I remember reading Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery when I was ten or twelve years old. It’s a great story that cleverly foreshadows danger, building to the unexpected climax and conclusion: the “winner” of the lottery is stoned to death in a small town ritual to ensure a good harvest.

In Boston, we have our own annual ritual and rite of passage for 4-years olds: the Boston Public School Lottery. Starting one year before children are eligible to attend kindergarten, parents visit prospective schools and choose the “best” school for their kids. Parents submit ranked choices and then assignments are made with priority awarded to siblings and people in the “walk zone” with a random number lottery used to break ties.

There is no neighborhood school based on address. Instead, the city is divided into 3 geographic zones. Parents can choose any school in the zone. In our case, we are eligible for 21 different elementary schools. In addition to these 21 schools, we can also apply for a spot in a public charter school (in a separate lottery).

The process is confusing for Boston residents and incomprehensible for everyone else. First of all, Boston is unique in offering what they call “K-1″–kindergarten for 4-year olds. There are not enough spaces for every child, but if you do get in, you have the opportunity of a free public education for 2-years of kindergarten before starting first grade. It is great that the city can offer that–but because it’s not universal, a lottery is necessary to determine who gets a spot.

K-2 is universal in Boston…but you will find that if you are not already in a school and moving up from K-1, there may be many fewer openings at the school you want…

Let’s stop right there. The school assignment system process begins with a “showcase of schools” and continues thorough the Fall with “preview days” when parents can tour the two dozen schools they might choose from to determine what school is the right fit. It ironically reminds me of my first days at MIT when we went through Residence/Orientation and chose our dorms or pledged fraternities. The feature of choice was a powerful element of beginning to establish an identity and develop a personal connection to the community.

But in Boston, choice subverts community and undermines parental involvement by encouraging a system of year-to-year decisions and an artificial diaspora of children who are bussed from their neighborhoods to innumerable destinations across the city.

But there is good news on the horizon! In the annual State of the City address, Mayor Tom Menino said:

I’m committing tonight that one year from now Boston will have adopted a radically different student assignment plan – one that puts a priority on children attending schools closer to their homes.

Apparently, it’s been said before, but it’s about time we challenge some of the fundamental assumptions that keep this system alive. We should start from a new set of priorities that recognize ameliorating racial strife from the 1970s is no longer a valid reason to subject our children and their parents to a crazy game of chance. But neither is a quasi-free market system of competition and choice.

We are not making education better through this regime of false choice. We test kids who barely speak English and wonder why they don’t pass. We have schools full of special needs kids–and other schools with advanced work programs. We offer minorities the opportunity to be bussed out of Boston to suburban schools and we use taxpayer dollars to fund an increasing number of charter schools that are virtually impossible for existing students to enroll in. Then, we bus kids all over town to make this mess work.

And yet, in many cases, our local schools are doing just fine. I attended a talent show at my daughter’s school last year about a month after we moved to Boston and I was amazed at the enthusiasm and positivity of the students. I’ve gotten to know teachers and the principal and feel more connected to our school than I did when we were going to an elementary school in the suburbs that is one of the top schools in the state. But every year, there is a new lottery for the incoming kids.

I’ve been trying to write this blog post for a couple weeks now…and I keep running into the endless complexity of explaining the system, why I still believe in the school system that my kids are a part of, and yet why I think this approach needs to be radically-scrapped. Many others have complained. Some have been labeled racists for desiring a return to neighborhood schools. Some become so frustrated they feel they have to leave the city and move to the suburbs.

We moved to the city and I want to make things better. I think the challenges of diversity will enrich my kids and my own education as we navigate this system. I believe a classroom of kids from all ranges of background, interests, motivations, and family is more like the real world than a classroom where all are the same and success is scoring the highest grade. In life, credentials do not matter and no one makes your life fulfilling for you. We must constantly deal with a world that is not fair and does not care what our expectations are. We must learn to find the passion in life, find what is interesting, and motivate ourselves always to learn–not just to compete or win approval.

But we ask our kids to navigate this mess in a sea of instability. Schools do not serve the community because they are not of the community. We need to find a way to make our urban schools grounded in community before we can build them up to the standards we would like for all.

I have a suggestion for implementing the radical reform Menino promises. Eliminate choice.

Take away the fundamental assumption of the lottery process–that parents have a right to choose their kid’s schools–but replace it with a commitment to ensuring that kids are guaranteed the right to attend a school close to their homes. Allow exceptions for special cases, but limit those cases to justifiable situations.

How would this work? I would start by simplifying the registration process and moving it to later in the year. Instead of having a month-long period starting in January where parents submit preferences, there is a deadline in the Spring for parents to submit their intent to enroll and prove residency.

Then, in an initial assignment round, kids would be assigned to the nearest available elementary school until 90% of the seats in that school were full. Existing data could be used to model the impact of this on the most recent group of enrollees to determine what a neighborhood map would look like. Re-running the assignment at higher percentages would generate multiple possibilities for families.

This system would not result in a “boundary-based” school district plan, but a probability map. If you live half way between the Sumner and the Bates, then you would know that you have a probability of attending either school or the Conley (also nearby)–depending one whoever else is applying this year. You have zero probability of attending the Lyndon or the Trotter however.

In my example, I held out 10% of the seats in each school…that is to allow some degree of adjustment. Parents receive an initial assignment and may accept it or apply for discretionary transfer in the next round. So, we receive a notice that our son is assigned to the Sumner, but is also eligible for the Bates or Mozart. We can return the form asking to transfer to the Bates. When the next deadline arrives, all the parents who resubmitted are preferentially-reassigned and the enrollments are adjusted to 100% of available seats.

This modified lottery is not just an effort to preserve some choice, but recognizes the reality that enrollments are not stable. Apparently, in some schools in Boston, they do not know who will be in the classroom until a few weeks into September when kids actually show up. I think a modified, limited choice approach to assignments could help that uncertainty sort out without resort to waiting lists and the current system of cascading re-assignments.

Now there are a million other issues…what about the city charter schools? What about METCO? What about how we have advanced work classes at some schools which result in enrollment shifts from 3rd grade to 4th grade? What about the K-8 schools and the Roslindale K-8 “pathway” to the Irving Middle School? What about the fact that K-1 is not guaranteed? What about schools that are fully integrating special needs kids vs schools that are not? We can’t solve all the issues at once! We cannot scramble the current enrollments either. So this whole approach needs to be limited to one cohort of students to begin. As Mayor Menino promised, “one year from now Boston will have adopted a radically different student assignment plan – one that puts a priority on children attending schools closer to their homes.”–so let’s limit the solution to one year from now, not try to change everything at once.

I’m afraid the only solutions we’ll see are tweaks to the current model–increasing the walk-zone priority percentage or increasing the number of school assignment zones to limit, but not eliminate choice. “Radical” is necessary to break from the incremental and unsatisfying creep away from the 1970s.

Our choice is a weak one at best. Because there are no guarantees, the “choice” parents currently have in the process is often a false one. Sure, you can choose to list the most popular school as your top choice, but you could just as well end up in a school across town that you know nothing about. I would trade meaningless choice for the right of my children to attend a nearby school.

We bought a house in Rozzie, and we finally move this Friday. It was not an easy choice to leave the town of Westwood where I’ve been active in several town boards, developed many friendships, and started our oldest daughter in the school system. (And authored the Westwood Blog for the past 3 years.) It was not easy to move past the neighboring town of Dedham either, where we also have many friends and probably would have purchased a house had it not gone under agreement the day we scheduled to go look at it. But I am excited about where we are moving and am thrilled we decided to do it.

It shouldn’t be a surprise we’d be attracted to really living in Boston (Roslindale is a neighborhood of Boston) for anyone who has followed the urbanism thread of this blog. I was excited about the Westwood Station project because it promised to bring some urban advantages to our community. I created a town board to promote active transportation–walking and cycling–because I believed we could really enhance the community by connecting our village centers and making it easier for more people to get out on the street. I commuted to work in Boston on my bike (14 miles or so) and via the train not only because I didn’t want to sit in traffic or park my car, but because it made me feel more like I was a part of the city that has called me to come home ever since I was a college student at MIT in the 1980s.

But what about the schools? It was our biggest concern. I found a blog, started by a Roslindale parent, called Braving the Lottery, which details her journey through enrolling her kids in the Boston Public Schools. My daughter is eligible to attend any one of more than a dozen elementary schools but transferring mid-year, there will not really be any choice or lottery. We submitted a list of our preferences and we’ll see what we get–hopefully later today or tomorrow.

I’m optimistic we will be happy as long as we get one of the schools we know have openings. Because class size is limited by law, the popular choices are full and have wait lists from the last lottery process earlier this year. But families do move (the people who sold us their house moved to Dedham) and parents don’t necessarily yank their kids from one school to another this late in the year, so it’s not necessarily an automatic as to where we will be assigned. Once we get in to a school, we hope that our sibling priority will be able to pull along the other kids who are currently in preschool.

Over on Westwood Blog, I recently noted how Westwood was featured by Great Schools.org as one of the top 5 school systems in the country. When you look up my daughter’s current school, it’s a ’10′ on a 1-10 scale–based largely on the fact that everyone passes the standardized tests. And we know from our own experience that it’s a great community school for many reasons other than just the test scores: parents are active, involved, and engaged and teachers and the principal are great.

Where we are moving…no 10s. But those numbers are all about the pass rates for standardized tests. We talked to parents and attended meetings to learn about our potential schools and heard mostly positive stories–and a great deal of energy from parents, teachers, and administrators who are working hard to improve their schools. The lottery does cause the schools to compete and attempt to differentiate themselves. In the end, we concluded 1) we will need to be heavily involved in our kids education and 2) it’s more about the specific teacher and classroom year-to-year.

I see some advantage to engaging in system that is trying to improve. When everything is already great, sometimes we miss the opportunity to see how our efforts contribute to positive change. Learning is more than just passing tests–I think it’s also about an experience of growing and adapting. I think we have set ourselves up for many of those opportunities in the coming years.

Several years ago, we discovered the First Church and Parish in Dedham. When we first attended, we were concerned that although the people were welcoming and the community was obviously strong, we weren’t sure if there was a critical mass of young families like us. We wanted our kids to be a part of a church community with other kids. But in the course of only a few years, the church has grown dramatically in this respect. Every Sunday, I am amazed at how many kids go to the front for the “story for all ages” and then depart to their classes–leaving the church back at about the capacity it was when we first attended.

Yesterday was the annual Fall Fair. It’s still not a big fancy production but I’m happy about that. Here’s a video of my daughter decorating her caramel apple.

The video is only 30 seconds long, and I know a video like that for non-parents (and maybe anyone not me) can kind of seem like forever, but as I was standing there watching her decorate her apple, it struck me how “right-sized” this community has become. I’ve been to plenty of seasonal family events and a more typical situation is a line of kids and perhaps pushy parents trying to get their turn at whatever is up next. We don’t have that vibe here. Kids had fun in the “bouncy house” and petted the barn babies. There was face-painting and various other activities that we’ve become familiar with as parents of 6/4/2-year olds. But no rush, no line, no problem.

It’s a tough balance…of course if there is not a critical mass of people, then things can be, well, rather lame, and unviable. And then if the “hidden gem” becomes popular, you have lines of people coming to check it out and crowd out the folks who built it up. But I think this community is in a good place now and growth means more people to help and more capacity to create good experiences and connections.

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 with a better plan. We are starting by posting this:

What question would you ask Congressional candidates Stephen Lynch and Mac D’Alessandro to answer if you had the chance? The editors of community web sites from Milton (02186 MyTownMatters), Dedham (MyDedham), and Westwood (Our Westwood) are inviting you to submit your questions as comments below from now until August 31. We will select 10 questions and submit those to both campaigns, then publish their responses online before the September 14 Democratic Primary.

If you are a constituent, go to one of our sites to submit your questions.

I wish I had a time machine to go back about a month because I really think a regional effort like this could make a difference in how we debate issues. I wish I had time to find more sites in the neighboring communities and talk to more people. But we’ll start with our 3 towns and see where it goes…

Over at Our Westwood (http://westwoodblog.org) I recently expressed my frustration that candidates in the upcoming September 14 primary for U.S. Congress and State Senate were unlikely to debate. I have a proposal for doing this online that will serve our communities, respect the candidates and voters, and increase participation and interest in the political process.

This needs to be local–sponsored and endorsed by real people with a stake in their communities. I’ve contacted the people I know in the area who run community sites like Our Westwood, and I am assembling a coalition to invite the candidates to participate. We will take on the responsibility of moderating and facilitating the public participation to avoid having the debate hijacked by extremists and “trolls.”

I think the format should be a hybrid of structure and openness. The debate will consist of three phases:

Phase 1: Developing Questions

During the last week of August, we will use “crowdsourcing” technology like IdeaScale to collect suggestions for questions and then vote the best questions to the top of the list. This phase will be “wide open” to anyone with an idea–i.e. no complicated registration, no verification of identity, anonymous participation OK. Then, our organizing committee will select 5 questions from residents to form the basis of the debate. If we can manage video interviews with those people, we’ll go out and record their questions directly using a Flip video camera.

Phase 2: Candidate Responses

We will set up a content management system with a structured commenting policy:

The questions will be posted by the debate moderator one per day at 9am. The candidates will have a window of 4 hours (the response period) before any response is published. This allows each candidate to respond but does not allow them to see their opponent’s response first. No public commentary is allowed yet.

After the initial responses are published (1pm), an additional window of 4 hours will be provided (the rebuttal period) during which candidates can respond to what their opponent said. At 5pm, the rebuttals are both posted and then the issue is open to public commentary.

Phase 3: Public Commentary

Public commentary will be available to users who register and provide basic identifying information and agree to a code of conduct. First name and town will be publicly displayed, but the person must also provide a last name, phone number, and email address for potential verification by the debate organizers. Anonymous comments will not be published. Comments can be text or video submissions, display a photo of the user if desired, etc.

If the candidates wish to continue participating, they may add their own comments. The candidate accounts will be officially verified and highlighted–i.e. no impostors allowed.

5 Days in September

I envision the debate cycle as consisting of a total of 5 questions–one per day–starting Labor Day, September 6. The public comment on question 1 will overlap with the response and rebuttal periods of subsequent questions, but I think it will be less complicated than that sounds.

What is needed?

Candidates – What I am suggesting here is a much more effective venue for communicating with voters than television, radio or a town meeting. We really need the people (see below) but if we make this work, I think it’s a venue of tens of thousands who will be able to really get a sense for why and how they should vote. I have not formally invited the candidates yet but I’d like to do this for our local Democratic primaries for State Senate and the 9th Congressional District of Massachusetts. With what we learn from this…perhaps we can cover more elections in the future.

People – I’m reaching out to bloggers and activists across the region because ultimately, we need to drive people to this. We can all post our little “you should vote” public service announcements, but I think a more effective way to stimulate civic participation would be to send people to a site where they can actually get useful information to help them make a decision about the primary. Also, I think the discussion itself will create interest and make it more likely people will vote.

Technology – There is definitely a big technology element to this project and although I can spec it out and could probably build it–I could really use help from a Drupal or WordPress guru who could create the site that powers this. Managing it is going to be “hands-on” so I don’t need a bulletproof fully automated software application here, but I need someone who really knows how to set up these kinds of user profiles and custom workflow rules in a way that is super easy for participants to use. I want an open source solution here–something you would be willing to describe to others–not some proprietary system or custom-coded application. This is something that should be possible to create in a day or less. If it takes longer than that, you are over-optimizing.

Draft

I’ve sent a few emails and talked to a few people–now I’m blogging for feedback. I’m open to suggestions and modification by anyone willing to help pull this off.

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 daily. A few people have asked me what does this mean for my site, WestwoodBlog.org?

The short answer is that is a source of more news and that’s good. Paul Gillin analyzes the Pew Research Center’s report on the differing priorities of bloggers and journalists and observes how bloggers need the mainstream media to provide source material for discussion. Although I have probably done more “original reporting” on my site than a typical blog, my goal has always been to stir up conversation and share information–not to be a reporter or investigative journalist. The site is a service for residents–to empower them to post their own news.

I think that local connection to the community is what is missing in most news coverage. You can send a reporter to every meeting of every board and commission, but when you don’t live in the community, you don’t see or hear what people are talking about and you don’t develop a sense of what matters. The news reporters can find stories–and tease out the facts and events or what is going on, but there is no feedback. Comments on news stories are not really participation because the story has already been written. Conversations on blogs are ongoing discussions. Blog posts in the form of citizen journalism can be biased–but that makes them better in some ways because they represent not what an outsider observed, but what a resident experienced.

Blogs and news, proceeding independently, are unsatisfying. The blogs can’t cover everything and can degenerate into opinionated diatribes. News stories can miss the context and move on to the next story. But together, these forms of media can create a “news ecosystem” that is mutually supportive.

A number of citizen contributions on my blog have led to news stories. In one case a resident blogged about the preservation of a school building–and then, a few days later, was interviewed and quoted in the newspaper. Another posted an article about a school music program being cancelled due to budget cuts–and again, ended up quoted in a mainstream news story. In many cases, I post articles that direct people to more specific stories in the media or to resources on the town website. As content contributors and community participants we share in the value not of any one source of news and information, but in the evolving ability to participate through this medium.

Yesterday, New Jersey hyper local blog Baristanet announced it was expanding to cover three additional towns where the New York Times has withdrawn from the local print publication market. It will be interesting to see how Maplewood Patch and Baristanet compete, coexist or cooperate. But whatever the outcome…print left town.

