Pull the plug on RiverwestNeighborhood.org? Build it even bigger?
Once in a while people outside Milwaukee and Wisconsin ask me questions about RiverwestNeighborhood.org because they want to build something similar, or they are doing some kind of research and writing about how people are using the web to do something they think RiverwestNeighborhood.org is doing. This is always interesting for taking stock, looking forward and back. Here's the most recent interview.
1. How did you come up with the concept for riverwestneighborhood.org?
First thing, it’s not a business/commercially viable operation. I’ve never pushed or marketed ad sales for it; it’s more of a hobby site and overgrown blog for experimenting with hyperlocal publishing and an open source web platform I’ve been using since 2006. Google and affiliate based ads plus some local advertisers who walk in on their own contribute about $1000-1500/yr. Building a commercial model for a community site like this would, I think, require increasing the scope beyond just one neighborhood, but it would likely need to be subsidized by cheap or free labor, at the least. I have some tentative plans for moving things in this direction down the road. On the other hand, I might just pull the plug and put the time it takes somewhere else, maybe something similar, maybe totally different. I try to keep an open mind, and it depends on what seems like it's going to help the most people and help them help themselves. Currently—and really from the origins and predecessors to this site—the thing that attracts the most vocal interest and active collaboration with other people is crime and nuisance properties: identifying problem areas, spreading awareness of them, and working out solutions.
You could say that is the one of the main concepts, but the site is really experimental and evolving, based on what seems to be the best and lowest-maintenance way to connect people, collect and deliver news, build a positive image for Riverwest, praise and encourage good things, and also call out abuses or neglected issues, especially those that aren’t visible or of interest to our dwindling local daily newspaper. Social publishing as community self-organizing sums up the master concept for me now I guess. Here’s a good article on that from Harvard’s Niemann Journalism Lab: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/four-reasons-neighborhood-papers-might-be-the-or-a-future-of-editing/
This points to the main conceptual problem: news tends to be consumed passively; organizing aims to get people working together and doing something with information that directs them toward a sense of common interests and shared goals. Most sites like this end up being viewed as a kind of newspaper, and it originally looked and acted like a news site. User contributions have never been terribly high volume (except when people are upset about something), and this is pretty normal—the 1% rule. Moving to a more Web 2.0 concept this year (and upgrading a lot of legacy software) was an obvious, belated way to try to squeeze more out of the 1%, and in the future, I’m sure I’ll be taking this further. More seamless integration with popular social/microblogging services means people contribute more, converse more.
That’s a fairly abstract, philosophical answer to your question. There is also a pragmatic/political/historical dimension to it. The site and the way it works, how it’s been built also follows from some organizational history that may make sense if you understand the neighborhood/city context. Check the links on the about page, do a little online research about Riverwest, or read this: http://www.riverwestneighborhood.org/411/4-perceptions-and-reality/6-is-riverwest-safe.html to get a little overview of that context. And here's the organizational politics history of the site, briefly summarized.
In 2004 there was just a single web page at riverwestneighborhood.org that I set up to promote a then-emerging Riverwest Neighborhood Association. I bought the domain and set up the page without any clear plan for it becoming what you see today. This single web page was also intended to promote a neighborhood email group that dated back to about 1999-2000, called RWmail/Riverwest Mail and then RNAmail. The email group was for news, crime alerts, events, intra-neighborhood classified type ads, and a small amount of moderated discussion. I was did the technical setup and maintenance for the email group once it outgrew Yahoo Groups, which had (at the time) a cap on membership at about 200 subscribers if I recall correctly.
The web page (and email group) was hosted alongside the main site of the Riverwest Currents, a neighborhood newspaper I was part of, mainly as the webmaster, but I also wrote articles and blogged for it. The woman running the email group was also part of the newspaper. The principal people behind all these things were responsible for founding the neighborhood association as well. Initially three of them were working as community organizers partly funded by CDBG (Community Development Block Grant) money through a CDC (Community Development Corp.) attached to the YMCA. That’s ultimately what made all this stuff happen, including the unpaid volunteer work on the email group and website.
