Our 2010-11 Inclusive Social Media pilot funded by the Ford Foundation built a foundation for taking our inclusive online engagement work to the next stage. “Knowing” what we are experiencing requires a reflective evaluation.

• Today, we are sharing the executive summary from our “participatory evaluation” (below) and publishing the entire 60 page review (PDF).
  
• Special Online Event: Webinar Recording with Slides (Watch/Listen for Free!) – Slides Only – From May 15, 2012 (Note the exciting list of co-sponsors.)

Led by Anne Carroll, with extensive participant interview assistance from Boa Lee, Julia Opoti, and Marny Xiong, it shares more “ah ha” moments than anything I’ve read related to local civic engagement online period. Dig deep. Go long.

Jennifer Armstrong and Steven Clift contributed to the report and Barry Cohen, Ph. D with Rainbow Research advised us on its design. Thank you everyone who assisted with this report and agreed to be interviewed.

As this evaluation focuses on 2010, it should be noted that in 2011 we focused on dramatically expanding and scaling our inclusive outreach efforts to more neighborhoods and added another 2,000+ plus members across many more forums.

Notably the 2010 focus on “engagement” is extremely relevant to our new 2012-14 project as we scale our efforts to 10,000 participants across all of St. Paul with $625,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation. Today St. Paul is 44% people of color and 17% percent foreign born. In 2010-11 we focused on working with lower income, highly diverse neighborhoods to discover what was possible. Our success is embryonic and we now know far more about the real challenges and seek to meet them.

This project and evaluation has inspired us to take the next step and attempt to establish the world’s most inclusive and diverse network of public neighborhood spaces online over the next three years. Inspired by the exciting online neighborhood movement, frankly almost exclusively linking “the haves,” it is only from understanding and sharing our initial experience that we can hope to gather the many people and organizations needed to build an effort that that truly reflects, engages, and build bridges among ALL the diverse people and communities of St. Paul.

Report feedback, particularly during our online teleconference/webinar gathering on May 16, will directly shape our new effort’s metrics, research, and evaluation.

Inclusive Social Media Project: Participatory Evaluation (2010)

A strategic effort generously supported by The Ford Foundation
December 2011, Final Version Released Online May 2012

This section provides an overview of the objectives and methodology for this participatory evaluation, and then highlights key learnings.

1.1     Objectives and Framing

This participatory evaluation of E-Democracy.org’s Inclusive Social Media project responds to the Ford Foundation grant supporting this work, as well as key goals of E-Democracy’s Strategic Plan. A complete description of E-Democracy’s Inclusive Social Media project can be found on our website at http://pages.e-democracy.org/Inclusive_Social_Media.   

The primary objectives of E-Democracy’s Inclusive Social Media project are as follows:

• Demonstrate that neighborhood-based online forums can and should work in high-immigrant, low-income, racially/ethnically diverse neighborhoods
• Identify how such success is accomplished
• Serve as a platform to help improve the success of others pursuing similar goals
• Increase interest by other funders to expand such efforts

At the beginning of this project, E-Democracy executive director Steven Clift framed our commitment, making clear that within the online community dialogues and spaces we host, with intent we can and should increase the diversity of participation and content by doing the following:

• Reaching out to and engaging people from communities who are racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically underrepresented on neighborhood online forums[1]
• Identifying community and cultural organizations and individuals, elected officials, neighborhood organizations, and other local leaders to intentionally contribute more information and conversation to the forums – what we call “digital inclusion for community voices”
• Moving forums beyond token experiences where the diversity “in the room” is recruited, but silent or essentially ignored

Through this work, E-Democracy hopes to debunk assumptions that people in poverty, of color, new immigrants, and others historically disenfranchised are digitally disconnected or less interested in connecting with their neighbors online than those in homogeneous, wealthy neighborhoods – and instead demonstrate that they in fact bring assets, capacities, information, and agenda-setting value to online civic participation.

To this end, two high-immigrant, low-income, racially and ethnically diverse urban neighborhoods were selected for this Minnesota-based project: Frogtown in St. Paul and Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis.

1.2     Methodology and Program Outcomes Evaluated

Central to this evaluation effort was determining the suitability and value of our approach and methods relative to outcomes – what we can learn from the results to inform our future work and that of others committed to inclusive online engagement.