I think the best outcome here will be a sort of “confederation” of content. I wish I had the time and resources to create something like Baristanet–to pull together the independent voices of writers and residents not only in Westwood, but in Dedham, Norwood, Walpole, Milton, Canton–something I would call “Neponset News.” I think several sites like this could be destination sites–like Universal Hub in Boston–where people start–and then find what matters to them via links to source material (news) and community perspective (blogs). But I need to find a job.

Most of the hyper local news initiatives like Placeblogger and Outside.in start from a “tell me where you are” perspective. I will never go to some generic web site and enter my zip code as a means to find out what is going on in my community. I am unimpressed by technology-driven sites that just pull a bunch of localized data into one place. I am disappointed in sites that crank out a templated advertising vehicle for every town. But if regional hyper local sites can develop clear, localized brand identity–they can become destination sites that informally mediate the discussion of what matters in the community.

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 push more towns to an electronic–and shareable–approach that increases the practical transparency of government by making data transmittable. The major changes in law are summarized on Mass.Gov–with the biggest being how enforcement has been moved from local District Attorneys to the AGs office. The Town of Littleton also has a good summary with links to more resources. The substantial changes of note to local boards and commissions are:

Notice must include agenda – Notice of public meetings must be posted 48-hours prior to the meeting, excluding weekends. So, if the Board of Selectmen wants to meet Monday night at 7:30pm, they must post the notice no later than 7:30pm on Thursday night. Previously, Saturday night was “good enough.” Now there is also a new requirement that this notice include “a listing of topics that the chair reasonably anticipates will be discussed at the meeting.” That is a small, but significant change since most meetings are currently posted without agendas–or agendas are posted the day of the meeting if at all. I’m guilty of this omission myself–it’s not part of a vast conspiracy to hide the truth or anything, just lack of advance planning.

This is huge progress. Attending town board and commission meetings is a low probability exercise in irrelevance since most members of the general public will have no idea what is going to be discussed and no context to contribute in a meaningful manner. Under the new law, residents will learn, by Thursday night, what topics the Selectmen will be discussing on Monday.

All documents become part of the record – Section 22 of the new law specifies that meeting minutes include “the date, time and place, the members present or absent, a summary of the discussions on each subject, a list of documents and other exhibits used at the meeting, the decisions made and the actions taken at each meeting, including the record of all votes.” Subsection (e) goes on to say, “The minutes of any open session, the notes, recordings or other materials used in the preparation of such minutes and all documents and exhibits used at the session, shall be public records in their entirety and not exempt from disclosure…[references to employment contracts, etc. omitted]”

Speaking from the perspective of a town advisory board chairman, this is a burdensome requirement, but it fills a huge gap for the citizen seeking to understand what happened at a meeting. Every meeting of our Board of Selectmen is punctuated by the three members referring to materials contained in large binders compiled by town staff prior to the meeting. Sometimes a Selectman will make a point of “reading into the record,” if there is a letter of commendation or something. Now, ALL that material is a public record. Ideally this information should be made available to the public as soon as it is distributed to the members of the committee. I do not see language in the law that anticipates such pre-emptive publication, but the knowledge that whatever is prepared will become a public record should remove objections to its early disclosure.

I contacted our Board of Selectmen and learned 1) we are already in compliance; having saved 23 years worth of those packets for posterity and 2) no one has ever requested to look at them.

Remote participation is possible – One of our Selectmen was injured last winter but, thanks to a special agreement worked out in consultation with the District Attorney, was able to continue participating in meetings from his hospital bed. The new law allows the Attorney General to propose regulations that would allow remote participation by members of boards if everyone can hear everyone else and a quorum is physically present. No more excuses to miss meetings–we can Skype you in. This change will not take effect until the regulations have been proposed and approved.

Email usage is clarified – it is still impermissible to use email to develop policy. The valid policy basis for this is that the public can’t see what committee members are talking about when they prepare for a meeting via email. However, the new law spells out a number of specific clarifications to make it clear that emailing agendas, meeting minutes, materials for discussion at the meeting, and for procedural issues–is permitted.

Finally, I believe the centralization of administration makes it much more likely this law will be able to adapt to the changing needs of communities. When I inquired about how much of my committee work could be done online, I had some guidance from the town based on the AGs opinion…but ultimately I would need to call the Norfolk County DA for a ruling. I think they are busy prosecuting real criminals. Now the AG has created a Division of Open Government…I’ll have to send them a link to my article on wikis…

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 room in the basement of Town Hall.

The signal below is a taste of what you will see when we do go live. It is very much a work in progress and may not always be on, but we wanted to get something up and running and start to gather feedback–and demonstrate the progress we are making.

The truly clever idea our Director, Greg Moberg, came up with–after we successfully did a live webcast of a town meeting–was to take the output from our video server and use it as an input to the equipment (a NewTek Tricaster) we had used to webcast. We created a free account on Ustream and configured it to livecast directly from the Tricaster. This allows us to operate all the equipment in the basement as if we were live…and then just route it to the web. One day, we swap cables and this signal will be broadcast on the local cable channels too.

In the meantime, we have a sort of alpha soft-launch. We can share the site with people and begin to develop our schedule, programming calendar and start generating interest in the community. We have a long way to go–if you watch the channel now you mostly see canned content from the video server vendor–but we will soon be broadcasting the public meetings we have taped.

This past weekend at the Burlington, VT ECHO Center, I saw this curious sign:

Once I downloaded the app reader described on the sign and pointed my iPhone camera at the honeycomb pattern, the software decoded that pattern into a web address and started playing a video about a tree planting with the Missisquoi River Basin Association in Highgate, VT. (It works off the image displayed here on your screen too–try it out!)

Watching the video on an iphone while standing in front of a museum display case was a bit awkward (better with earphones), but because I took a photo of it, I was able to access it later. That is much easier than bookmarking a URL or keeping track of a paper brochure.

It worked smoothly–the app install on my iphone went quickly and then it was just as easy as snapping a photo. The app viewfinder displays a frame that turns green as soon as it recognizes the pattern. Then, it sends you straight to YouTube.

My mind started racing. The code/patterns are free and easy to create on the BeeTagg web site. The process is very similar to a URL shortening service like bit.ly–just go straight to the BeeTagg Generator, enter a url and even add your own logo…then save the resulting jpeg image:

Then post that up on a billboard, right? It makes more sense than putting long web addresses on billboards or reading them over the radio.

But I was thinking of other applications–local content for my community. It’s fun to embed user-generated content like YouTube videos into a blog post, but how do you get people to the blog in the first place? I’ve written travelogues like this bike trip in France report but what if I could leave posters with codes on them behind at stops along the way for future travelers to watch?

I could design a walking tour of the historic district of a town with these codes posted at the various stops. How hard would it be to go around town with a Flip video camera, record short narrations by local people who grew up here, then print out some laminated signs to post? A project like that could be done in an afternoon and then it would be a free resource for the community.

How about a scavenger hunt? Find the BeeTagg and watch the video that leads you to the next clue.

How about tutorials and assembly instructions? Scan the code on the IKEA box and watch someone put the dresser together. Many times. Repeat. Try again. Recharge the phone. Better idea: snap a photo in the store, then go home and launch the product page in your web browser where you can visualize it in the room, then click a button to order.

What makes this revolutionary is that it shortcuts the cumbersome process of remembering and typing a web address into a browser. In the same way that bit.ly and tinyurl made it possible to quickly share links on Twitter, these BeeTagg codes can take links off the computer and into the physical world where a person can simply snap a photo.

Real estate listings. Forget about those “talking house” signs that ask you to sit in your car and listen to the am radio for a narrated Realtor pitch. Just scan the code off the for sale sign, go home, and load up the listing. Like this:

The potential applications are endless…and liberating because they can be done by people for free without complicated software. Having a Smart Phone with a camera IS a bit of a barrier, but for now, this is a low to no cost technology that might connect a few more people to their communities through a clever use of technology.

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 National Bike Summit.

Perhaps it is ironic that I follow an angry post about generationally-irresponsible recovery spending with a call to borrow more money against the future, but there is a big difference between investing to leave something for the next generation vs spending money to help the current generation cover the mistakes of the present.

The Active Community Transportation Act would make grant money available to communities for investments in infrastructure that promote walking and biking.

I want to keep this post positive, but I cannot ignore the sense that many people feel biking and walking are recreational activities and should therefore be lower priority. But in fact, because the impact of small investments here can be so large, they should be a higher priority.

The types of projects grant money like this could support could include components as small as improved crosswalks. For about $10,000, we could install a solar-powered pushbutton-activated flashing light and repaint a crosswalk so that dozens of kids and their parents would feel safe walking to school. We could deploy several of these across a busy, wide stretch of road that serves to divide part of our community and effectively “knit” the town together and reduce reliance on car trips. We could make it easier for people to choose to ride the commuter rail and walk to church by bringing the focus down to the sidewalks and streets and investing is small things that pull our communities together.

The benefits are not just aesthetic. We have a childhood obesity epidemic to combat. We have a national health crisis that, regardless of what insurance companies may or may not be doing, is driving the cost of health care higher and higher. We have recurring cycles of foreign oil dependency and occasional bouts of awareness with global warming, carbon emissions, and general sustainability. Do more than buy a Prius. Thank about ways to change the way we live to be more sustainable and more responsible to the future and then ask what stands in the way?

Active Transportation is a path through the obstacles. It’s a part of the solution that, unlike many government projects, is more efficient and has “externality benefits” rather than costs.

It’s efficient because this kind of grant program encourages community-based action. Our local advisory committee would gather information, talk to our neighbors, participate in the grant application process and assist in project managing and monitoring the implementation. The overall grants will be designed to support networks of improvements costing $5 to 15 million each.

“Externality benefits” are the intangible things like improving the strength of a community. It would be impossible to measure the economic impact on house prices down to such a micro level, but I would bet that over time, the increase in walking and perception of safety across a divisive roadway would translate into higher home values. I know we moved from one house because the street was busy and didn’t make an offer an another because it was “on the other side” of the road that we’d have to cross to get to school. Not everyone will share these valuations…but when small projects like these are happening all over the country, the sum effect has to be a net gain.

Will there be boondoggles and “bike paths to nowhwere?” Perhaps. But at least then we can start talking about the best way to do things. How many bike paths could have been built with the money that was used to make it possible for me to drive to the airport in 30 minutes instead of 45? I’m guessing a few hundred thousand.

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 of an organized plan.

Such is always the case, unless a community has a blank canvas upon which to write…and millions of dollars of funding…and popular support for centralized design and planning of an urban utopia. Expect that confluence of opportunity sometime in the next century. In the meantime, improvements are opportunistic: a bike lane here, an updated intersection there…a new development bringing potentially more problems but at least some cash to manage solutions. When those micro-opportunties happen…advocates need to be ready to propose improvements, but these improvements should be seen NOT as accomodations for interest groups, but as opportunities to develop “complete streets” – recognizing that…

The streets of our cities and towns are an important part of the livability of our communities. They ought to be for everyone, whether young or old, motorist or bicyclist, walker or wheelchair user, bus rider or shopkeeper. But too many of our streets are designed only for speeding cars, or worse, creeping traffic jams.–National Complete Streets Coalition

Increasingly, communities are adopting policies to incorporate this new kind of paradigm. Even as they do so, however, they are not immune to the misunderstandings of those who view these measures as expensive luxuries that detract from “fixing potholes.” What opponents fail to realize is that today’s potholes were yesterday’s bogs and other “cow obstacles.”

Complete Streets is not about a master plan to impose a new design on cities, but an effort to develop a shared use strategy that recognizes how our needs are changing. We need safer ways for active transportation to be supported in our communities. Partly, it is “aspirational”–we do want to encourage more walking and biking–but successful change looks for real needs: where are people currently trying to walk and bike? It can never be about “build it and they will come,” it has to be “thank goodness they finally did something about that bridge!”

Adopting a Complete Streets strategy means coming together as a community to adopt a policy that commits to a vision of the future where the needs of all users are considered. It provides a reference point for “why do we want to do this?” and “why are we doing this?” so that changes/improvements are not seen as accommodations or concessions to appease a minority of outlier users, but as necessary steps towards ensuring a better future for all.

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 down the last remnant sometime in the following spring. Having learned my lesson, I am happy to see a giant bag full of candy in the kitchen now awaiting Saturday night.

Thousands of empty calories await as we prepare to march our children around the neighborhood in this annual ritual of excess. Given the explosion of childhood obesity in America, am I worried? Not really.

I’ve been following a number of stories in the past few weeks connecting the obesity crisis in America to health care. CBS’s Sunday Morning devoted an entire show to “Size Matters.” A radio program on NPR last week devoted an hour to a discussion of Overweight America. The radio show considered, in particular the question of how we advocate for weight loss without “blaming” overweight people.

We focus far too much on symptoms of a problem that has much deeper roots than can be addressed directly. For solutions, we leap to radical and drastic methods like surgery or the search for medications that will fix us. We guilt each other into diets or pursuing unpleasant exercise routines we hate…and then we watch the food we eat selectively–seizing on the most minute reports of the bad or goodness of a particular food, while oblivious to a landscape of excess that surrounds us.

But I digress. The folks at Zillow, where you can look up the value of your neighbor’s house, have created a Trick or Treat Housing Index for Seattle (their company location) neighborhoods. It’s basically a list of affluent, walkable neighborhoods–big surprise–but what I find interesting is the walkable connection.

A 30-minute walk once a year with your kids is not going to compensate for eating thousands of calories in a glorious choco-fest of indulgence this weekend, but perhaps living in a place where this traditional activity is easy will. 20-minutes of walking to a train and from the station to work everyday does make a difference. Deciding, several times per week, that it would be enjoyable to go for a walk around the neighborhood adds up to many miles of exercise. Hopping on a bike with a kid in the bike seat to go to the library occasionally…it all adds up to an active lifestyle that is foreign to many Americans who have become isolated in car-dependent housing developments.

So I look forward to enjoying Halloween and the “fruits of our labor,” so to speak, with no guilt or worry. We will eat crap and be happy. We will join our neighbors in this annual tradition that fills our side streets with parents and children walking from door to door, meeting each other, and collecting candy. It’s a great American tradition, but what is great about it is not just getting the candy but the whole experience that is fundamentally-rooted in an active, community-engaged lifestyle that reminds us of how simple, safe–and relatively healthy–our lives were before we over-thought and over-did everthing.

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 principal virtue. I have experimented with other online tools to help improve communication and/or organize things before, with mixed results:

• The WestwoodWiki went nowhere–I think mainly because it requires a great deal of participation, awareness, and faith that one’s investment of time will be meaningful. A wiki is a website anyone can edit–allowing group collaboration in drafting documents, etc.–and although I believe it can be a great tool to foster civic engagement, and there are great examples of this in larger cities like Melbourne, Australia or Davis, California, it is hard to get the ball rolling, so to speak.
• WestwoodBlog has been successful, but inconsistent. It totally depends on my effort to stir up news and events and is most valuable when there are “hot” issues in town. If I post something about Westwood Station–the controversial development project that is now stalled due to the economic slowdown–it generates a ton of activity. If I encourage and solicit candidates for Town Election to post their ideas, this generates some commentary. And the topic I created for Walkable Westwood, has been a good place for me to publicize our efforts on Ped/Bike Safety…but the blog is a very general purpose, news-oriented site that many read, but few contribute.

The IdeaScale Site has generated 44 ideas and included several hundred people participating by voting those ideas up or down.

• I seeded the site with many of the ideas our group had already been talking about. This gave us a place to document and discuss those ideas. We had talked about circulating spreadsheets and drafting a group report, but I found publishing the ideas moved us forward more effectively.
• The site was relatively easy to use. I had a few reports of difficulty…and very few people went to the trouble of creating a login account–but as anonymous, guest users, they were able to quickly submit ideas and comments (60-plus comments so far).
• The “discussion” has stayed on track. On the blog, things can go off on tangents since there is no overall purpose, but on the IdeaScale site, it is so focused on a single purpose, I think this has avoided some of the community management problems that could result from just posting a blog item and asking for feedback.

The big question is “what next?” I believe our committee has had great discussions so far and is building an increased awareness of active transporation issues in Town, but I want us to start creating some “small victories”–little accomplishments that demonstrate we are putting ideas to work.

At our last meeting, we began to work through the ideas submitted. I exported the ideas into an Excel spreadsheet and, based on suggestions from other members of the group, created scoring columns for urgency, population impact, and relative effort–summing a 3-point scale so that when addedd together, each idea received a score ranging from 3 to 9. Then, we can sort the ideas and identify the most urgent (immediate safety issues) ideas affecting the largest number of people with the fewest obstacles to implementation as projects we should form subcommittees or working groups to address.

We began by sorting the ideas by their IdeaScale vote score and then working down through the list. The process of discussion itself was valuable–given this framework for approaching it. I projected the spreadsheet on a wall from my laptop and edited it in real-time. For each idea, I clicked on the hyperlink from the spreadsheet to a web browser that allowed us to read the full idea submitted and see the comments. In another browser window, we used google maps to view satellite imagery of the specific locations involved.

As a group, we then reached a consensus on the 3 ratings for each item. Unfortunately, our meeting was already running very late, so we only managed to review the first ten ideas–but along the way we have already begun to identify some projects and priorities and talk about solutions with people in the room who can make a difference–e.g. the Town Engineer, Safety Officer, Town Planner, Planning Board members, PTA representatives, DPW representatives, and other interested people. At our previous meetings, we have had a lot of discussion, but I believe this more structured approach is leading us towards a more methodical review of ideas.