As the neighborhood association became more independent of the founders and the newspaper, there was a growing tension over the conflict of interest that arose from having the same people controlling or at least strongly influencing both entities. This was especially true with the email group--which used the neighborhood association’s name but wasn’t really an official organ of the association, which neither owned nor controlled it. The situation was probably tolerated partly because the email group was a valuable thing for about 600 people and the primary means of communication and credibility for the RNA. It took 10 hours a week of the moderator’s time—which I suppose was partly compensated because she used it to promote events, and event management/promotion was a good part of her living. When she moved and anted to step away from the email group, she asked me to take it over, and the idea came up to have me build an interactive website integrated with the email group. I had a verbal understanding with the RNA that this site was to come under the full ownership and control of the RNA when I was done, and I agreed to do it all for free, with the association reimbursing me for the annual hosting and domain costs. This relationship went on for about 6 months before breaking down short of making the transition to the RNA taking ownership. I ended up saying I would NOT turn over the website to the association and that it would become an independent community news hub anyone could join and use within the boundaries of the rules and refereeing that was set up. The alternative was to go on assisting with the destruction and (in my view) negative use of the work I had done, or else to hand it over, walk away, and watch it fail simply from technical incapacity and neglect.
This all happened because association’s board proved unwilling and was probably incapable of taking over the writing/editing/publishing duties of the site as well as some of the obligations of their own offices. The reality is, it could still take 10-15 hours of your time each month to do a good job in those positions, you're not being paid, and sometimes you're taking flak from people who are giving you the perennial "who are YOU to say, who do YOU think you are?!" treatment. That's pretty chronic "nabe politics" whether you are running a newspaper, neighborhood association, or website. They're all new little para-political entities that get interjected in the space of "public discourse" and it's not the most stable, conflict-free place to be.
Political events in the community had (at the time I was finishing the site for RNA) created intense divisions and conflicts on their board and in the community. The new website was seen by those most involved in the politics as a new force that was either on “their side” or “the other side.” The issues in play had to do with concerns about change in the socioeconomic and built environment of the neighborhood, mainly the development of a new university dorm on a brownfield that was, at the time, county land. The whole point of projects like the neighborhood association from the beginning was to have growth and greater safety but to preserve the identity and character of the area. That's a tough thing to get consensus on.
Some people opposed the dorm and other changes (around the peak of the housing market bubble) as “gentrification,” which generally meant they opposed any new development of any kind, and some went so far (in 2007-2009) as to align with radical groups in a pro-crime, anti-police message, and to cheer vandalism of businesses and new construction. Some of these people probably saw the new website I built (and the old email group) as a tool they could use for their own agendas if they could get hold of it. All the problems that had simmered before with the email group (and the newspaper) came to a head and still pop up at times.
2. How have you seen the community benefit from the website?
I have seen the community benefit from the website in a couple of ways. First, a lot of people express appreciation and thanks for it, and they usually indicate their appreciation has to do with spreading awareness of things they regard as good or as negative threats of some kind, typically crime. Especially in transitional areas and cities like Milwaukee, there is kind of “are things up or down today?” mentality that can be very sensitive, especially since outsiders and TV news tends to focus on the negatives in sensationalistic ways that get a lot of things wrong—at the neighborhood’s expense. So there is also an undercurrent of people who dislike the crime reporting period, or an apparent focus on it, but I guess they just tune out or deal with it because the "thank yous" far outweighs the complaints.