We chose a participatory approach that relies on the insights and wisdom of the outreach staff, volunteer forum managers, and numerous participants in our Frogtown and Cedar-Riverside Neighborhood Forums, supplemented with simple data analyses of forum posts and posters.

The program outcomes evaluated are as follows:

• Develop outreach and information leadership-development structures and techniques
• Increase forum size, diversity, energy, and community-building potential
• Engage community organizers, community organizations and institutions, and elected officials

1.3 Key Learnings

1.3.1     Outreach

We learned a great deal about how to attract and retain forum members in these high-poverty, high-immigrant neighborhoods, and believe these lessons apply across the full range of E-Democracy forums.

• The fact that our forums are online doesn’t change how people make decisions to participate – or not – in one of our forums. Face-to-face connections, paper signup sheets, and a personal approach are by far the most successful recruiting methods.
• Building trust is essential. Knowing that “someone like me” is on the forum makes a difference. Personal invitations and direct support help people get started.
• Understanding people’s needs and then helping them find ways for those needs to be addressed through the forum smoothes the path for their participation and continued involvement.
• Partnering with respected neighbors and event organizers creates opportunities to participate in community activities and offer people the chance to sign up for our forums.

1.3.2     Content and Participant Diversity and Animation

As discussed in detail in Section 5, intentional content “seeding” by E-Democracy staff, volunteers, or forum members, accompanied by some level of active support and encouragement for participants has a huge impact on content and participant diversity. That combination of seeding and support helps set a welcoming and inclusive tone that in turn increases the numbers of forum member and participants and likely adds to forum stability.

We have also seen that the Frogtown and Cedar-Riverside neighborhood forums have a less intimate feel than some others in the E-Democracy network because they’ve stayed more issue-oriented rather than having a large base of community life exchanges. In all cases we are aiming for that “tipping point”[2] of around 10% of the households, and have to find ways to make that work whether community residents are renters or homeowners. In some cases there have been active exchanges about community life issues such as child care or school choice or safety, and as we discuss in the section on Age, Digital Capacity, and Forum Relevance, there is more work needed to help a cross-section of community members see neighborhood forums as great places to ask questions and share information.

1.3.3     Cultural Competency

Issues around culture, home language, race, and ethnicity are central to all of these discussions, whether around who is reaching out to whom, who posts and who doesn’t, or the content of the posts. Being able to discuss the forum with cultural awareness and in the community member’s home language is essential. In high-immigrant and racially/ethnically diverse neighborhoods, one outreach staff person cannot reach all communities. Building and supporting an active and diverse forum base will increase capacity and forum sustainability. At minimum, everyone involved in outreach or forum leadership must be able to demonstrate cultural awareness and cultural proficiency, and continually evolve on both fronts along with the communities they serve.

Both forums and especially Cedar-Riverside have also been challenged because many of the forum’s posters have English as their second or even third language. And on both forums members not only speak different languages and dialects but also cross cultures, races, sexes, political affiliations, ages, affinity groups, and so on. The understood challenges to email communications are compounded many times when both forum posters and readers are e-talking across such diversity.

There are also complex cross-cultural and cross-gender issues as noted in the Culture, Race, Power – and Gender section, especially when the inherent transparency of an E-Democracy forum post or exchange gives community members information about someone that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Additional and very real dynamics that we did not explore in this project include the high number of immigrants on both forums who may currently or recently have been at war with each other “at home,” as well as the varied and sometimes volatile legal status of some immigrants.

1.3.4     Forum Structure and Leadership

While issues around culture, language, and power are explicitly not E-Democracy’s responsibility, we must nonetheless be aware of and sensitive to their implications on our forums, and consider ways we can design, structure, or run our forums that help minimize or mitigate unintended negative impacts on forum members.

Even that limited scope seems daunting, but we learned that E-Democracy’s forum outreach staff made exceptional headway on both forums by putting in an average of only about 7 hours a week. In addition to these two paid contractors, the neighborhood residents serving as volunteer Forum Managers contributed to this effort. That means the cost of effectively engaging and supporting forum participation – particularly at startup – is extremely low, making it realistically replicable.

We also need to continue providing support as each forum defines its own tone and tenor, style, and energy. Frogtown and Cedar-Riverside “feel” very different from each other, and equally different from other neighborhood forums and the larger citywide forums around them. That is, of course, a positive measure of the localness of these forums, but as each forum settles into its own rhythm it’s not always easy for E-Democracy to discern what is “normal” within that forum community compared to what we’re accustomed to seeing elsewhere.