It’s early. This was just one meeting and as it approached 10pm, I was torn between the desire to get things done versus the reality that everyone needed to get home to their families. It was not a simple, “that’s a 1, this is a 3,” kind of discussion as people have many perspectives on each idea and it is incredibly valuable to hear that input as a group. But we began to get into a rhythm of discussion and then a conclusion that, ok, that sounds like it affects the whole town…or, ok that will require work, but it is not impossible…”

I’ll report more as we progress.

Last Wednesday, Westwood schools postponed their participation in International Walk to School day due to a torrential downpour. This morning, we await the dawn to melt the first frost of the season, as the thermometer at my house reads 34 degrees and the Norwood airport reports 28. But clear skies should make this a spectacular fall day.

Meanwhile, the concerned parents and bureacrats in Saratoga have eeked at bit closer to permitting kids to ride bikes to school at Maple Avenue Middle School. The Board of Education did in fact strike down the 1994 policy forbidding bike riding, but transferred authority to the local school principal to determine whether it was safe or not. Advocates for change aren’t thrilled–it simply transfers the issue to the local school where administrators may continue to say it is not safe, nothing has changed, etc. But I think this is a victory as it opens the door to a local discussion and changes the conversation from “bike riding will not be tolerated” to “how can we make this school safe?”

The reality is that the perception of bike riding as an unsafe activity persists no matter what official policy is adopted. Parents are not going to encourage/allow their kids to ride bikes if they feel it is unsafe. Adults will not bike commute to work if they fear for their lives. Those who extol the virtues of active transportation must find solutions to real and perceived dangers through a combination of what are described as the 4 E’s of planning: Education, Engineering, Enforcement, and Encouragement. Additionally, a 5th E, Evaluation, is critical to success of Safe Routes to Schools programs as it “closes the loop” on making sure great ideas, as they are implemented, actually work.

These success stories from communities that have improved their walkability illustrate the key theme of inclusion. Change must “bottom up,” it cannot be imposed from above or simply “fixed” by changing a law or building a sidewalk. How we get there is vitally important to success.

Measuring a baseline is the first step towards assessing and ultimately achieving improvements to walkability. Walk Score has generated a ton of news lately–winning a Rockefeller Grant to improve their service, providing a quantitative basis for the CEOs for Cities study that illustrated a link between walkability and housing prices and providing a measuring stick for communities to compare themselves to one another. A quick lookup of our new home versus our old one confirms what I already knew: a 12% increase in walkability, although it feels MUCH greater.

Walk Score is imprecise–it depends on searching google maps for known points of interest like grocery stores and other amenities. But it gives us some relative basis for comparison and can prompt a discussion of what factors go into generating a higher score. Ultimately, when the Walk Score shows up in real estate listings, it becomes a “marketing tool,” and that’s not bad–it helps quantify the often vague assertions in home listings of “walk to shops, parks, trails” which could mean there is a patch of green grass somewhere withing 2 miles of a house. It helps get people talking specifics and reinforces the idea that walkability is a valuable topic.

I’m also impressed by what the League of Illinois Bicyclists has done in compiling a “Complete Streets” audit of road construction projects. They evaluated 46 recent Chicago area road projects for pedestrian and bicyclist safety and generated a 100-point scale that combines ratings for ped, bike, crossing and context to arrive at a “complete” score for the project. That study, published today, was cited by the Chicago Tribune to support their conclusion that “the best streets are built by those who will use them.” Projects administered by the state department of transportation scored lowest, while locally-planned and originated projects scored highest. Big surprise: central planning fails to serve the needs of the community.

These are two examples of data-driven analysis–and how it can influence the public debate. As we talk to our neighbors, we hear so many ideas and so many observations…but it is hard to get from talk to action. The big “deal breaker” of course is money–and I’d love to hear how cash-strapped communities have come up with funds to pay for projects. The short answer is that it is not a short process. There are grant programs that take time. The planning takes time and resources of busy people. At every step, there are questions of impossibility: how could we ever afford that?! The residents will not support it. Someone will object…whatever. These kinds of quantiative tools–combined with a more qualitative–quality of life–perspective and vision for the future are the best recipe for progress…

Over at WestwoodBlog, I write about my vision for increased walking and biking in Westwood. I include the following list of resources that are great for anyone looking to improve pedestrian and bicycle transportation:

• Dan Burden’s Walkable Communities is a website with tons of articles about this topic. Walkability is not just for cities or small towns–and it is part of a whole sustainability movement. I could go on…but Dan does it better.
• Cambridge-based Livable Streets sends out a newsletter that compiles links to interesting articles on many transportation issues in the Boston area and nationally. They also hosts events such as this upcoming talk about how residents of Jamaica Plain and Roxbury fought back the big highway projects of the 60s to save their communities.
• walkBoston is not just about Boston; this resource hub is helping facilitate efforts in 58 communities across Massachusetts. walkBoston piloted the first Safe Routes to School program in 2000.

These are just a few resources to get people started thinking about improving the walkability of their communities. Here is a link to the topic thread of my blog posts on Walkable Westwood.

There is a great article in the Globe today about the Charles River Wheelmen and their Saturday Morning Fitness Ride in Needham. The weekly ride has proceeded uninterrupted for 617 weekends, including a few during blizzard conditions.

When we first moved back to Massachusetts from California in 2002, we lived in Needham. Every Saturday morning, around 815am, I would suddenly see a brightly-colored peloton of riders turn down South Street. That inspired me to want to join. My wife and I had mountain bikes in California, but they weighed a ton and we never really got into it. But we went out and bought a pair of hybrid bikes and began riding.

The roads in certain areas of Massachusetts are inconspicuously marked with “arrows” signifying informal bike routes. The Saturday fitness ride is a simple inverted “T” pointing the direction of the ride and indicating where to turn. The northwest suburbs around Concord are serious cycling country as you will find intersections with four or more different symbols painted on the side of the road. Follow these arrows and they will take you on bike loops of 30-50 miles or more. While we found it difficult to make it to the start of organized group rides, we made an adventure out of going to the start of these rides and following the arrows.

The great thing about cycling in Massachusetts is how green the countryside is. Out in the suburbs, just past Route 128, there are miles and miles of roads past farms, fields, and conservation land, and passing through the many classic New England town commons. Ice cream shops make a great resting point. And occasionally you meet up with other cyclists.

As we had kids, we invested in bike trailers and bike seats to take the kids along for the ride. With three kids now, it is harder, but someday soon, they will be ready to start riding their own bikes!

The reason I say the Saturday Morning riders changed my life is that it led me to start a more active lifestyle. The irony is that I have never actually made it to that ride; I was always too late and now, I would have to ride over from Westwood (and leave my wife with 3 kids for hours!) But as we rode the beautiful country roads of Needham, Dover, Sherborn, Wellesley–and took trips out to Concord/Acton/Boxborough, we found something we loved doing that also made us healthier. I was 210 lb when we left California; I’m 179 now. I had been a smoker for years, but stayed quit and have no desire to go back. When it got too cold for me to ride, I started running and, because I was fitter to begin with, enjoyed it and started running marathons.

Another aspect of cycling is harder to quantify–it is the greater sense of participation in the environment. When I was working in Boston, I bike commuted whenever possible, and felt a much greater connection to the city because of it. It’s not just about saving gas or being healthy, there is a feeling of connectedness when we ride or run through our communities, taking time to absorb the sights, sounds, smells, and feeling of the environment through different seasons and different conditions.

I have not ridden my bike since my crash a few months ago, but it’s more due to weather, road conditions, and lack of time than injury (I am completely fine!). But I am looking forward to the day when the snow melts and I carve out some time again to return to the road. Until then, I run when I can.

I believe our most fundamental challenge is to restore a sense of community–a building and strengthening of the ties within our neighborhoods and between our communities, especially the neighboring towns where development is uncoordinated and often in opposition to the interests of the next town over. But what can any of us really do about that on a daily basis? It’s not even really my problem–it’s a theoretical observation, an explanation for some frustration about how our society can’t seem to solve big problems like ensuring health care for all citizens or delivering accountability and integrity from our government.

So instead of dreaming up “macro solutions,” perhaps we should consider some basic, day-to-day activities that permeate (or could permeate, with greater participation) civic life: walking and bicycling — what many term “active transportation.”

Boston has begun to improve the cycling infrastructure with new bike lanes, a bikeshare program, and bike commuting promotions like Bike Fridays. We should support, advocate, encourage, and educate about the benefits and practicality of cycling in the city with the dream of transforming participation into something like what the Netherlands experienced over the past 30 years. My ride in from Westwood is a physical way I feel more connected to the city, and I think the more people who share that kind of connection, the better.

For walking, we need to get out of our houses and apartments and onto the streets. Our kids need to feel safe walking to school. We should meet and know our neighbors. Walkable communities are not only safer, they are stronger–and the more people who share this experience, the more a sense of “connected place” will develop.

There are plenty of problems to solve and things to improve in our society, but where do we start? I think a sustained emphasis on encouraging and making safer these modes of active transportation could have systemic benefits to facilitate all other efforts while providing immediate improvements to our quality of life.

Today is International Walk to School Day–but not for some communities where walking and biking have been banned. Two recent news stories are discouraging on many levels, but do not represent the norm as more and more communities are, in fact, adopting alternatives to driving.

• In Saratoga Springs, NY, a woman and her 12-year old son are defying school officials who, on the day before school started, advised all parents that “walking and biking to school would not be tolerated.”
• In Marblehead, MA, the town’s participation in today’s event was cancelled while the school works out “issues related to program administration, safety, and liability.”

These stories are “easy targets,” for walkability advocates and that is my first complaint. The newspaper coverage of the New York story in particular follows the pattern that has become so typical of print-based media’s clumsy attempt to remain relevant in an online world. Controversy-baiting stories leave little room for reasonable discourse as dozens of intemperate commentors react to the story that has set up the town for criticism without providing adequate context to explain why presumably reasonable adults in the community made decisions and now find themselves on the online hot seat. Online media (including this post of mine, to some extent) jump on the bandwagon as the Sarasota Springs story makes it to the Huffington Post, shows up in my LinkedIn Groups, and will undoubtably be a feature item in the many Pedestrian and Bike update email newsletters to which I subscribe.

Maybe the folks in Saratoga Springs ARE idiots, but I suspect there is much more to the story…the policy has been in place since 1994. The parents and administrators are probably focused on 100 other issues and it is unfair-based on the limited information reported-to leap to conspiracy and anti-progressive theories. But it is more fun to do that and it sells papers and generates online traffic. Meanwhile, the parents and community members probably feel angry and misunderstood, but dare not venture into the online argument of anonymous people who know nothing and judge everything.

In Marblehead, the local newspaper, the Marblehead Reporter, does a better job of providing context. Parents, administrators, and school officials are not characterized as opposing walking, but it seems the promotional effort “got ahead of itself.” The town had recently experienced a tragedy when a high school sophmore was hit and killed by a motorist…then, a “Wellness Committee” coincidentally launched a promotion of Walk to School Wednesdays. School Board Chairman Dick Nohelty said that the program was not passed through the proper channels before launching.

The Marblehead story is a cautionary tale for walkability advocates about the importance of inclusion and consensus. These ideas–promoting walking and bike-riding–are not self-evident truths or causes “against” anyone. In fact Marblehead, like my town of Westwood, is fully signed-up for the Safe Routes to Schools program. School Superintendent Paul Dulac noted that he’d like to see that program “more integrated” before a walking campaign takes place.

It should not be controversial to organize a walk to school or choose to ride a bike. But anything involving the safety of children is an extremely touchy issue that, when it makes people uncomfortable for whatever reason, will prompt conservative reactions. I’m learning for our own committee, it is easy to make mistakes and to not include the right person, talk to people the right way, promote an idea prematurely, etc.–but I think it can be managed by maintaining a positive attitude and accepting criticism as a learning process. We can’t lose sight of our overall goals as we navigate the details.

Update: a torrential downpour here has cancelled today’s walk…so perhaps next week, I’ll report on how this went.

According to land use strategist Chris Leinberger, speaking at the Walk21 conference in New York City yesterday and reported on StreetsBlog:

If the American Dream of the Baby Boomers was all about being able to have a car and a house in suburbia, the new American Dream is having the choice between living in drivable suburban places and walkable urban ones.

This summer, CEOs for Cities released a study showing how the walkability of a neighborhood increased the value of homes in that neighborhood. In Charlotte, NC:

Controlling for all other factors including size, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, age, neighborhood income levels, distance from the Central Business District and access to jobs, “if you were to pick up that house in Ashley Park, and place it in more walkable Wilmore, it would increase in value by $34,000 or 12 percent,” Cortright said.

But it is not an “either/or” challenge. Some important distinctions:

• According to Leinberger, “About the the same number of people want to live in a pedestrian-friendly environment as those who want to live in a drivable suburban one…” In other words, there are always many factors at play in the personal preferences of home buyers, but desire for walkability is playing an increasing role. It is not necessary that everyone be walking…but the trend appears to favor walking which is beginning to translate into measurable economic value.
• Most of the discussion so far has been about urban vs suburban–a distinction I find stereotypical and non-applicable in my New England town. Although we are only a dozen miles from the center of Boston, we have two “villages” separated by relatively rural spaces. It’s not quite “farmland,” but the town has set aside conservation land in a community that has evolved over several hundred years–limiting the amount of cul-de-sac sprawl. Getting across town on foot is currently impractical but within these villages, many amenities are accessible on foot. There is a great opportunity here.

We all know the potential advantages of living in an urban village, but most of us in towns and suburbs have weighed those advantages against much higher disadvantages which include the following perceptions:

• urban schools are unsafe and less integrated into the community
• urban living is more expensive
• parking is a nightmare and cars are still a necessity
• personal safety is a concern
• “anonymnity” is less desirable as we “settle down”
• most people still want “space”

I’m just listing those perceptions to illustrate, not to start a debate. Most people like where they live and it is an arrogant and presumptive mission to tell them they should change their attitudes. Instead, we should focus on the opportunities to get the best of both worlds.

We can transform our suburban towns into walkable communities, retaining the strengths and advantages of already desirable communities. When more residents can walk to amenities like shops, parks, schools and small local restaurants, the economic viability of these highly localized services will be strengthened. It does not mean “no more trips to WalMart,” but perhaps a few more customers per week at Cafe Diva or Islington House of Pizza will prompt them to stay open longer or be able to hire another person. Perhaps the foot traffic to these places will result in a new customer walking into the “Ski Shop” or choosing to drop off dry cleaning at the Crown Cleaners instead of using a chain store. As activity increases, perhaps a new business will open…

Over time, one new customer at a time, we grow. While we grow, our children become healthier as they walk to school and our playgrounds, spending less time in front of video games and more time outdoors. We see our neighbors more often and the strength of our community grows. Isolated houses sit on the market for months while starter homes on 10,000 sf lots get multiple offers. It all feeds together into an economic and social revitalization that begins, literally, with a few steps…

I recently reviewed the mission statement of this blog and was struck by how it sums up my own “mission.”

The purpose of this blog is to connect topics in economic development, community development, and new media technology and identify practical actions readers can take to make a difference in improving our society.

I want this to be more than a writing project. I wrote a series of posts about a business plan, a sort of thematic arrangement of content topics I would write about to create a popular blog. That’s not really a business plan–the business plan was just to get more traffic and use google adwords to make some money off clicks. But for that to work, I need hundreds of thousands of visitors…I need the blog to be an end unto itself…and that is not what this is about.

The blog is a tool, a communication medium that has connected me with people who share ideals and passions about improving society. I think there are many of us who are engaged in what Ed Morrison of the I-Open Institute describes as “Strategic Doing.” Some of the things I’m “doing” strategically are to:

• create a blog in Westwood to encourage greater participation of residents in our community
• form a Pedestrian/Bicycle Safetey Committee in Westwood to look for opportunities to make the town more walkable
• get a Community Access Television station up and running in Westwood

Now what does any of this have to do with economic development?

The older, traditional ideas about economic development were about attracting business to locate in town. It was about creating a regulatory climate friendly for business and identifying opportunities–then clearing obstacles. I’m not a practitioner and I cannot claim expertise about the work that continues in that conception of economic development. But I think there is a “New Innovation” growing based on an increasingly engaged and creative Citizen 2.0.

If we can find ways to connect the people who are innovating–problem-solving individuals who care passionately about issues of sustainability and growth–I believe people will be begin to see opportunities to invest. This will become “Enterprise Collaboration.”

Again, what does it mean?

To revitalize a town, you need people, not just business. You need the people who will shop there and the people who will open stores. You need people who live there and care about the community and who choose to make their stake in town, rather than hopping in a car and driving to a job in the city where they can collect a paycheck and go home to sleep and watch TV. You don’t need EVERYONE to do this, but you need a critical mass of a few people who are no longer fighting the good fight alone, but who network with each other, draw strength from each other, and see opportunities they would not have seen alone.

It is the same principle in schools–to make them better, we don’t need more money alone, we need parents to be involved. We need that elusive and powerful force of responsibility and activism that is more evident in its absense in the anonymous suburbs and isolated communities of regions in decline.

What next? What do I do?

That’s the $100,000 question, really. I need to find a way to take these ideas and passions and not only accomplish things, but generate income for me and my family. My website describes one approach of the type of consultative advice I believe I could deliver. But talk is cheap…or, more realistically, just sitting around talking about theory is not something cash strapped town can afford to bankroll.

