A few days ago I wrote about an idea for a web-based debate between candidates. When I met with other bloggers in our community, we had plenty of good ideas…but we kept looking at that calendar and realizing we had very little time and no guarantee the candidates would even respond. So we came up [...]
From the category archives:
Building Community
Yesterday, Patch (the hyper local news publisher funded by America Online) launched a Westwood, Massachusetts site–the 11th town so far in Massachusetts. I met the editor and am impressed that they are making an effort to cover the news in this town of 15,000–potentially filling the void left when the Daily News Transcript stopped being [...]
Significant changes to Massachusetts Open Meeting law take effect on July 1, 2010. The new rules do not directly promote collaborative technologies–e.g. how a town might use a wiki to improve governance, for example, but some common sense clarifications do open the door to removing some anti-technology sentiment. And I think the documentation requirements will [...]
Westwood Community Access Television is using a simple, but powerful combination of old and new media technology to jumpstart their efforts to bring public access TV to Westwood, Massachusetts. While the administrative and technical details for taking control of local origination programming are still underway, we are using Ustream to livecast from our minimalist control [...]
If you would like to see more Federal money spent on local projects to promote and make safer more bicycling and walking, call your Congressional Representative and ask him or her to be a co-sponsor on H.R. 4722, the Active Community Transportation Act. It is important to make the call this week, in support of [...]
The popular understanding of the origin of street design in Boston goes back to the original wisdom of cows pastured on the common and commuting home to farms. Although this is more folklore than fact, it does reflect the liklihood that streets were developed piecemeal in response to short-term needs and not as a part [...]
A few Halloweens ago, I picked up a barrel of “Halloween Pretzels” from Costco–mini-pretzels in orange and black bags in a big plastic container. About the ONLY one happy about that choice was our dog who got into the “treats” when the untouched bowl was left on the floor inadvertently. I believe we finally choked [...]
A few weeks ago, I set up an IdeaScale web site to gather suggestions for ways to improve Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety in Westwood. It has turned out to be an effective, easy way to collect ideas and our challenge now is to do something about those ideas.
The site is simple to use–that is its [...]