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November 16, 2003
Research Question on Civic Software (aka "pls help me with my homework")
Posted by Clay Shirky
What cities, towns, villages, hamlets, burgs, municipalities & c. are doing a good job provisioning software to support community -- not just "Pay your parking tickets online", but actually supporting or fostering communal involvement.
I'm looking for examples, if there are any, of a pattern like "Meetup for one town" or "UpMyStreetIfMyStreetIsYourStreet." (It may be that this sort of thing is better provisioned by a service of UpMyStreet's national breadth, so there my in fact not be a lot of places, other than intentional communities, doing this.)
In any case, if anyone has illustrations, exemplars, inputs, counter-factuals, specimens, case histories, & c., I'm all ears, either in the comments here or at
clay@shirky.com.
Comments (6)
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1. Shimon Rura on November 16, 2003 10:44 PM writes...
The town where I live, Arlington, Massachusetts (a suburb of Boston near Cambridge) has an excellent e-mail list, available at http://arlingtonlist.org/ . An email list isn't really what I think of as provisioning software, but it's an easy, informal way to get to know people. It's also a major reuse channel -- people give away furniture, kids' toys, etc. to others in the neighborhood. I'm surprised at how useful this list is, and I think it has a lot to do with the particular scale, concentration of technical savvy, and other demographic features of Arlington.
Permalink to Comment2. NA on November 17, 2003 9:38 AM writes...
my startup is gearing up to target 'brain drain' cities with just an app suite.
core features can be thought of as: socnets meets 'market maker for customized lifelong learning and career services'...
ideal for economic cluster development/stickiness...
so 'brain gain' cities should also come to embrace this, to avoid being leapfrogged...
see creativeclass.org to better understand our motivation...
more details upon request (if others in my company agree)...
Permalink to Comment3. Seb on November 17, 2003 10:34 AM writes...
The Italian town of Desenzano del Garda (pop. 22000) has been running an online community at http://wrc.onde.net/. I believe it's basically a FirstClass message board that is being used by citizens to discuss pretty much everything under the sun. Apparently, it is very successful - very few people in town don't know about Onde.
I could only find oldish stuff on the web about the project: http://www.onde.net/progetto/www9/
I learned about Onde from meeting Maurizio, the administrator, at the (virtual) community informatics workshop during the WWW'2003 conference. Very nice guy. I guess you could get in touch with him to learn more about it.
Permalink to Comment4. David Brake on November 17, 2003 4:31 PM writes...
I believe http://www.maplewoodonline.com/ has had quite a significant effect on its community. I imagine you already know about Blacksburg http://www.bev.net/project/research/ , http://web.mit.edu/sap/www/colloquium96/papers/13shaw.html and "Netville" http://web.mit.edu/knh/www/pub.html
For something smaller scale, user-created
Permalink to Comment(and aimed at a low-income demographic) look at http://www.redbricks.org.uk/
5. Tim Harding on November 22, 2003 11:11 PM writes...
Clay, you should check out the latest offering from BBCi. iCan is designed for Brits to "Change the world around you".
So, yeah... the UK people are sponsoring their own provisioning of such software through their licensing fee.
Permalink to Comment6. Tim Harding on November 22, 2003 11:14 PM writes...
Oh, the comment form didn't much care for my href so google for iCan BBC and feel lucky.
Permalink to Comment