I could create a non-profit, an association not unlike a chamber of commerce, but more of a business facilitator…then choose projects to tackle and start delivering value to the members of the organization. Perhaps opportunities come out of more of these discussions…perhaps it is as basic as helping civic organizations set up blogs and facebook pages. But I think fundamentally, I need to identify some real, specific needs of the community and find how money is currently being spent towards that need–then propose a less expensive alternative.

Towns, cities, developers, business leaders and activists should seize the communication opportunities available in social media to collaboratively and cooperatively plan their economic futures.

I recently blogged about how Boston World Partnerships is developing a social media approach to facilitate connections between “movers and shakers” in Boston and globally promote the city. I subsequently chatted with Eric Schoenfeld and got a better sense of how they are in the process of preparing to launch what will be a resource and affinity network–like an alumni network for the city. It could connect all those who identify with the creative and intellectual “gravitas” that is Boston in a way that fosters collaboration and cooperation. I see this project as a way to address the criticisms and comparisons of the culture of the past–most notably the Saxenian appraisal of why Silicon Valley beat Boston in the 90s race to be a technology capital.

That’s big picture stuff. But there is a great deal that can be done right now by individual players to improve the lines of communication and thereby make growth more manageable. Social media is all about conversations. In the business context, it is about using new tools like blogs, wikis, facebook, and twitter to converse with customers. But in the local government context it is about resident and business constituencies.

We have a chronic problem with communication. Elected officials feel attacked by activists. Activists feel like the government ignores and disrespects them. Other residents just grow tired of hearing about it all. And developers and businesses are universally suspect as presumably only profit-motivated. Politics is viewed as a game to be played in secret with winners and losers determined by money and connections. In such a cynical world there is no trust. Without trust, there can be no collaboration and no cooperative work for the “common good.” I think we can do better.

• I encouraged the developer of Westwood Station, to post to WestwoodBlog, and while it is not a full-blown “conversation,” I am glad to see a couple of articles addressing resident concerns about cost-cutting and rental properties.
• Back at our last town meeting, we had a controversy over alcohol licensing and issues of fairness with respect to local grocery store chain Roche Brothers. CEO Rick Roche posted several times to the blog and responded to questions from residents.
• During our town election, I set up the Selectman candidates to blog and conducted podcast interviews with them.

These were small steps and I believe more conversations like these can help us move closer to a more transparent and trustworthy engagement between people in town. I think that kind of trust–even a contentious but working relationship–can make governance, development, and growth better. How?

• An ongoing blog, email newsletters, short videos, and photos of development progress would engage the residents in changes that are happening. Short periodic updates–with the opportunity for residents to comment–could demonstrate a serious commitment to listen to the needs of the community on an ongoing basis. The newsletters and website now are one-way communications that have been carefully polished to pitch a message–I’m talking about something a lot messier. The value is not only in the information, it is in the openness of the process and the willingness to potentially make mistakes and then have to react. There is an additional advantage to the developer as well: Other communities are following the activities of the developer and “girding” for their own fights. If the dialog between residents and developer were published for all to see, it would speak volumes of whether words matched actions.
• Roche Brothers has a strong, positive reputation in the community because they help just about every local organization in some way or another. Rather than simply tell that story or convince others to repeat it, Roche Brothers could look for ways to connect with residents online. No supermarket I know of has an official blog or facebook page, but there are informal facebook groups of Wegmans fans (15,000+ members) and blogs like We Love Wegmans and Wegmans Wire. I don’t know that an official group would be useful, but perhaps monitoring and participating individually is the best approach for now.
• I believe there is a sense among elected officials that residents who are upset about decisions are partly to blame because they don’t bother attending the right meeting. People show up at Town Meeting and want to amend an article–they are told that it is too late; they should have gone to the FinCom meeting. But mostly, people just don’t know what is going on and so they assume the worst.
  What if one or more of our selectmen blogged regularly? Not the long-winded things I write, but just a couple paragraphs a week? What if they responded to things that were posted online as Selectwoman Sarah McDonald did in Dedham recently. What if they read neighboring town blogs and discovered, a month in advance, issues that were likely to affect our town such as Dedham’s Adult Entertainment district on our border?

Social media is a very new field…there is no clear blueprint of how and what the “correct” strategy for towns and businesses is. But there are definitely new opportunities emerging to connect with people in constructive ways that increase transparency and provide opportunities for conversations instead of secrecy and misunderstanding.

Social Media writers describe how blogging can be used to connect with customers and influencers…and at a personal level, to build your brand and personal network. But so often, they are talking about people who are already established or who have now made it “big.” Blogging can be valuable for everyone, even if your objective is not to start a company or become a celebrity. Here are some examples of how valuable my blogging–which reaches an audience of perhaps a few hundred people–has helped me achieve influence at work and within my community.

Work

At first, I was apprehensive about people at work finding my blog(s). When I started DaveWrites, I was isolated in a small startup company and looking for a new job, maybe a new career. But I had no network and no connections to anyone on the east coast. I started blogging because I really wanted to be a writer, and rather than sit around trying to figure out how to become a freelancer and support my family, I realized I could just start writing. It helped me personally to see that I was multidimensional and no longer defined by my job. Eventually, I found a new job at a great company–although I was doing essentially the same kind of work, the blog had added a personal and satisfying dimension to my experience.

I believe the blog also helps my influence at work. Coworkers are reading my blog–and I think that is good. It’s obviously not a blog about technology (my primary responsibility at work), but part of my challenge is to grow beyond my image as a tech expert. The blog exposes more of me than people experience in the office. I think it helps communicate a more complete view of who I am. It is not a replacement for developing more connections and relationships–but it is a thing I can do easily and well that is better than trying to strategize in a vacuum about how to change my image.

I don’t know how generally applicable that is for others. If people think you are wasting your time blogging when you could be working, that’s a danger. And of course you can’t blog about stuff that you don’t want everyone in the office reading. But I do think it can help present a more complete image of you as a person, if you do it well.

Community

When we moved to Westwood 2 1/2 years ago, we (my wife) knew a few people from her Mom’s groups. I wanted to get involved in the town both socially and with respect to local issues. I set up a blog at http://westwoodblog.org and then worked to get relevant content on the site. I solicited the local candidates for selectman to write articles and conducted podcast interviews with them. I published anything I could find that I thought others would find valuable. As our election and town meeting came up last month, I found my blog in the midst of a discussion over highly contentious issues and suddenly local media and prominent people in town wanted to talk to me. Things have quieted down a bit now that the meeting is over, but I did what I set out to do: I used the blog to help the town and get myself involved.

I am not saying the blog was a “launching pad” for me, but it has helped me over a most fundamental hurdle of involvement. Some of the early entries on this blog talked about town meetings and community and whatnot, but it was all talk until I started talking with and about my town. This doesn’t mean that everyone should start a blog about their town in order to get involved, but for me, it was a good move.

Profession

I really enjoy writing, but I feel this blog is not something I would want to fill my life. So what is my plan? Well, when I considered a career change, I ran into so many roadblocks and “leap of faith” no-gos that I realized I needed not to find the perfect answer, but just to do something. But my passion was more in writing than in many of the interesting things I fantasized about. Just to digress…some of those ideas were:

• put my law degree and admission to the bar to use by practicing law
• go to graduate school in political science or urban planning
• get an MBA
• start my own internet company

It’s overwhelming to scheme big plans. I know, fundamentally, if I want it bad enough, there is nothing I cannot do. But those kind of all-or-nothing dreams are hard to find and sustain. It is inspirational to read books like Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus along with other books about social entrepreneurs who dedicate their lives to making the world a better place. But it is hard to wake up one day with the idea that will carry you forward on a journey like that. You need many little things that allow you to discover your purpose.

DaveWrites was born out of my job search and it was originally intended to focus on Economic Development. One thing I have been doing offsite along these lines is to write book reviews at All About Cities:

• Concrete Dragon – the urban revolution in China
• Suburban Transformations – a planning and development methodology to reform our suburbs
• The Missing Class – the “near poor” in urban America
• Wikinomics - implications for cities

Is that a career for me? Hardly. But it is something I can do with a blog that I can’t do otherwise. It contributes something valuable and people seem to like it. Publishers have started sending me books to read. I met Paul Lukez (author of Suburban Transformations) here in Boston and have made some basic connections to people in the practice of planning and architecture. Baby steps, definitely. But steps nonetheless and far better than just sitting around thinking maybe I should have done something different 20 years ago. If I had read Jane Jacobs when I was 20…

Another fascinating thing to me is how blogging connected me to other writers. My blog review from last week (and the commentary from the bloggers I talked about) illustrates how I am not in isolation anymore. When I started, I was impatient about everything; now I look back and see a lot of growth, for me personally at least, in a short period of time.

I don’t have a strategic plan for blogging and my career. But I have used the platform and technology to engage much more effectively than anything else I could think of at the time I was wallowing in a sea of unrealistic fantasy choices. The plan for now, probably for the next 5 years at least, is to just keep it going while we raise our kids. Some people have a plan; I don’t. But I know you don’t get anywhere by standing still.

As gas prices skyrocket, Americans will abandon the suburbs and embrace urban living. That’s the wishful thinking I detect when urbanists seize upon the findings in a CEOs for Cities study that claims to find and prove a causal link between rising gas prices and the collapse of the housing market bubble.

The study is intriguing; it uses data on gas prices and the timing of the housing bubble collapse, along with location specific analysis of real estate trends to explain the housing bubble NOT in terms of lending practices, but instead due to a fundamental shift in economics caused by rising fuel prices.
The study is principally talking about exurbs–and situations like the one in the New York Times article where a double-income couple chose to buy a McMansion an hour from their jobs. Perhaps those people, if they were looking to buy that house today, would think twice, factoring in the commute cost.

But it is too great a leap to take this study and say that Americans are ready to alter generations of housing practices and flip so many assumptions upside down overnight. Personally, I am a proponent of urban living, but even for me, a number of practical considerations make “suburban town” a better choice. It is impossible to predict economic behavior in an essay with any accuracy, but the idea that high gas prices = Americans coming to their senses and moving back to the cities where they “ought to be,” is ludicrously elitist and ignores the many things that have not changed in the calculus:

• Many people hate cities. Perhaps if everyone could live in neighborhoods like Hudson St in Greenwich Village in the 1960s when Jane Jacobs was writing the Death and Life of Great American Cities, more might be inspired to move. But it is a fundamental component of the American psyche and dream to value space over place. Part of place is living somewhere where other people don’t bother you. People are already willing to drive an hour, have no local community life, and have limited family time together…why would a few thousand dollars a year of fuel costs make much difference?
• Most people feel they need space for the kids. It is possible to find examples where urban living is safer and workable for kids and to contrast that with suburban settings where, due to isolation, the space is not what parents thought it would be…it is an isolated, boring wasteland. But the draw of suburban space is more complex than that, and while gas prices may make us reexamine our assumptions…we are still left with:
• 1) having a yard means we can let the (very young) kids play by themselves instead of having to chaperone them to a city park. Mom or Dad can watch the kids out the window while doing household chores.
• 2) schools are generally better in the suburbs. There are always exceptions and there are certainly cases where committed parents will make a difference in the city. But it is a lot easier to improve the suburban school than rescue the city project. Many suburban parents who would otherwise like to live in the city, factor in the cost of private school as a necessary component of moving back.
• Convenience. If you find the ideal city neighborhood, perhaps it is possible to schlep down to the corner store for what you need and walk home. But even before we had kids, we needed regular excursions by car to stores like Costco and Walmart. With 3 kids…you are probably driving a minivan. It’s nice to have a driveway to park that boat in. After baby 2 and before we realized we would have Baby 3, we traded in our pickup truck for a Honda Element…now, we realize the car cannot legally carry 3 children at once. Some items of convenience are habits that grew out of suburban living, but the decision to eliminate car travel is more complex than just cutting the mileage when you have kids.

After I thought about this, I happened to be driving back from Boston through Newton the other day and found myself wishing I could move to a closer location. As I drove Commonwealth Ave (having missed the on ramp to I-90 and resigning myself to a slow drive instead of backtracking) I was impressed with all the people walking, biking, strollering…it seemed so idyllic. It seemed like the kind of neighborhood I would like to live in. A quick zillow of that area brought me back to reality. A single family home is easily $750K; most are closer to $1M. And yes, there are parts of Newton where you could buy a small condo for less. Maybe if we didn’t also have two large dogs…

Affordability in the urban core of places like Boston is the nail in the coffin to any hope of exurban in-migration. I think we will just buy more fuel-efficient cars and make fewer trips. We’re not going to trade a $2500 mortgage for a $5000 one. Already, where we live, in the “inner suburbs” is priced out of the reach of most people starting out. As people go through the thought process above, their focus will creep slowly outward, along the commuter rail lines, into the inner suburbs. That will revive the housing market in place like where I live, I hope. But it is a marginal effect…it is the people who bought the McMansion moving from the exurbs to the suburbs. As they move in, they will drive prices further beyond the reach of others who will trade places with them to live out past 495 and drive to a train station at the end of the rail line.

This is a pessimistic assessment, I know. And I don’t have data to back it up; just my impressions and my own locational calculus. I believe the gas crunch will wake many people up to consider alternatives and I am optimistic that those alternatives could be:

• Tranform our suburbs. OK, I have to drive to work. But the many, many little car trips around town has got to go. Before I sell my house, I think I’ll see what I can do in my town to make fewer trips.
• Choose more selective and authentic suburbs. That tract housing development never appealed to me, even less so now. I want to live in a suburban town, not a developer’s cookie-cutter pseudo-community. I don’t really need an affluent shopping mall, what I need is a good grocery store. Those lifestyle centers with pretentious names and gated communities disgust me. Make the town work; don’t build me a dream community from farmland.
• Improve the transit. I am sick of standing in the train vestibules. I need more trains and better service. I’m going to ride my bike to the train station and demand better service.
• Who needs an SUV? I know I need a minivan, but it gets 23mpg, 27 sometimes on the highway. Perhaps the SUV is finally on the way out as they are reviled for their environmental impact and just too extravagant for more people to operate anymore.
• Work from home. Working from home one day per week would save 20% in fuel costs. Gas prices give workers an external argument to employers to make this accommodation. Failing that, workers will realize they need more money and push wage costs up as they change jobs to cover the travel cost. But it is a lot easier for everyone just to figure out effective remote work strategies.

Rising gas prices are a real change agent. But let’s focus on what we can change and take advantage of the increased awareness to make incremental improvements. Migration is the last resort.

Town governments should consider using wikis to encourage citizen involvement, deliver greater transparency in the public policy process, and achieve faster, more comprehensive solutions to local issues.

A wiki is a website made up of pages that users can add to or edit using a web browser. Changes are recorded and preserved in the version history of every page. I’ve blogged about wikis before, but here I detail specific examples of how this technology could be used by a town. I also consider some of the practical limitations and implementation issues that might stand in the way of adoption.

The wiki approach to collaboration is a fundamentally different way of creating documents. Instead of passing a single document around through multiple, serial drafts and edits, the entire document remains in a constantly evolving form, on a public website. Individual contributions are de-emphasized because it is possible for any person to make small or large-scale changes at any time. Individual authorship blends into a collaborative, consensus product. When this process works, it can solve a number of participation challenges that are especially relevant in the context of local policy action:

• Individuals can contribute when and where they have time and expertise – Rather than attend a series of meetings, a person can follow the development of a document over time and submit their modifications at 3am or whenever they have time. If a person has special expertise, they can fill in with much greater detail or correct misunderstandings of details that often escape review in higher level discussions.
• The entire process is public – the wiki is hosted on a public website and can be set up to send automatic notifications of topic changes to interested persons via email.
• The process itself can be engaging – One reason residents do not bother to attend meetings is because they have no clear idea of what is to be discussed. Or worse, they do attend and find that 90% of the meeting is about a topic they care little about and their issue has already been decided. Not only can participation be intimidating, but giving up 2 hours of a weeknight to go watch a government meeting with no substantive opportunity for participation quickly sours the average person from following the civic process, especially in the early, formative stages of policy, when their input could be the most valuable.

  A wiki is no cure-all, but it provides a much lower barrier to entry and a way for residents to research the current status of an issue–to better understand how to join the conversation. Furthermore, because the focus of a wiki is on producing a tangible, consensus product–a document–it can be a very substantive experience–not just a discussion arena. Below, I will talk about some of the complementary things needed to make a wiki work–to prevent it from being a “flame-fest.”

• The process is ongoing and adaptable – By the time public policy is presented for a vote at a town meeting, the issues have been crystallized into a simple yes/no choice. Residents line up for a few minutes to “be heard,” but the “losers” go home frustrated and dissatisfied. It’s often too late to participate in a meaningful way as the battle lines have hardened and advocates have assembled their arguments to win, not discuss. A wiki, used to help formulate public policy prior to a formal meeting, gives residents a much great opportunity for participation and can be a tool to help the community develop policy over time.
• The process is more transparent – Massachusetts and most states have enacted Open Meeting Law legislation to prevent public matters from being decided through back room deal and crony networks. It is illegal for a town board or commission to meet in private to decide policy. Meetings must be announced, made accessible to the public, and recorded so that residents and the media have access to meeting minutes. Email alone does not help transparency, in fact, the Attorney General advises, in her guide to open meetings:
  

  …Like private conversations held in person or over the telephone, e-mail conversations among a quorum of members of a governmental body that relate to public business violate the Open Meeting Law, as the public is deprived of the opportunity to attend and monitor the e-mail “meeting.” Thus it is a violation to e-mail to a quorum messages that can be considered invitations to reply in any medium, and would amount to deliberation on business that must occur only at proper meetings. It is not a violation to use e-mail to distribute materials, correspondence, agendas or reports so that committee members can prepare individually for upcoming meetings.