Second, I have provided a lot of material to put the neighborhood on the web, and the “all press is good press” rule seems especially true online. If people can see there is a there there, stuff is happening, and there are running conversations that have something to do with a place, or places in a larger place, it’s an indicator of life, activity, interest, good stuff. Dead and dangerous neighborhoods have no presence on the web except for bad news in the mainstream media. Everything online has an address now, and helping to amplify what’s happening on the ground sure can’t hurt. It has caused people to connect and form friendships or working relationships that might not have happened otherwise. I also suspect that by using Twitter and Outside.in—which are monitored and used by the local mainstream media—I have indirectly and unwittingly pitched stories to print and broadcast journalism. There have definitely been some more interesting, thoughtful, and positive stories done about the neighborhood than in the past—even when they dealt with overall negative subjects, like homicides. To the extent that I’m creating a voice for the area, it probably results in different treatment. When things we write or say about a subject are not seen as being answerable by the subject, we tend to take less care with them. It’s easier to kick around abstractions, but if you start to think of an area as actual people you know and can see doing things, that changes perceptions and how you get treated. But whatever I contribute is just one part of a lot of things. We are most of all benefiting from a good 10-15 years of positive growth and all that brings with it.
Third, I think I’ve helped educate more people about some of the basic operations of the city government and how to get typical neighborhood problems dealt with on the official channels. I ran a poll once where responses gave high marks to this idea, that the website has increased their civic literacy, i.e. how to deal with nuisance properties, pothole politics, etc.
3. One topic that has seemed to be featured heavily recently has been the tenant plight of absent landlords. What do you see as your website's role in this situations like this?
Dating back to stuff others did for the neighborhood newspaper and old email group, nuisance property and bad landlord issues have been a running concern in the area. Landlords are totally unregulated in any meaningful sense, and the ones who do no real tenant screening or property maintenance can just kill a block really fast. So I will write strong opinion pieces and do more direct advocacy on issues like the landlord licensing. Owner occupancy has risen a lot in the past ten years in Riverwest, and some slumlords that used to be a big problem are pretty well cleaned out. In the process of living here, becoming a homebuyer/owner, I learned how the banks, the real estate market, big absentee landlords, city assessments and code enforcement work—and how they often work in a totally exploitative, predatory way. The relation between property neglect and crime is just huge, and it’s a huge cause of good people being frustrated, hurt, isolated, and leaving if they can. The people I learned from the most have found ways to fight against these negative forces, and I want to align myself with that and show people that’s the way to go—and if you go the other way, there are some of us here who will come after you with whatever tools we have.
I guess you could call that another benefit—payback, if not a more stable and happy community. I'd like to think it has a preventative effect too, that if the housing boom-bust cycle is to be repeated, next time around people in and out of government will work smarter and harder to protect the interest of long-term neighborhood stability. Corruption starts below the radar of the media and gets shoved under the rug by bureaucracy, so that too needs early alerts from "the people." With a lot of help from others, the major malefactors I’ve gone after have not had good outcomes, not because we wrote about them, but because we wrote an then engaged in informed advocacy with authorities. I had some role in bringing down a corrupt alderman and putting some screws into slumlords. Some of those people have a pretty blatant record online for anyone googling them now, or their properties. If you search for just an address, you will get stories I’ve written about problems there—and you might also get some records from the City itself, or public records I’ve acquired and republished.
4. On the about page, you state that this is a “civic experiment in new media literacy.” Can you explain a little about that?
“Civic experiment in new media literacy” is probably a dumb phrase, and the “literacy” part may make it too confusing. But the idea is, “What happens if we use the online tools and get versed in them as a community, for civic purposes?” That’s the experiment.
5. What challenges have you faced in getting this website off the ground?
No major technical challenges. It’s mainly a matter of the cost in the time it takes to do, the time it takes away from other things. It would help a lot to get other people regularly posting stuff.
6. How did you market the site? Has your approach changed since you started?
There is no marketing, so no change.
