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How do we get back the neighborhood?
Of course I'm referencing the 2012 TED prize The talk which inspired this question has been posted: Jen Pahlka talking about "Peace Corps for Geeks" aka- coding for government. One of the ideas in that talk which resonated for me was it's not about making the bureaucracy easier- it's about solving the problems. More often than not that means getting the bureaucracy out of the way and letting people be neighborly. "Adopt a fire hydrant"- shovel it out when there's a snow storm. That's pretty simple stuff and it promotes Community - with an upper case "C".
I've seen my own home town go from a place where I could walk to everything (the butcher the baker the candlestick maker) to one where there are 30,000 vehicle round trips a day. This is for a town of 6000 residents. The service providers drive in and out for work. The residents drive out and in to go to school, the hospital, the rec center and to find lower priced goods. Employee housing (also out of town-but closer) has resulted in a boost for the construction industry which increases the service trips in and out. Placing a transfer tax on real estate has favored flipping and cowboy development. I only mention this to emphasize that treating the symptom doesn't work and the unintended consequences can be devastating.
So, how do we get back the neighborhood? How do we get back the Community?
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Daniel Bassill
a) This link points to the Boston Indicators Project where there is a pie-chart that reflects issues important to Boston. Click into any slice and you dig deeper into that issue. http://www.bostonindicators.org/Indicators2008/
b) This link points to a site that I host where a map of Chicago is used. It includes overlays showing poverty and poor schools, as well as sites of volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs
c) This link points to a map of information hosted in one section of my library - http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1238727620187_1222661202_30228/Learnng%20Network%20-%20Research,%20Resources.cmap
d) In a different TED discussion a writer showed how discussions could be mapped. http://www.ted.com/conversations/331/what_if_ted_utilized_the_mind.html.
e) At http://debategraph.org/mentoring_kids_to_careers is another way to map discussions.
If communities can provide sites that include these concepts they can expand the information that people have to build understanding of the issues and possible solutions. They create a platform anyone would be able to use. They also might make it easier to follow discussions related to specific topics. Using GIS maps the result could be more people sharing the same geographic working together.
However, this is only a start. In order to get large numbers of people into these discussions all sorts of marketing and advertising techniques need to be used on an on-going basis to draw more people's to these sites. I wrote a blog article about this earlier this week. http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/2012/03/making-sense-of-info-using-it-to-solve.html In this I pointed to a concept called Massive Online Organized Curriculum (MOOC) that encourages on-going and in-depth learning by large numbers of people.
The tools to make this possible keep expanding.
Richard Harris
Ziska Childs 50+
http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html
and to a slightly lesser degree:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jer_thorp_make_data_more_human.html
I'd *love* to see Deb Roy's system hooked up in the Council Room.