  I was unable to locate any legal references to wikis in public meeting law and my query to the Attorney General resulted in a referral to my local District Attorney’s office. It’s a hypothetical question as to how a wiki would be construed, but my argument is that a public wiki better serves the purpose and intent of open meeting law than a legally-compliant public meeting. The wiki is always open. Whenever a document is modified, that change is preserved and visible in the revision history of the document. Residents can subscribe to notifications of changes and follow the evolution of policy at a much greater level of detail than simply attending a meeting. In fact, residents can step into the process at any time–they are not constrained to limited meeting times or reliance on knowing the right board member to get their input included. Armed with this information, when they do attend public meetings, they have the background and material to meaningfully participate.

• The process is organic – the truly revolutionary thing about a wiki used for this purpose is that if it works to effectively gather the input of residents, it is beyond the control of politicians. It would not eliminate the need for expert studies and professional research work, but such work could support the education of the community, not simply be an expensive consulting project the town pays for which is then disputed by opposing factions. Because the wiki is a website, it is easy to include hyper links to documents and other resources. It can be used to collect all the information around a particular issue…imagine if we had good “documentation” about the policy systems our governments create. Imagine a website that pulls together all the resources, studies, and public discussion used to craft policy…then, imagine that that website is built for free by the community, not just a marketing vehicle devised after the fact to sell the town’s idea.

By now, the cynics and realists have long been shaking their heads at the impossible optimism of such a dream…yes, it is not automatic. I wish I could lay out examples of how this has worked effectively, but I’m trying to make the case myself for why my town could utilize this process and I don’t know of any examples! I do know a broad outline of what it would take to address the most fundamental challenges though:

1. It will be chaos!–or nothing – anyone can edit any page? Vandals will make it impossible to be useful. People with usernames like RandomInterloper will go in and replace the thoughtful writings of DaveAtkins with idiotic gibberish. Or perhaps, less dramatically, non-residents will contribute to the process. The wiki can require registration and email validation. Key pages can be made read-only. Problem user accounts can be disabled and ultimately attempts can be made to block those users. Online Community management is tough.

   It is important to set the intended scope of the wiki and adapt it as necessary. The wiki is not just something we throw out there and expect to work–it has to be part of an overall strategy of community engagement. If the wiki becomes more a discussion board, then we start a discussion board in parallel. If town leaders want to prevent their opinions from being overwritten, we can have a blog to run in parallel. When pages become disorganized, leaders of the project will need to gently reorganize things. It is inescapable that a successful wiki requires a resourceful, web-savvy champion to help manage the chaos that could ensue and cultivate adoption and participation.

2. people here are not technical enough for this – wiki software tries disparately to simplify the way pages can be edited, but I think the challenges are actually more procedural than technical. It is hard to edit someone else’s work, not because you don’t know how to make a font bold, but because you feel like you are doing violence to their writing. You send people a link to a wiki page and it’s not that they don’t know how to click a button that says “Edit,” it’s that they don’t know what they are really supposed to be doing. We cannot simply throw it out there and expect anything to happen. People need to see not just the value of the information, but the value of modifying the information.

   A wiki needs to start with a small group of people who believe in its potential and are excited to try using it. It may be that a wiki is nothing more than a place to record meeting minutes at first…or to post the meeting schedule…or to upload some key documents…whatever it takes to get people looking at it. To build momentum, there is a great deal of offline work to be done and a search for early adopters. When the project begins to work, users will help each other and technical problems will not slow anyone down.

3. what about people without internet access? Digital Divide! – this sounds great, but won’t it just be a tool for geeky rich guys with internet access? It’s part of a strategy. It’s not a replacement for public meetings or traditional methods of political engagement (that have worked so well). When you consider all the advantages the wealthy and connected (people-connected, not internet-connected) have, this can only expand the level of participation.
4. the town has a website, why do we need this? – The town website is usually primarily one-way informational. It’s not a tool to develop policy, it is a means of communication. The kind of wiki I am proposing is not an encyclopedia like the wikipedia, but a working document model. I’ll illustrate below good and bad ideas for how to use a wiki…

As I described above in many cases, the wiki is just a tool for helping solve a particular policy issue problem. Its best use is where there is a need for multiple people to collaborate on learning about an issue and developing a consensus document or plan of action.

My town is in the midst of a great deal of tension over a massive proposed development that will create a “mini-city” of shops, restaurants, office and residential space. When I state my support for the project, it draws fire from the opponents. So, if I were to suggest starting a wiki topic on something this contentious, it would be a recipe for failure as proponents and opponents overwrote each other’s views, turning the site into an erasable message board.

However, a wiki might have been a useful way to develop a shared vision in the town of our economic development future. What can we agree on that we want in the town? What are our options? When there are topics that become contentious, we could create a message board so that a threaded discussion could proceed there as people argued over what was appropriate to include in the wiki.

Another project in my town involves the creation of a Public Access Cable Channel. I started a few wiki pages on this topic and at our next meeting, I hope I can convince others to help me fill in the details as I have been educating myself on what is involved in such a project. We have a sort of standardized startup manual/kit, but we need a way to organize our local information and tap the resources of people who are busy and perhaps do not have time for marathon meetings to discuss all the details. Honestly, I don’t know if the wiki is the way to go, but it seems as long as the project is information-gathering and constructive/creative, this tool is useful. If people want to debate about things…that will become evident over time.

I’m not linking to my town’s wiki here…because I feel I need to do the face-to-face groundwork first. If anyone is interested, I would be happy to send links, but I think the fist step is understanding the vision of what it could be. I welcome comments and suggestions on this very, very long blog post–especially any reports of similar activities in town and cities.

Today, the city of Boston will announce a website that is described by the Boston Globe as a “Facebook-like social networking website.” That description fails on so many levels to communicate the value of what the city is doing.

Boston World Partnerships is the non-profit created by Mayor Menino to promote economic development in the city of Boston. The concept is so much more than a website…it’s how we use modern communication technology to market our talent and facilitate development. It’s part of the answer to the question I was asked by a Selectman in Westwood as how a blog could play a role in a policy debate other than allowing residents to “vent.”

Social networking is about using technology-enhanced media to connect people and ideas and start constructive conversations. Of course it’s also about connecting with all your friends from college, but in the business and political context, we can use blogs, wikis, twitter, facebook, and even myspace to give more people more opportunity to participate. It’s not just about people venting or individual citizens complaining–it is about finding, connecting, and leveraging the human capital of our communities. The Boston World Partnerships site is clearly at the business and professional end of this spectrum:

Mission: Boston World Partnerships informs business leaders worldwide about the competitive advantages that Boston offers, and connects them with the resources they need to locate and grow here. We also work to strengthen the general business climate and to help existing Boston businesses achieve sustainable success.

It is admitedly a long stretch to go from my small town blog and experiments on twitter to something of this magnitude, but the principles are all there. Use social media marketing to market a city. Connect the “movers and shakers”–whether they be individuals, entrepreneurs, non-profits, activists or whatever. There is no need to be held back due to hierarchical planning and bureacracy when we can connect the people who know how to get things done and support their efforts with an infrastructure that takes advantage of the latest technical and media innovations. This is the future–not just future technology, but the future of applying business and marketing principles to public and social policy.

This article provides advice and tips for residents of Massachusetts who are unemployed. It is the most popular post on my blog. Please read the related posts in the category “Navigating Unemployment” and the comments below.

Please consult the Mass.Gov website for improved information regarding unemployment benefits.

No legal advice. This blog post relates my experience only and the information I researched in January 2009. I have attempted to keep it current, but no one should rely on this blog post as legal advice.

Text of original post follows…

Rachel Levy and I have both been blogging about our searches for work. If you know anyone looking for a marketing professional, please go visit her site and hire her. My blog is not only about looking for work–check out the archive to see the breadth of things I’ve covered in the past two years…but today, I want to talk unemployment.

The Massachusetts Division of Unemployment Assistance website has a great deal of information, but there is very little to answer the specific questions real job seekers have and no way to actually do anything of value there. Once you have filed your initial claim, you will be able to go online to file your weekly claim. But in the beginning, there are so many simple, basic things they do not tell you. So I’m going to list what I’ve learned here and invite people to comment and fill in the details…

Top 7 Tips for the Unemployed in Massachusetts

My purpose here is not to tell you how to find a job. It’s just about the hoops you need to jump through to get the insurance benefits you are entitled to receive while you are looking for work. I recommend you just do these things and don’t get hung up on lots of questions or debates about why the system is the way it is. We have a pretty good deal in Massachusetts compared to other states, so check your attitude at the door and don’t let the bureaucracy and cesspool of negativity you may encounter distract you from finding a job.

1. Go stand in line. Or, more accurately, sit in your car holding a number. Do not bother with the phone; it is busy. There is no way to register online and no forms to print out. So rather than call and wait on hold for hours, what you should do it go down to your local “walk in center” in the middle of the day and ask them when the line forms, then come back the next day at 7am or so to get a number. Then go get a coffee from Dunkin Donuts and come back at the right time. Make sure you bring all the information you will need to fill out the form. When I filed my claim, the center was experimenting with a group filing approach; we all filled out our forms together and I was out of the building within half an hour. Then, later that day, I received a call from the intake person to confirm he had registered me in the system. Easy. Painless. No frustration.

It would be nice if the form were online so I could fill it out in advance, submit it online, or even just mail it in. It seems ridiculous to have to stand in line to get a form that you fill out and hand to a person, then leave.

2. File your Medical Security Program application ASAP. If you are receiving unemployment benefits, you may be eligible to participate in the Medical Security Program. Download the application form, fill it out, and send it in before you file your initial claim. If you are eligible, MSP will reimburse you 80% of your COBRA premium up to a monthly maximum of $1080 for a family plan or $440 for an individual plan. My COBRA plan would cost me $1312.92 per month for Blue Cross HMO Blue Enhanced Value.

Are you eligible? Probably, especially if you have kids. But the determination of eligibility is complicated so rather than try to figure it out, just get the application completed and filed ASAP along with any required supporting materials…like the letter you need your wife to write saying she is a stay at home mom.

Download the brochure and application form and read them carefully. The website itself does not give the details you need. But get the application in so have it ready if you need it. If you fail to submit the application right away and find you need health care, the state will not pay retroactively; a friend I know is already in for $2600+ with the state refusing to reimburse the COBRA payments he made before his application was processed. You can file an appeal–another great use of your time when you could be looking for a job.

3. Wait for your first unemployment check to arrive before you try to call MSP. I burned through 45 minutes of cell phone time (I do not have a land line) before I got to a person who said she could not help me until I had received my first check. It will probably be a month before you get a check and maybe 6 weeks before you learn anything about MSP. In the meantime, you will be hoping you don’t get sick, avoiding going to the doctor, and not electing to use your COBRA “benefits.” You have 2 months from the date you are laid off to elect COBRA and it can be retroactive. So, if you have an emergency, you go to the doctor then pay COBRA.

If you do qualify for MSP, you will have to front the money for COBRA premiums and get reimbursed. And I do not know how part time work affects your eligibility for participation in MSP, but I suspect it is not good.

Please see my more recent posts on health care

4. The Commonwealth Care program is irrelevant to you. If you are eligible for MSP + COBRA, you are not eligible for Commonwealth Care. You can use the Commonwealth Connector web site to shop for private insurance, but you will not get the low-cost or free health care that is available for people who did not just lose their jobs. It is interesting to note that this site shows me many options cheaper than COBRA, but none as good as the NASE plan.

5. If you find part-time or consulting work…manage your time strategically. It is a crime to fail to report that you worked and earned money while unemployed, and you are allowed a pittance of earning (1/3 of your benefit amount, e.g. a couple hundred bucks), but what typically happens is if you make any significant money, you lose your benefit for that week. So if you do manage to find some freelance work, make sure you do it all in one week. Don’t do something foolish like work 10 hours a week for 4 weeks. Schedule your work so that if you have a 40-hour project, you can do it all in one week.

6. Stay positive. It is easy to get upset when you are on hold forever and then the phone hangs up on you or the person who answers refuses to help you. It is frustrating to click on website links that claim to give you information on how to apply…but then don’t link to the forms. And it is terribly frustrating to listen to repeated hold messages telling you to go to the website…when the website is telling you that you have to call the phone number. But just do what you need to do and get back on track looking for a job!

7. Don’t feel like a scumbag. I try to laugh at the movie Office Space and recall the line from one worker who is afraid of being laid off:

I’m going to be the first one they’re gonna lay off. Just the thought of having to go to the State Unemployment Office and having to stand in line with those scumbags!!!

There is no shame in collecting unemployment. We’ve been paying into the system for years–or at least our employers have been paying for us. It is social insurance, designed to cover just this situation. It’s not a government handout.

In the 1930s, perhaps our grandparents gave up their dreams to provide for their families during the Great Depression…they put their college degrees away and found jobs doing laundry or whatever it took to keep their families fed. There was no safety net and dreams were deferred out of necessity. But that generation enacted social protections to help prevent that kind of thing from happening again. For a few minutes, the lucky among us who had good jobs, stand in line with the laborers and attorneys, ironworkers and accountants, in these challenging times, and focus on building a better future with a least a few months protection from losing our homes and freezing in the cold because we were only a paycheck away from disaster. If there are some hoops we must navigate, we do it, and we move on.

If you have specific, useful tips on what people should do to make their experience with the Unemployment Insurance go more smoothly or constructive suggestions for how to improve the way these services are delivered, please comment here. Don’t post links to business opportunities. Even if they are well-intentioned, I will delete anything that is not directly relevant to the topic of navigating the unemployment bureaucracy.

Over at my local blog, WestwoodBlog, I wrote a short photo narrative about how I used my bike and trailer to pick up produce at our Community Supported Agricuture (CSA) farm this weekend and then made a side trip to the grocery store. It’s part of my effort to promote more bike and walk-friendly activity in town–a personal testimonial of sorts. My conclusions:

• A bike trip like this, with kids, can be safe. Cars whizzing down Gay Street at 50mph may scare you, but if you plan accordingly, make yourself very visible, and ride sensibly, there is no reason you can’t bike across town for errands.
• You can make the time to do it. The entire trip involved less than an hour on the bike and covered 11 miles. Of course in a car, we’d be at the farm in 10 minutes and from home to Roche Bros. in 2. But that really works out to about a half hour total, so an hour is not that bad–plus you get the benefit of the exercise.
• You need good “kid karma.” I was lucky that many of the unpredictable (more accurately, “unschedulable”) things that happen with 2-year olds did not derail my grand plan. But we did not stand in the deli line on this day!

Excursions like this are easier when you live in a denser urban setting. But in our New England suburbs/towns, we are fortunate to have avoided some of the more stereotypical suburban sprawl patterns and in my town, we have made a concerted effort to preserve open space resulting in a unique urban/rural blend of possibilities.

I’m writing a proposal for a writing fellowship. On this blog, I had started a “business plan,” but I ran out of steam when I realized I’ve spent the last dozen years or so in startup companies tying to second guess management on how to make the business work. It’s boring. It’s a necessary means to an end–to create the thing that brings in the money so we can have fun creating something new. But I would be managing away the things I want to do most: reading, writing, learning and experiencing life.

So here’s another angle…a big topic I’d like to write about:

These are exciting times to live in the Boston area as massive redevelopment efforts are underway to reshape the city and suburbs. I am fortunate to live at the location of one such project and work in the midst of another.

Westwood Station

Westwood is a town of almost 15,000 located on route 128 about 13 miles southwest of downtown Boston. Developers have just broken ground on Westwood Station, a 135-acre mixed-use, transit-oriented Smart Growth community—and an attempt to, in one massively-planned effort create a new mini-city. Its advocates describe a new urbanist utopia. But the fault lines of change are many:

• The project is seen as a long term solution to local financing needs—a cure for the cycle of suburban property tax overrides necessary to keep schools funded. But the current economic downtown may jeopardize everything.
• A significant number of residents oppose the scale of the project and feel betrayed by the town. Lawsuits to force traffic mitigation are followed by large public meetings of angry citizens. The project is supported by most, but some fear it will destroy the community as it pits one side of town against the other.
• Another development, Legacy Place, only a mile away in Dedham, will complement or compete with this project.
• Within the span of only a few years almost 2 million square feet of new mixed-use development will be completed—on top of two existing towns: Dedham and Westwood—towns that historically were one town. Within a decade, this region is likely to be transformed.

We may be witnessing the birth of a second generation “Edge City.” Can the mistakes of the past be avoided? Will this be a massive suburban sprawl nightmare or a model for the future of urban planning? Will the project integrate with the town or be a separate, tolerated entity?

Fort Point Channel

Meanwhile, just across a narrow channel of water that serves principally as the cooling water discharge basin for the Gillette “World Shaving Headquarters,” the Fort Point neighborhood of South Boston is being completely rebuilt. My startup company shares space in a building occupied mostly by artists and architects and surrounded by constant construction. Old warehouses are converted into upscale condos that will provide urban professionals the opportunity to live a 5-minute walk from the Financial District. The residential development is part of a larger 2.9 million square foot Fan Pier redevelopment that is anchored by the new Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and the Federal Courthouse.

• Currently the area is home to artists in live-work studios who will not be able to afford the luxury developments that are underway. But a big part of what will make the neighborhood “cool” will be the retention of these people. Will the project preserve the character of the neighborhood or gentrify it?
• The neighborhood has a blog and website; similar to the idea behind the blog I started for Westwood. Will these online tools help build/preserve community under a period of rapid change?
• What impact will the current increased economic uncertainty have on this project?

