics. Teens need places for music, art, events and sports — and for learning new media skills as well.

Perhaps seemingly disparate (civic and social) spheres will merge so that different activities can occur effortlessly in one kind of place. IN some ways this is happening. Political applications are being written for facebook, and the 2008 election is alive and well on youtube.

But how to find or start a resource rich network to address a community issue — share the activities of that network with other community organizations and networks? These possibilities still seem to require civic sites with public networking tools.