7. What new projects do you have planned?
I build stuff online all the time for other people. My personal projects, apart from my business site, are RiverwestNeighborhood.org and CreamCitizen.org. The latter is a little moribund right now. Down the road I am thinking about morphing RiverwestNeighborhood.org into just one part of a larger site covering many neighborhoods as a news and twitter aggregator + social network tightly integrated with Facebook. I want to gear it toward people who want to know what is going on in their area, and when it comes to crime or civic issues, some tools to get involved as politically enfranchised citizens. Our City and County websites are so bad, and their main assets (public data) are so hard to access, I can see this becoming a kind of portal or hub for people to use to bypass the official online obstructions—ironically so they can actually do what they are supposed to be able to do as voters, citizens, and taxpayers. Do you know the film “Brazil,” which is a kind of absurdist, satirical allegory about modern technology and the bureaucratic state? Robert DeNiro plays a guerilla fixit man, and one of his best lines is “I can’t fix it…but I can bypass it.”
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thinking ahead
Keith there is not a lot of big success in "CaaS" that has been attempted, beyond Yahoo Groups. That web+email model has been done in a specifically neighborhood focused way by http://frontporchforum.com/ and by really big, international providers for DIY social networks from http://www.bigtent.com to Ning. Google and Yahoo will morph further in that direction too.
The problem is not really availability of services; it is availability and sustainability of functioning online communities that are geographically focused on a very local level and not just affinity based. Self-organizeed success tends to look like 300-600 people on a walled-garden Yahoo group that most of the potential users don't even know about and will not stumble across on the web. These are sustained by organized group(s) (social, block watch, nabe association) or sometimes 1 person who works in a basically microlocal journalistic capacity. On another level, you have "placebloggers" and their regular readers/commenters. The 1% rule applies in that the successes are 1% off the total attempts, and the contributors who make the success are 1% of the total audience or user base.
So success in terms of providing not just a service with some level of "use" but actual, meaningful use is pretty rare. There are people tackling CaaS with a qualitative focus, which tends to mean non-profits working on some kind of "civic engagement" or "deliberative democracy" project. They too have to be portable and national or international in scope to function, and I question how well the outcome can be from any cookie-cutter template-driven approach that is not fully and systematically localized.
No matter how you do it, online communities are like organizations--they rely on a few sustainers/curators to give them personality, currency, content and to perform functions like writing, editing, moderating, contextualizing, gathering. This would be needed even within what I would call an "ideal" CaaS platform now--imagine everyblock converged with Google and/or (somehow) Yahoo plus strong social media integration, so you can really look at one screen and see everything that is being said/done/reported in a particular urban geography LIVE and then zoom in on whatever you want. Even with the ideal interface, this would be just too much, especially in bigger cities. EveryBlock as it is now is a big lonely green master-aggregator. You need the blogger/columnist/critic/journalist/public reaction conversation on the side as an index to what the overall main issues are at the moment, from your "front page" to the police blotter, business page and A&E stuff. This can be done, and EB will surely do it, but none of the available content (aside from the placebloggers) really covers the zipcode and neighborhood level. That's the urban lifeworld for all city residents. You can give them a bunch of data and 911/311 type reports, but what's missing is a conversation about "what it means." That's the part that's most interesting to me--what happens if you give people all that? How much potential is there at that point to make things better? It's mass communications turned back from the faceless mass to the individual.
Right now there is also a problem with basing anything around email--and in ignoring email. Email use is going down everywhere, especially non web-based email, and that can be seen in the email list subscription rates versus social media channel subscriptions here.
However, it tends to be older people and also the volunteer/amateur as well as the professionally engaged community activists and "problem solvers" who use email heavily and powerfully to do their work. Their theme is "Conserve and protect."
It tends to be younger and differently engaged people who use the social media channels. Their engagement and influence on the community is strong but on other levels and in other ways that are not "organized" per se. Their theme is "Live, work, and play hard in the city."
There is some crossover, cooperation and cross-pollination between the groups as well as certain typical conflict areas. Both are important, but they tend to self-segregate on and offline.
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