In considering my proposal, I did not believe a magazine would be interested in my simply narrating the story of my town’s development. The story needs to have more universal appeal to get readers to care about what is going on in Boston. So I’ve laid out some issues here and expect to explore these in greater detail to see what strikes a chord with readers. Some potential lines of inquiry would be:

• The role of new media – Both neighborhood blogs strive to be objective—they are not activist in the sense of a “stop the development now!” site. Will they play a constructive role in shaping the future?
• The target demographic – the residential component of both sites seeks to attract similar young professionals. But Westwood and Fort Point are night and day—most urbanites in Boston have not even heard of Westwood. Will these developments be magnets for “creative class” workers?
• Is comprehensive planning going to work or is a more adaptive process necessary? In the case of Westwood, how can uncertainty be navigated by town and developer with transparency…or is that simply impossible? In Boston, a similar maze of regulation—under a shifting economic reality—makes transparency in working with the community difficult. Are they successful? Does it matter?
• In the aggregate, these places are following sustainability principles. But are consumption-oriented shopping towns inherently unsustainable? What about sustainability in terms of the integrity of the community these new creations supplant?

Well, we shall see if this proposal gets support. If not, I can always write about it here for free…

While visting my Mom in rural Virginia, we attended her Riverside Community Church. It wasn’t what I expected.

The church meets in a new movie theater in Farmville and makes good use of the space, with a band (electic guitar, bass and drums) and video projector displaying the words to the songs and quotes from the sermon on the big screen. Lead guitar and vocalist Bruce did a great job making inspirational music fun. Pastor Frank centered his sermon around the book of Habakkuk–a short book told by the prophet as he questioned the despair wrought upon Israel in the time of the Babylonians.

I’ve written about religion here before when we joined the Unitarian church last year. After attending for most of the year, we made the difficult decision not to join. We visited our local Episcopal church in Westwood several Sundays and were going to consider the First Parish UCC church in Westwood as well, but we feel we have our hands full this summer–getting out of the house on a Sunday morning is just a real challenge right now with the new baby and 2 toddlers.

One attendance at a church cannot tell everything–but I was happy to see what this church is doing and am glad my parents have found it and the community around it. The music is done very well. It’s not just that they have a band up front. The songs are “psalmic” and modern at the same time. I don’t know if you’d really call it Christian rock–it’s more like modern hymns.

Pastor Frank’s sermon was thought-provoking as well. It was interesting to see faith discussed in a manner I found similar to the liberal view described in Marcus Borg’s book, Heart of Christianity. I am almost certain the Riverside Church would not agree with the liberal themes of that book, but at the core of both liberal and fundamentalist belief is a concept of faith as much more than belief. Faith is based on a “real” relationship with God more than belief in specific facts–faith is more than the faith of Assensus.

In our organized, hyper-rational world, we can be trapped by our own rationality into belief systems that are not fulfilling to us. When we hear that faith can move mountains, we automatically discount it as a metaphor. We presume the superiority of reason over faith because our work and so much of our lives depends on our ability to apply the tools of logic and reason to solve problems.

But the things that really matter in our lives are things we often solve in our hearts, not in our heads. Frank described the story of meeting his wife; that God had meant it to be. And I thought to myself how in my own life, the most important decisions–the ones that really made my life–were ones made on a leap of faith.

My wife–the church would certainly not approve of how we met in a bar, dated a few weeks, then moved in together. But I felt I was guided by some kind of certain feeling that this was right for me. I did not wrestle with questions of “could I do better?” or “am I ready?” or “is she really the one?” I just felt it was right. And it was.

In starting our family…it went against every rational impulse in my memory. Neither of us had planned to have children when we married, but after many years…we began to change our minds. Still, I was not ready. But the rational arguments in my head just didn’t feel right. Ultimately, we just did it. Then we did it again and decided to stop. Then, we kept on, so now we have 3 kids under 4. I was looking at a photo of those three last night and realizing how it was not something I had planned or scheduled or even really decided upon–but really how miraculous it is and how grateful I am for it. Sometimes you have to just let great things happen.

I also thought about how faith is an ongoing process. The kids changed our lives and every day, you have a choice of how you perceive things. You do feel frustrated at times and wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into. But you have to keep letting it happen…faith in the decisions you made, faith in the life you will live–you will find a way…and you do. But if you start analyzing and second guessing and worrying…you sabotage yourself and your life.

I was also reminded of a darker time in my life when another type of faith saved me. In a terrible relationship, I was trying to end, but trying not to be the “bad guy,” trying to do the right thing, but making a mess of things. A friend came to visit and I realized how weak I must look to him, and it shocked me into realizing that all I really had to do was let go. Stop trying to do the right thing whatever that was and just stop caring. That does not sound like a great model to live by, but it was really the recognition that FEAR was the enemy that was destroying me…and FAITH…at least in myself…was what I needed to walk away. No amount of rational thought was ever going to get me out of the mental traps I had set for myself.

I’m not planning to join a fundamentalist church anytime soon. And my take on faith is a very secular one. But there is a core of truth that speaks to us, if we let it, and which can truly save us and/or raise us up to things we did not believe possible before.

Check out my other blog at http://westwoodblog.org. That site is more of a community information site that I used the blog format to create. We have a town election on Tuesday and I have been stirring up interest in the blog by getting the candidates to post. Additionally, I conducted 4 podcast interviews with the candidates for Selectman. It is a different approach than this blog–I strive to be a neutral facilitator–and I will have more to blog about here after the election as I believe this experience has taught me a number of things about the potential and limitations of new media in a small town.

I produced my first Podcast last night when I interviewed Greg Agnew, a 20-year old Assumption College student who is running against three other candidates for selectman in my town of Westwood. Check out the 40-minute interview over at my other blog, WestwoodBlog.org.

The more I learn about urban planning, the more I know I have to learn. I recently read Suburban Transformations, by Paul Lukez, a Boston area architect. He describes an approach to planning he calls adaptive design that attempts to define a more organic approach to development. I will post a review in the next few weeks as I digest this more thoroughly.

I also read Jane Jacobs classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a relatively ancient text from the early 1960s that is often cited as one of the most influential books in urban planning. It’s an amazing book, written with a voice that is devastatingly passionate and witty. The themes she talks about, specifically her central thesis that cities are systems of organized complexity and therefore represent a different type of problem than can be approached with mere statistics, is a transferable battle to the present day. The same types of mistakes in thinking she railed against in the 1960s continue to clutter and hinder our progress. I loved this quote as she delivers a final summary criticism of the conventional wisdom assumptions driving most planning in the 1960s:

…it is harder to understand why this form of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to succeeding generations of planners and designers. It is disturbing to think that men who are young today, men who are being trained now for their careers, should accept on the grounds that they must be “modern” in their thinking, conceptions about cities and traffic which are not only unworkable, but also to which nothing new of any significance has been added since their fathers were children.

She cautions early on that you cannot apply the analysis of cities to town and suburbs. So I’m not going there. But it got me to thinking about where our Town of Westwood is going in a larger context. We are a town, clearly. But we are not quite the town I grew up in. In my hometown of Smithfield, VA, you could not go to the grocery store without running into someone you knew. The teachers had all taught most of the kids’ parents. It was a very small town of about 3500 people. Westwood is about 14,000 people…but we are 13 miles southwest of Boston, so we are part of the Boston Metro area. However the town is still very rural in character and there are no big office parks, etc. so it does not feel like what I think of as a suburb.

That is likely to change with the Westwood Station project. This mixed use development is the largest of its type ever and appears to be a poster child for smart growth. I welcome the idea that it will boost the growth of the town, but many residents are very concerned about the traffic it will bring. The phrase that caught my fascination in the description of Westwood Station was “mini-city,” the idea that it would be like planting an urban seed in our town, to grow a new social, cultural, and commerce center in the town. I envisioned an evolution over my lifetime where this project not only anchored its shops, restaurants, office and residential space, but became a new cohesive center to a small city of Westwood.

But I think the more accurate term for what is to be created is “Edge City.” And historically, “Edge City” does not have positive connotations. They are sterile, minutely planned commerce and employment centers that isolate and are isolated from the town that existed before. Their shiny new facades rise from the once pastoral landscape and at night, the gates are closed and the city shuts down; its temporary occupants drive their cars out the feeder roads, back to the random towns in the metro area and beyond.

I think Westwood Station is trying hard to avoid this, but who really knows what will happen?

Several months ago, Gerald Nealy, of Baltimore InnerSpace, blogged extensively about several developments around Baltimore that he describes as Edge Cities in the making. It’s the kind of analysis I wish I was qualified to write about our own Westwood Station. And there are many articles about Smart Growth to digest, like this piece by Robert Goodspeed who talks about gaining grassroots support for Smart Growth policies.

I think the alternative to growth is stagnation, so I am supportive of the project. I do wish there was more discussion of the vision behind it and some way in the community to think about this as more than just a tax revenue source or traffic magnet. Time will tell the fate of our growth.

I joined Facebook last year as a crop of 30 and 40-somethings discovered this cool new thing that seemed slightly more respectable than myspace. I recognized the technology and social media implications quickly. And for awhile, I was addicted. But I lapsed as most of the other “older” people I knew didn’t really know what to do with it and it just didn’t become a part of my life.

But I revisited it recently as it seems so perfectly appropriate for something my church is doing. We are putting together a pictorial directory. We are also trying to grow membership. And we are organizing events in the community that I hope will draw interest and people. Facebook is a picture book…but it is so much more. However, I know that for many people who are not already on Facebook, my invitation to join is likely to be their first and only visit because…if you haven’t joined already, you probably don’t see the need or value of it.

Facebook doesn’t make it easy for the late adopters. There is no guide to facebook, no tutorial, not even a page of Frequently Asked Questions. I guess that is by design because the nature of the site is that it evolves and is driven by the creativity and use of its users. It’s not a static resource. It’s an organic thing that people seem to either get or not get. You can always google facebook and find guides to it–but that presupposes motivation. I think the principal and only motivator for the adoption of facebook has been “all my friends are on it.” Well, all my friends are NOT on it. But perhaps we all just need an illustration of what to do to begin to see the value…

The main value of facebook, the thing that makes it more than just a website, is that it effectively publishes your life to your friends. For example, there is a “status” with a link to “What are you doing right now?” that you can update with…whatever. I just updated my status to “blogging about facebook.” Now, all my friends have a “feed” on their pages so when they log in, they see a little note that says “Dave Atkins is blogging about facebook.” It’s not an email…and they can (and probably do) disable the notification when it becomes innane and/or overwhelming, but this is just an illustration of how facebook works. Whenever you take any action in your profile, it gets posted to the feed. So, for example, this is what I see on my feed right now:

I don’t have a ton of friends, so you see a few people repeated here. But notice how everything in blue is a clickable link. You can see how my friends are adding other people as friends. I could click on a name I recognized and add that friend as well. Other people are using applications or posting things…in each case, I may be curious about it and I can just click on the link to see what’s going on. This is the essence of viral marketing activity. It feeds back on itself. Each person who is inspired by curiosity to try something a friend tried contributes to the “virtual buzz” about that thing. And it is all automatic.

When I first joined facebook, this activity alone was interesting for a few months. I would see that someone had added an application that allowed them to display their favorite books, or politician, or generate a map of everywhere they had ever traveled and I would do the same. But after awhile, I have to admit the applications were just overwhelming. People started wanting to bite me and turn me into a zombie. I just didn’t have time for that.

One of the features I had an initial interest in–and which seemed very promising for my church–was the concept of facebook groups. Anyone can create a group about anything. And, of course, when you create the group, it get’s published out to all your friends. When they join, it gets published out to their friends. So, I created a group for our church.

Within 24 hours, all the young people in the church (who had their own youth group on facebook) had found and joined my group. But the real challenge is engaging everyone else. And with all the befriending and group joining going on…well, we get back to the basic question again…what am I supposed to do on this thing?

Here’s what we can do with the group:

• promote events – I created an event associated with the group to promote a Jazz concert by Nhojj to be held February 3 (just before the Super Bowl). That actions does two things: 1) the event is visible to all the group members and 2) the event shows up in the overall Boston network where any user who clicks on it will see the link to the First Church and Parish in Dedham group.
• mass communicate – we can send a message to all group members. Now the church already has an email list, but some people feel the private messaging of facebook is better because it is not clogging up your email with spam and you can easily include links to other posts, events, etc. in the message. If you are on facebook all the time, the private messaging may be preferable to email.
• instant website – the group page is like a mini-website. Other group members can post events, upload photos, upload videos, post comments, and start discussion threads. The church already has a website, but it is a project to maintain it. On facebook, any member can add to the site. Hopefully, people will be responsible, but if they are not, I can modify the permissions, edit the content, etc. And as always, the beauty of facebook is that whenever someone does something, it will be “fed” out to their friends and members of the group.

A couple weeks ago, I blogged about wikis and town government and how that technology could allow mass collaboration to assist the development of public policy. Facebook is different…this is an illustration of social networking, of how we can leverage our connections with other people to spread information quickly. Facebook provides the behind-the-scenes engine to make it automatic so that your actions are communicated to your friends and people of similar interests. Neither technology is a magic solution: we’ve got a facebook group: we’re all set! It takes more, specifically:

• priming - Before I send a mass email to our membership, I wanted to write this article–to illustrate some of the possibilities of facebook to many who are not yet on facebook. If they are already active, they can probably tell me how to improve this! But technology alone is never the solution…it needs people to actually use it.
• maintenance - I don’t know if the group is set up just right. Maybe I need to modify some permisions or change the layout or something. It’s not a “set and forget” type thing. But the effort is pretty small and manageable, I hope.
• contribution - I posted the Nhojj concert as a starting point. There are other events, I’m sure. And maybe I should start up a discussion group. It would be great if someone else jumped in though…

Finally, there is the question of what else “should” I be doing on facebook. OK, I signed up…I joined the church group…what next?

• consider changing the preferences on your birthday – Click the Edit link to the right of Profile after you login to facebook. Unless you want everyone to know you are pushing 41, change the drop down choice under Birthday so it only shows month and day. If you care.

• search for other friends on facebook. It can be difficult if your friends have names like “John Smith.” You can just invite people you know by email address and if they are already in, they will just add you as a friend.
• check out this list of 10 things you should do on facebook
• or these 8 things you can do…
• check out the facebook blog
• Check out all the facebook applications – “applications” are the heart and soul of facebook. I’ve just described the most basic core features here. Applications are things that thousands of developers are creating to do sometimes interesting things like create a map of all the cities you’ve ever visited.

I’ve just scratched the surface. Most people who find value in facebook quickly get addicted to it. We learn as we go. It is different from what many are used to–this is not a place to set up a user account with some fake name or weird screenname like “laughingboy57.” And it can be a little intimidating to know that you don’t know what information is being sent out to your friends. So try not to take it too seriously, but at the same time do be authentic.

Here’s my profile. Enjoy!

In a sense, I know I have too many projects half going on. This morning on the train, I sketched out some of the stuff I’d like to do over the next few months. It was interesting to see how I now have no shortage of ideas–a very different state of affairs than about a year and a half ago when I first started blogging and trying to find a new job.

So first, there is job and family. I don’t write about the specifics of my job because it is possible some people from work read my blog and while I’m generally positive about it, I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot and have something I say here come back to haunt me. But I will briefly violate that rule…

There is clearly more I could do at work. I am in a technical role and it is a role that I have skill and experience in that makes me valuable. But it is not the kind of stuff that I think about in the shower. Technology is just a tool I use to get things done. My dilemma at work is that while I can see so much non-technical, leadership and vision work that needs to be done, I know that I don’t have the time and energy to fight for that role. My sense is that for now, I should put my second guessing on hold and just try to be a good team member.

Family is busy. Baby 3 is due in February. Baby 2 is at the “terrible 2″ stage. We just have to go with the flow for the next year or so. Everything else is a supporting role.

Exercise: I’m not real big on exercise for the sake of exercise. But I love to run and have joined a couple of clubs that keep me running 3-4 days a week. I’ll do some key races next year and do the Baystate marathon again in October. Cycling is pretty much over until spring when I can commute again. Maybe after the baby is sleeping through the night, my wife and I will hire a babysitter and go on some weekend bike rides. I’ll pick it up again.

That leaves this blog and special projects I wrote about this morning. Whew.

This blog needs more focus. I feel I’ve accomplished a lot writing for the past year; when I go back and read some of the early stuff, I think my writing has improved. But it is thematically all over the place. Having written for a year, I can at least outline the themes I would like to cover. If I could hit each of these themes each week–well, that would be a full time job. But I’d like to cover:

• City Survey – with two feet of snow on the ground, running in the dark in sub-freezing temperatures, I kind of wonder whether the Boston area is really going to be our long term home. But the spring will eventually come. In the mean time, I can do a little research on cool cities and write up what I find. A quick perusal of the useless Money Magazine articles or Kiplinger Magazine’s Smart Cities article contain gems of idiocy like this:
  

  Nashville keeps attracting people…The couple was looking for a great place to start a family. Last summer, they bought a three-bedroom house for $230,000 in Gallatin, a 40-minute drive from Nashville’s entertainment hot spots, which they frequent on weekends.

  Now actually, I think Nashville might be a cool place to live, based on blogging activity I see coming from there and its rep as a creative magnet. But don’t tell me buying a house in Gallatin qualifies as moving to the city of Nashville. That’s like saying buying a house in Chelmsford is “moving to Boston.”

  These top city lists are utterly bogus and useless; I can do much better just by doing a little web research…

• Social Media – I’ve blogged about Facebook and Linkedin, etc. before, but I need to make that a regular item here. I work in the technology every day and this is an area where I can leverage my work and this blog together. The field is changing faster than anyone can track–just try setting up your google reader to watch the rss feed from Social Media Today, for example and you will quickly be overwhelmed by the volume of writing on web 2.0 stuff. I have over 1000 unread articles waiting for me there…they will continue to wait…
• Politics – I think the details of Presidential candidate issue statements are less important than how they plan to engage the creative class. So I’m not going to critique the Obama health care plan vs. Hillary’s, but rather consider what I can pull out of these communications that might sound remotely like it is comprehending a creative class perspective. This is probably one of those themes that will be infrequently substantive.
• Social Entrepreneurship – I just finished reading How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein and it helped me understand that there is so much good going on in the world we just don’t know about. I’d like to take some time to profile short stories of the efforts of people like J. B. Schramm who founded College Summit, an organization that helps high school students get to college.
• Book Review – I’ve written book reviews of Wikinomics and The Missing Class for Wendy Waters blog All About Cities. It’s a fun challenge and a natural outlet for the ideas that flow from all my commuter train reading.
• Generational Lens – I’m ambivalent about the whole Generation X (me) vs. Y (Millennials) vs. Baby Boomers motif that powers much of the writing behind my favorite blog, The Brazen Careerist. On the one hand, I think conflict is overstated and the analysis is full of generalizations that don’t fit. But I think it can be really helpful to consider that the world is really changing and to see it through the eyes of the next generation. I need to post an article to ypcommons again soon on just that topic…the world really is changing–not just “new to you” based on my gen x perspective to complement the gen y folks who are legion.

So what’s the point of all those themes? Shouldn’t I just pick one? How can I possible write on all that stuff?! OK, in one (no two!) sentences:

Social media gives social entrepreneurs new, effective tools to make our world a better place than any political action alone could accomplish. Young people, based primarily in cities, will be the driving, trans formative force in our culture and, over the next generation, will solve problems we now think are intractable.

In my spare time, when I’m not trying to fill in all those blanks…there is the local community action I’ve signed up for…

• I need to kickstart westwoodblog.org and possibly revive westwoodwiki.org as tools here locally. I need to figure out how to find more local news to write about and stir up some interest in people contributing. One idea I had this morning was to blog about the preschool admission process…which actually got me to thinking someone should do a comprehensive news article on the many issues that come out of that…
• I need to generate some action with the Westwood Public Access Cable board that I am on…I’ve drafted a mission statement and thought up a needs survey that I posted on my westwoodblog, but I need to get the process moving more directly with the other board members before we are scheduled to meet again in late January. I think the westwoodblog and wiki could be great tools in this respect.

So that’s what I think about in the shower and on the train. Then it takes me 3 times as long to write it up!

Despite moving around a great deal, I was an activist. I even managed to get myself elected to the 1992 Democratic National Convention, and I worked on Capitol Hill. But that was all volunteer, (i.e. no money) and when I started working, I found that not only did I not have as much time; I also started to lose interest in politics.

It’s not that I don’t care. But I can’t see the relevance of the infrastructural politics anymore. Locally, we have a board of selectmen and the full democracy version of the New England town meeting. So, you can go down to the annual meeting with all your neighbors and sit for 3-4 hours while they talk about everything under the sun and accept or reject the recommendations of the finance committee.

I went to a couple of town meetings in my prior town where they have a representative town meeting (you cannot vote unless you have been elected a “member” in your precinct) and for me, it was an irrelevant waste of time. I was new in town and it seemed most of the time was wasted debating trivial expenditures while the planned $50 million renovation of the high school had already been decided.

The town meeting may work well for the town, but it doesn’t give me any sense of participation or control over things. To really effect change, you need to get involved on the town committees. That is a serious time commitment and it is just not that compelling in a general sense. For long-time residents and retired or part-time workers, it makes sense. But I work in the city all day; I don’t have time to be that involved. There may be nothing wrong with the town meeting; but it is unrealistic to expect people like me will be involved in any meaningful way, unless there is a single issue that really gets my interest. A general interest in the common good, a desire to plant roots in the community…yes, yes, that is all good, but for me, I just don’t seem to find the time for that. Besides, how do I know if I will still be living in this town in 5 years?

My attitude is anathema to my sense of activism. It is selfish and superficial, I know. But it is a product of the reality of how my work and home life is arranged. I want to be involved…but I don’t want to be involved THAT much. I want to make a contribution on my terms. I cannot attend meetings during the day while I am working. I self-censor myself because I want the quality of my involvement to be worthwhile. I don’t want to just show up all uninformed with some off-the-wall opinion. And I don’t want to have to sit through hours of boring discussion of issues I don’t care about. So, I end up not being involved at all.

I suspect my perspective is a common one among creative professionals. Unless you live right in the middle of a community that is core to your identity, it is hard to get excited about the day to day workings of local government. When you commute–even a relatively short commute of 10 miles–your community may be nothing but a “bedroom community.” All you do is sleep there. But I want something a little more than that…I want to find a way to contribute with the small amount of time I do have, without having to sit through hours of boring discussion.

We need to create structures in our communities to facilitate participation from people like me. The town doesn’t need my opinion on 95% of the town warrant. And an opinion is not really participation if it is only voiced at the last minute, as the final debate is happening. But there are probably many ways I could help and gain a sense of involvement in my community.

I try to keep this blog up with regular postings. But Thanksgiving was busy. However, here’s what I’ve been up to…

Wendy Waters, who blogs about cities at All About Cities, asked me to take a shot at writing a city-themed book review. You can read how I think the principles of global collaboration described in Don Tappscott and Anthony Williams’ book Wikinomics apply to cities on her site. Here’s an excerpt:

…Wikinomics is not a book about cities. However, the social changes it describes will have profound effects on cities because they impact how we live and work as well as how businesses perform. Here are five potential implications of the “wiki effect” on cities…

I continue guest blogging on Rebecca Ryan‘s ypcommons.org with this piece on how I believe younger people are going to start having babies sooner…or something like that.

…I think if I’d read this when I was 25, I’d have said “not applicable to me.” But then it was, a decade later. Did I just get older or is there also a social change going on that will influence younger people as I predict?

Finally…inspired by Brian Keaney‘s work with myDedham, I launched WestwoodBlog. It is amazing what you can do with a little technology these days. Now if I could just get by on less sleep, I’d be all set!

We are finally starting to learn details on the retail composition of the planned Westwood Station. The project cleared a major hurdle earlier this month by receiving a final environmental impact certificate from the state.

To your elation or dismay, depending on your perspective, one of the big anchors will be Target. Other retail tenants will include bookstore Barnes & Noble, outdoor clothier Eddie Bauer, woman’s clothing stores Talbots, J. Jill, Chico’s and Coldwater Creek. Additionally, PetSmart will be in the complex, if they obtain a permit for a kennel.

According to the Westwood Press article, restaurants will include seafood restaurant McCormick & Schmick’s, Italian bistro Brio, Japanese steakhouse Benihana, California Pizza Kitchen, Flemings Steak House, sushi bar RA Sushi and fusion restaurant Not Your Average Joes.

Today, in my guest blog on ypcommons, I talked at length (of course) about my personal efforts to get more engaged in my town. Many of my suggestions/principles closely parallel the kind of ideas it takes to “get ahead” at work–or just be a “contributor” in general. It’s a work in progress.

Also, I found this draft article by Kit Hodge, CEO of the Neighbors Project about how to involve young people in urban planning. There are a lot of great “web 2.0″ ideas in there about how a town/city should develop an engagement strategy that reaches out to younger people who are typically out of the “word of mouth” loop, but very connected online.

There were two things I meant to write about last week; I managed to cover the first in talking about my church’s Community Harvest Dinner along with many links to local resources for eating local. Then, on Friday night, I saw that PBS NOW ran a piece on the same topic! For more info on “locavores,” check out Growing Local, Eating Local on PBS.

To further complete the deja vu experience, PBS NOW also covered the topic I did not find time to write about: Saturday’s National Day of Climate Action. I received an email from the Boston Critical Mass mailing list about a planned bike ride from Boston to Concord–recreating the ride of Paul Revere as part of the event that would culminate in Concord with an environmental rally with speeches by Senator Kerry and Congresswoman Niki Tsongas. That sounded like an awesome idea, but 1) no way to spend half a day riding my bike by myself while my pregnant wife gallantly tries to entertain our two toddlers, and 2) we had a tropical storm hit us that day in Boston.

A long time ago, I blogged about what a great sense of place I get from riding my bike in New England…and I think a bike ride to an environmental event is a great idea. I mean, it seems kind of lame to pile everyone into a minivan, drive 20 miles, then rally about reducing CO2 emissions. So, in the end, we stayed home.

But here are some youtube videos from Boston:

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Next Saturday, November 10, 2007, at 6:30pm, my church will host a “Community Harvest Dinner,” a meal prepared from ingredients collected from local farms. It’s a great idea both for promoting community and stimulating discussion about some of the great resources we have locally. There is more info on the First Church website.

The vegetables will come from Powisset farm in Dover, which recently started a community supported agriculture (CSA) program. CSA farms sell “shares” in the farm to the public. Then, each week during the growing season, shareholders can go pick up a basket of produce. It’s a great way to get fresh locally grown food.

I first became interested in locally-grown food after reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Back in April, I blogged about my concerns about the industrialization of our food supply and sought to learn more. I have found a ton of resources. Please, if you know of more, especially those local to the Dedham/Westwood/Boston area, comment on this blog with your additions…

• Local Harvest is a nationwide database of farmers’ markets and CSAs. It is a good starting point, but at the time I searched, I only found a smattering of farmers markets, typically at inconvenient times (when I am at work.) Now, I find the site has been updated to include many more resources.
• the (Town of) Newton Conservators has a page listing Boston suburban CSA farms
• New England Grown is a “webzine” devoted to farming and supporting farming in New England with links to many resources on finding locally grown food.
• the Eat Local Challenge is a blogsite combining the efforts of many writers and activists who talk about the advantages of eating local and tips for finding more resources.
• The 100 Mile Diet began with one Vancouver, BC couple’s experiment to see if and how they could only eat food that was grown within 100 miles of their home–and turned into a movement for similar projects like the Upper Valley Localvores in Vermont.
• Boston Organics will deliver a basket of organic, often locally grown produce weekly. It’s not as local as joining a CSA, but it does provide a way to schedule a steady stream of quality food that is delivered right to your door.

There is a distinction between organic and local…one of the points in Pollan’s book was that organic has become such a fashionable trend these days that there is big money to be made in slapping that label on food. (Whole Foods disputes his perspective here.) Essentially, organic food is simply food that is grown without pesticides. Beyond that, it can be nothing but marketing hype to get us to pay more money for food that is being shipped from halfway around the world. I predict, within the next 5 years, we will see a McDonald’s campaign, not unlike the “supersize me” campaign, called “Go organic!” “Would you like your Big Mac with organic cheese on a whole wheat bun? It’s only $1 more.” No thanks. When I want a Big Mac, I’ll eat a Big Mac, with no illusions that it is healthy for me.

I think the Community Supported Agriculture movement is potentially a great antidote to the at-times mindless elitism that fuels a new breed of excess…people believing they have to spend $4 for a healthy loaf of bread at Whole Foods. We go into grocery stores these days and read the labels like never before…as one nutrition villain is replaced by another: trans fat? 0 grams. OK…but the second ingredient is still “partially hydrogenated soybean oil”…wheat bread? is it “whole” wheat? Is it 100% whole wheat? What’s the second ingredient that makes it not taste like cardboard? High Fructose Corn Syrup of course! Argh!

Local food is about knowing where your food came from. It can be about developing a closer relationship to the producers of that food. Or it can just be better tasting. We have many food options and this is a fascinating one to explore.

Finally, I could not resist posting a video about the 47th Avenue Farm, a CSA in Portland, Oregon. I grew up with farmers in rural Virginia and it is bit odd to hear someone talk about trying out farming without quitting her day job…but apparently, she has found something that works for her and her community, so check it out:

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And, if you are still reading after watching that video, here’s a video slideshow/podcast from Texas A&M that describes the whole idea behind CSAs:

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I posted today on YPCommons about how I think a lot of Generation Y analysis is a bit elitist and presumptuous and how we need to figure out how to bridge the class divide between creative class/knowledge workers and working and service class.

I don’t know if I really made my point…or if it’s even worth making. But as I’ve blogged here before, sometimes I read this stuff about the difficulties of desk-jocky types like myself getting along at work and I feel embarrassed when I imagine how trivial it all may seem to people like my parents who sacrificed early on to help make my great lifestyle possible today.

I just finished reading Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande. It’s my book club book for this month, and although I didn’t think I would find it that interesting, I was surprised by what I learned.

In the first chapter, Gawande describes how health workers in Karnataka, India responded to a polio outbreak in June 2003. Their task was to inoculate 4.2 million children in a matter of days to contain the one “index case” that had been identified. Eradicating polio is all about the last drop of effort–the immense expense and difficulty of containing outbreaks as soon as they occur. He describes it as a challenge of diligence–of the kind of commitment to do what needs to be done in the face of depressing odds and often impossible conditions. But the doctors do it because they know that this is the only way to win and hopefully add polio to the list of plagues that has been wiped from the face of the Earth. In addition the the Herculean effort involved in vaccinating millions of children around the epicenter of an outbreak, he also notes the information challenge–the problem that every hour that goes by before the outbreak is noticed, the scope of the mop up operation increases exponentially. If we could instantly recognize that an infectious disease was breaking out, the mop up would be orders of magnitude easier. And when we fail to detect the outbreak…it jeopardizes decades of work to eradicate the disease.

The solution to the information problem may be coming…from Google, of all places. Several years ago, the Public Health Agency of Canada, using technology developed by Nstein, Inc., developed something called the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN). The system monitors tens of thousands of news feeds from all over the world, performs sophisticated text mining to extract contextual meaning, then watches for patterns that could indicate an infectious disease outbreak. An example could be a pattern of news reports in a region about people with disease symptoms. The system would give medical professionals immediate notice of a potential crisis developing. The GPHIN system was instrumental in containing SARS in 2002.

This technology caught the attention of Larry Brilliant, who described it as the nucleus of what he would like to develop if he had the resources… Brilliant won a 2006 TED prize to help implement his vision, and assumed leadership of Google’s philanthropic division, Google.org. Since 2006, there has been little public information about the progress of this project, but one can only imagine what will emerge from Google Labs to take an awesome idea to the next level.

When we begin to think about the possibilities behind massive parsing and text analytics applied to public media, it is easy to think of a dark side…or at least a more business-oriented, less philanthropic side. I wonder if my blog is being parsed by DoD computers in search of patterns that could indicate I am secretly coordinating an Al Qaeda cell? Are my phone calls being converted to text and similarly parsed? I’m not that worried; to me it seems the positive value is probably so much greater than any conspiracy fantasy I might entertain.

In Malcom Gladwell’s Blink, he described how, in World War II, the British assembled thousands of “interceptors” to listen to encoded morse code transmissions from German operators. Although they could not decode the transmissions, they could, by listening to the cadence of the transmissions, identify the individual “fists” of the Germans. They know who was sending the messages. Over time they were able to use this information to follow the movements of different units.

Text analytics is very different than simply identifying who is talking. But it is a similar step toward automation of a subconscious skill…not so much the development of artificial intelligence, but of a catalyst for collective intelligence. James Surowiecki talks of the great challenge in harnessing the power of the wisdom of crowds as building structures and systems to effectively aggregate the crowd’s intelligence. The kind of text analytics, early warning system envisioned by Larry Brilliant is an evolutionary leap forward–not just for the case of identifying pandemics, but for accelerating the feedback loop in all sorts of social improvement.

Most of what I’ve written here today is simply stitching together a few fascinating articles and other people’s blog posts. But imagine if a Google technology were crawling the entire blogosphere looking for patterns and connections…and imagine you could ask such a system a question. I feel we are venturing into serious “psychohistory” territory here. Rather than fearing the future, we can imagine a world where our many contributions, however ever individually small, might be pulled into a greater good.

After she read my comments about her book, Rebecca Ryan asked me to guest blog on her site at ypcommons.org. I’ll be contributing something every Tuesday; check out my first post about whether or not people still idolize working at companies like Yahoo now that we’re all reprioritizing our lives in favor of a life-work balance…

I’m joined on the blog by Sam Davidson, founder of CoolPeopleCare.org. That’s actually a little intimidating–Sam is basically doing what I wish I could do full time–they have organized a website around the idea of showing young people how to make a difference in the world. He’s full of great ideas and practical suggestions like this one to set up an hour a week to just brainstorm with other interesting people. Small steps like that will help get me to the next level.

After reading Bowling Alone, it is pretty hard not to think television is, in many ways, to blame for the demise of community involvement and, by extension, society. I have resisted that conclusion for a long time because it is so easy to blame television…and so many elitists revel in their denigration of TV and people who are “addicted” to it. Putnam makes, I think, a good effort not to fall into that simple argument, but his data analysis reveals that unquestionably, sitting there watching the “boob tube” is a depressing, ultimately unsatisfying experience.

I am sitting here in front of a black 55″ screen, while I write this blog…or read a book…or talk with my wife–in all of those cases I am not engaged in the community. Perhaps it is better for my own psychic health, but I am not building any social capital. If this blog were being read by more than a half dozen people…perhaps one could argue that the writing and thinking was in some way contributing to things–but it is not true engagement.

So what should I do? The kids are in bed and realistically, the most engaging thing tonight is watching “The Office” and then trying to surf between Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs. Or, perhaps I could go upstairs and install some software on my computer in order to get a pet project of mine, a Boston version of this bicycling trip planner website working. But working on that is a very solitary pursuit, it isolates me in my home office hacking away on my computer while my wife knits downstairs.

There are plenty of things to do…some of them are more “valuable” than others and all involve a different allocation of time and tradeoffs. But none of them involve the kind of face-to-face community interractions that build social capital. Of these activities, arguably, watching TV might be the most beneficial because it:

• allows my wife and me time to relax and decompress without worrying about keeping up with the kids or work or whatever that has been nonstop since we woke up
• allows my wife and I to share time together, commenting on what we are watching and sharing the same experience. One of the things I recognized recently when reading Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence was the importance of the subconscious mirroring neurons in our brains…the idea that “just being there” is important and healthy because when you are with another person, you tend to get in tune with them at a subconscious level. The TV provides a common stimulus that we each react to and then react to each others reactions. We’re not just staring blankly at the screen.
• also along the lines of “shared experience” the TV show provides “something to talk about” at work. At my current job, at least half the people are anti-TV types, and there is no water cooler gathering, no shared trivial experiences to talk about. But in nearly every other school and work environment, the popular TV culture provided a safe (i.e. non-political) source of material to start conversations over and engage in the kind of chit-chat that helps build and maintain basic rapport. In contrast, politics, especially in an environment where we are all basically liberals, leads to long time-wasting discussions about things we can’t do anything about.

Now if that is just a rationalization, let us again consider what else “better” I could be doing? First, I could consult this list at BetterTogether.org for some great (and simple) ideas like “Call an old friend.”

That’s great for somebody who is actively engaged in trying to understand this issue…but the fact that I have to go find a website to tell me to call an old friend is pretty sick. The fact is, those obvious, simple, NICE things on the list are not occurring to people. People, in general, have gotten out of the habit of doing the kinds of social things that used to be common social sense/decency.

Does TV make it too easy to turn off your social brain? Perhaps. If we didn’t have TV, would sheer boredom compel us to get up off our butts and go talk to our neighbors? I don’t know; I might prefer to read a book. Going out and meeting people is hard work. Staying home and watching TV…or reading a book…or writing a blog…or writing computer software…are all much easier.

To improve the bonds of community, we need change that is organic, affecting many people at a subconscious level, not a rational guilt trip spurring them into action. We don’t need to be browbeaten by people who complain that voter turnout is low, so get up off your lazy butt and go do your civic duty! But then, it gets back the same basic point I reached in my last long post about activism. You just need to do it. I need to call that old friend. I need to smile at people on the train. I need to hold the elevator and thank the guy who bags my groceries. We all need to start a contagion of niceness and re-engagement.

Turning off the TV is not enough and actually, I still don’t think its an answer. A better answer is to use tonight’s episode of The Office (which I’ve now missed half of) to spark a conversation with a coworker I would otherwise have had nothing to say to tomorrow.

Since my last posting, I have been consumed by work and family. But several books have gotten me to thinking about what an exciting convergence is underway today.

The most recent book is “Wikinomics” –link in sidebar to the book, link here to the collaborative website.

It’s a long book, but the essence of what is going on is that I believe we are entering an era in which small actions by everyone add up to big things. The term “WikiPolitic” I just made up; I mean it to capture the idea that participation models in not only business, but also society in general, are moving towards an environment where everyone contributes what they can, when they can, to a system that over time is learning to effectively integrate these actions into a greater good.

My previous view was that individuals led by action or thought. Certain key people always mattered. Someone had to get the ball rolling. Some individual was behind everything of consequence. Group action was always necessary, but leadership was the difference between success and failure.

It is a new world. Leadership is not irrelevant, but the idea of planning and orchestrating big projects and big ideas to a desired result is just not fast enough anymore. What is important is getting people’s contributions out there: give people a platform, not only for ideas, but for action.

Our politics are fossilized into irrelevancy. I watched the State of the Union address the other night, and I found myself looking at that assemblage of our representatives thinking: what a bunch of old farts! And I’m in my late 30s! I thought, as I grew older, that I would view our elected officials as closer to my age, but it seems they have aged into antiquity. I know, that’s a cheap, superficial observation, but it’s my gut reaction, watching those guys sit there playing their game instead of doing anything that matters.

Barack Obama – I read his other book, The Audacity of Hope. Great. I agree with him on most every issue. But should he be President? Actually, I think what we need is about 50 more of him in the Senate and 200 or so in the House before we start talking about the Presidency. He’s got great ideas, but then so do lots of other people. If he were President, is that the best way to make those ideas happen?

Jimmy Carter – I read his book on Palestine. Thanks for telling me how truly messed up things are in Israel. But what is really amazing is how much work Jimmy Carter has done for all of his life. He’s probably done 100 times more good since leaving office. People can disagree with his opinions, but here is a guy who goes to Lebanon and shuttles around between all the various voting places, demanding that people be allowed to vote. He walks the walk.

Al Gore – Don’t waste your time running again. It’s a distraction. You have found your role as a champion for the environment. But my only hope now is that millions of people will hear your message and start to think differently.

So much else is going on beneath the radar of mass media. Of course there is the blogosphere…and while 99.99% of it is mindless incessant chatter it is also providing a medium for people with good ideas to connect. My blog will not win a Pulitzer prize or whatever. But one person reading the one intelligent post by me might go do something to add to it…and so on…but if I just sit here with my thoughts locked up in my head, nothing ever happens.

There are websites like TakingITGlobal, kind of an activist mySpace, where thousands of young people are connecting to do good in the world. Maybe a lot of it is superficial or naive, but I think we are entering a stage in society where these online tools perform the aggregation function described in The Wisdom of Crowds so that the dumb stuff will cancel out and things that matter will rise to the top. Even that analogy fails to really “get it”–it is not about content–it’s about action. People will filter what they need. The great thing is that we now have a platform to throw our ideas out there.

It took so much to make a difference before. I don’t have time to go to the town meetings on a regular basis or get involved in the town committees on various issues, etc. Nobody with a career and life does. Sorry. If you are lucky to have a career in social issues, great, but most people aren’t ready to be that committed. We just don’t have the time to pay our dues. So we dropped out. No more.

We can find the time to occasionally stay up until 2am writing. Perhaps someone will pick up on a thread we start. Perhaps something will make it to the top of Digg that fires up a few thousand people to do something like they did with the Katrina PeopleFinder project. The barriers to action are dropping. People will find small ways to make a difference instead of sitting there watching the news helplessly.

Times are changing. The WikiPolitic is not about email lists of Howard Dean supporters or 100,000 like-minded blogs all complaining about the same thing. It’s not even about sophisticated ways of organizing old politics. It is about what unexpected collaboration efforts, independent of representative democracy, will be born out of the this new landscape. Blogs, wikis, chatrooms, mySpace, YouTube, flikr, etc. are the many blades of grass on a limitless field of opportunity. We don’t know what is coming next. And no one controls it.

Actually, I don’t have a concrete answer for that, but I finally “got it” just now to understand what’s up with these sites.

Social networking sites make the transaction costs of maintaining “weak ties” almost nill and therefore, have the potential to make all of us (especially those who are introverts like me) more effective in ways that are not immediately obvious. OK, translation…

Weak ties are (summarizing the theory, very crudely) relationships we have with people that are not really friendships, but are enough of a connection and familiarity that we feel we know something about the person in a particular context. I worked with a guy for 6 months. I know a lot about what he’s like in the office. I have no clue about anything else beyond that. I went to school with a guy 20 years ago and we worked together on a project for a few months. But I haven’t seen him since.

Now let’s say you are trying to get your job hunt network put together from scratch. If you read career advice books, you know that you should always be networking, but nobody really likes doing that, so most people find themselves looking for a job change after 5 years of having no interactions with anyone outside their immediate work environment. Most of use feel very apprehensive about being perceived as desperate losers who are now suddenly calling up everybody they ever worked with to get them to try and find a job. And if you don’t know anybody, you’re supposed to “informational interview” which is hard to do without feeling like a fake. You are trying to “work” your weak tie network…but since you neglected it, you have to really invest a lot of strong tie effort just to get it off the ground. Some people are much better at this than others…others grit their teeth and learn to do it and practice until it works.

Now how about a political example…suppose I wanted to learn more about a local political issue…or maybe I have a strong opinion about it and want to do something about it. What I need is access to a lot of people who will hear my point of view and agree with it enough to maybe vote one way or another, make a phone call to a representative, or maybe go to a meeting. I don’t need these people to be my best friends. If I were already active in the community, and it was 1950, maybe I’d be able to toss out an idea at the weekly bowling league game or at the barber shop…but again, that’s not the case now. I’ve met one of my neighbors so far…so what can I do?

I could organize a grassroots movement. Yeah, right. Again, I need weak ties, but going door-to-door and pitching your big idea is kind of a strong tie mode of operation. Would you invite yourself over to your neighbor’s house to talk about health care reform? You can launch into a topic like that with closer friends and family, but if you do it to random people, then they will think you must be running for Congress or trying to raise money.

Social networking sites don’t give you an automatic network, but they lay the infrastructure for preserving the weak ties you naturally create every day. There’s a very low expectation on a site like Facebook, I think. It might be cool to reconnect. I’m not looking to date you (I indicated I was married in my profile!) and I don’t expect you to write me recommendations like on LinkedIn. Let’s just see what happens.

Maybe I will notice an old familiar face and click on their profile and find out they are doing something really cool now. I might email them and say hi. That is a lot less trouble than the email requesting an informational interview because I just got fired and need to find a job. I don’t have to invite them over to dinner and try to develop a relationship with them; we can just be Facebook friends…whatever that is.

I think younger people are starting out with these massive networks. Us old farts are jumping in and not knowing what the heck to do. We see some guy on myspace with 20,000 friends and laugh…that’s silly. Nobody can have 20,000 friends. I’d be happy to have 20. Actually, being such an introvert, I kind of feel like I have 1 best friend and that’s enough. But my criteria for friend is such a strong-tie thing that I underestimate how many people have some kind of weak-tie link to me.

So what do we do with all this? Again, I don’t know. But I think it IS part of the answer to how we rebuild community in our modern world. We overestimate how strong the old ties were because really, they were just weak ties that were massively reinforced by community norms and structures. Everyone knew everyone else in town. Well, maybe getting everyone in town signed up on facebook is a start to 21st century community building.

Back in January, I blogged about and coined the term WikiPolitic to describe my optimistic view of a future of empowered, connected people collaborating to solve the problems of the world. The term came out of reading the book Wikinomics and was not meant to mean that wikis, collaborative websites like the Wikipedia, would become political, but that perhaps the sum of all newer collaboration and social networking technologies might allow individuals to make small contributions that would add up to big results. But that’s a Ph.D thesis topic…let’s talk wikis for a moment…

A wiki is a website that allows readers to edit any page, typically by just clicking an edit button on that page. You register an account and then “have at it.” So, someone might start a page, then other people would contribute more pages and edit the existing pages to improve them. The Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia. I might, for example, decide that the Wikipedia needs a page about my hometown of Smithfield, Virginia. In fact, that page has existed since 2002 and was edited just last month. If I saw something wrong on that page, I could fix it.

It’s a long argument about why wikis work, but let’s just set aside all the obvious criticisms for a moment and consider if there is some way this could help us become more empowered to effect social change.

In a blog, typically one person writes an opinion and people comment on it. Community blogs have many people writing and many comments–see my favorite progressive blog sites below. It’s like a running transcript of a political party that never ends.

In a wiki, although the history of all changes are tracked, users are encouraged to delete and rewrite. It is designed to be a collaboration, not just everyone taking a turn talking and arguing. Sometimes wikis have links off to discussion boards so people can argue away until they reach consensus, then update the wiki article. This approach means the ultimate site is very much a group project–not an individual effort. Your long winded opinionated piece will quickly be overwritten by someone with another opinion or simply removed because it doesn’t help get to the root issues at hand.

It is hard to get wikis going. I’ve been trying to get one going at work and while the technical people have taken to it, it has not caught on yet among others. The irony is that the wiki is not a technical thing–it’s just writing and ideas–but it is an approach that techies tend to take to faster than others…so it always seems like a tech thing, not a business solution.

There have been some attempts to set up political wikis…

Campaigns Wikia is one. I took a look at this site and browsed the issues, examining Health Care to see what was going on. Unfortunately, what I found is a lot of information, like an encyclopedia article, but not much of a link to action. Then I found another wikia site, Politics Wikia, that appears to resemble a hub of political bloggers. At the top level, the site is divided into channels for Democrats, Republicans, etc. There is much more activity apparent on this site, but it is all highly politicized…the discussion is interesting, but there is just not the intensity of involvement that overflows my google reader that is pointed at DailyKos and BlueMassGroup for example. I’m overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time.

A well-functioning wiki really works to roll up the ideas and suggestions of many people into a collaborative document. It is easier to imagine this working with objective, non-controversial topics where there is a critical mass of contributors who share a norm of peer review…who are all in pursuit of an objective truth.

Even before wikis, in 1996, I was part of a project to create something called SmartVoter. 10 years later, Smart Voter has expanded to several states. One of the key features of Smart Voter was not simply that you could enter your address and see a sample ballot for your precinct, but that we encouraged the local candidates to post information online. This was back when few candidates had their own websites! People found this very helpful for the judicial races and the many lesser-publicized races on the ballot.

I’ve also just recently started a wiki for my town–nobody knows about it yet though, so there is nothing in there except a few articles I wrote. And it is definitely not political–I’m talking about using it to post information about preschool, trash collection, sports schedules, running routes, etc., not how we achieve health care reform or get the troops back from Iraq. I think, as soon as you go political, you are going to draw the fire of extremists and hackers who want to deface your site. But perhaps, if you adhere to a public service philosophy, you can achieve common ground and build participation based on a shared goal of creating a resource.

Update: here’s a good link from Social Media Today about situations where wikis don’t work. And links within to more discussion advocating wikis…

An article in today’s Globe, The Downside of Diversity, reports on the recent paper by “Bowling Alone” author Robert Putnam. In a nutshell, the paper produces evidence that increasing diversity–the inevitable result of immigration and globalization–weakens community:

Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations’ or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

As the Globe article describes, Putnam is an engaged social scientist…he wants to make community work, not just analyze it. And publishing a paper that seems to go against the mainstream mantra of “diversity is great!” is a gusty move. He uncovered uncomfortable data and rather than minimize it, he proceeds to advocate for things we can do about it. But I have a couple of “quibbles” with all this…

1. What is so great about diversity anyway? For me, that question was answered by James Surowiecki’s fascinating book, The Wisdom of Crowds where he illustrates how certain kinds of problems can be solved far better by aggregating the diverse insights of many people rather than relying on “experts.” Intellectual diversity can come from a team of ethnically homogeneous people with vastly different life experiences just as it can come from a team of ethnically-diverse people. It is also very possilbe to have an ethnically-diverse team of people who are not really intellectually diverse because they all went through the same colleges and credential-vetting process. At any rate, if you have diversity and a means to aggregate the information and collaborate effectively, you can make better decisions. But community is not just about decisions…it’s about living day to day. Maybe the diverse town meeting can make a good choice, but that doesn’t mean anyone is happy about it. The concept of better does not just mean that good decisions are made; it has to also mean people are happier. So just because diversity might be great for a team solving a problem doesn’t mean it’s great for the community as a whole.

2. What about the infrastructure? What about technology? Putnam’s Bowling Alone book came out before Web 2.0 and online community was anything more than an idea about freaks in chat rooms. This paper doesn’t address technology either–probably because things are still so very nascent and changing so fast that it is hard to study the minimal effect that might currently be happening and impossible to compare to anything historical. However, my view is that so much of the “good old days” of community was based on such a strong set of shared norms and assumptions that weak social ties were easy to maintain. Everybody knew what they were supposed to do. People who did weird stuff like change jobs ever 2 years were outcast and insignificant. We had both religions in town: Baptist and Methodist.

I don’t really think about ethnic diversity…I don’t worry about it at all. Yet I feel that I am isolated in my town. I have met a few people and asked how they felt connected, etc. and it all comes down to school and kids. When you have kids in school, you will suddenly be a part of the town. I feel that on particular issues, yes, I would be motivated to learn more and participate in the political process, but that’s not how you really get strong community ties or neighborhood, etc. But I’m not a great test case anyway–I’m not a social person to begin with…but I think in the past, there were more clubs, more things to do, more structured work/family time, so that I would have developed more into the community. The whole set of community enhancing infrastructure items are gone or less accessible now–and it has nothing to do with the number of immigrants in town.

Putnam quotes Barack Obama at the end of his paper, in the context of how we should be searching for way to bridge the gaps between ethnic groups. I agree with Obama and would take it a step further to note that much of what Obama was arguing for was that we overestimate the size of the gaps, due to the polarization of extremist politicians. When he talks to people about concrete issues that affect them, he finds most of us are actually a lot closer than we think in terms of shared values. But then, on the national stage, it turns into such vitriolic rhetoric that we imagine we are besieged in a nation divided into red and blue states populated either by Godless Atheists who want to convert our children to homosexuality or by people who believe the “End of Days” is coming soon.

It is complex. This study is a good, uncomfortable complexity that will help people who want to make things better, see through to solutions and actions that make a difference.