1.3.5     Moving Forward

Having already shared several lessons, the best insight gained from our intensive outreach and support in 2010 is a much deeper understanding of the potential of our neighborhood forums to increase civic engagement and accountability.

Neighbors told us the forum has provided them with new information and alternative viewpoints. We learned that elected officials pay attention to posts appearing on the forum, even if only a few post. Community organizations that found ways to actively participate found it relevant and rewarding. We believe all of this is a testament to the hard work of community members – those who participate in their forum and who volunteer to keep it healthy, respectful, supportive, and animated.

The range and depth of conversations on the forum is dependent on forum members’ willingness to share their opinions, ask questions, and seek input from people of many backgrounds. Thought of another way, the success of the forum is circular, where the participation of all members sparks newer, far richer, and increased numbers of conversations, expanding the circle and emboldening all participants.

Finally, while this evaluation of our inclusion efforts in Frogtown and Cedar-Riverside is for 2010, E-Democracy continued to actively support these efforts in 2011 with a substantial additional grant from the Ford Foundation that deepened both our outreach and the sustainability of these forums. In 2012 we were awarded a major grant from the Knight Foundation to fund our three-year Inclusive Community Engagement Online initiative. Current information on all our work can be found at http://e-democracy.org/inclusion.

[1]  According to the “Neighbors Online” report released in June 2010 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 7% of Internet  users report being members of neighborhood e-mail lists of forums. While Whites and African-Americans participate equally at 8%, those in households making over $75,000 a year are 5 times more likely to belong than those making $50,000 or less (15% versus 3%). Latinos participate at 3%. While there are not data on more recent immigrant groups, we suspect it is even less nationally.

A blog post on Harvard’s Saguaro Seminar by Tom Sander caught my eye because it outlines exactly what I see being bolstered by critical mass very local neighbor connecting online:

Robert Putnam and I had always focused on information-flows as the key mechanism.  So these social networks:

• enable individuals to access valuable information: how to get something done, hear of  job leads, learn how better to promote one’s health, find out what is happening in a community, etc.; or
• help individuals find partners for joint economic transactions (e.g., to know with whom to partner  in business, to close a sale to a friend or a friend of a friend, to locate a neighbor with whom one can exchange tools or expertise); or
• spread reputations of members (or neighbors or local merchants) which causes all people in these networks to behave in a more trustworthy manner and facilitates altruism.  ….
• facilitate collective action: it is easier to mobilize others around some shared goal like politics or zoning or improving trash pick-up if others in the  community already know and  trust you, rather than your having to build those social relationships from scratch.

Prompted by this, I’ve decided to share something from an internal “next generation” document we produced in 2011. To get at why online neighbor connecting matters from a public interest perspective (and why community groups, governments, foundations should promote it BIG TIME), we’ve generated a list of all the good things that can be generated by neighbor connecting online (and off).

Benefits – Community Solutions 

While our [next generation efforts] must provide real value to everyday people to attract use, we’ve been gathering contacts across government and non-profit public service providers (potential “Solution Partners”). These vertical “silos” of community service will strategically benefit from our horizontally designed service. Service providers are likely not in a position to build critical mass participation for a similar system in isolation and will likely resist deep participation in other efforts where they are not true partners.

This is a full list of ideas suggested to us about how an engine for neighbor-to-neighbor digital connections might promote efforts or activities at the block, building, or nearest neighbor level:

• Crime Prevention – Neighborhood watch, block club formation and communication
• Disaster Preparedness and Community Recovery – Neighbor contact directories, communication (note current post-quake Christchurch Neighbours Forum effort: http://neighbours.cc )
• Emergency Preparedness and Response – Rapid communication, particularly with text/SMS alert options
• Neighborly Mutual Benefit and Support – Neighbors who know each other are far more likely to help each other in times of need
• Health Care and Long-term Care – Neighbor-to-neighbor connections which support for healthier “aging in place” and neighbors facing major health challenges
• Energy Efficiency – Exchange on successful energy use reduction actions among those with often similar homes (go beyond the numbers to how you changed yours)
• Environmental Sustainability – Shared use of tools, reuse of household items – down the block rather than across town, block-level community tree planting and “citizen” forestry (note our connection with Ashoka Fellow-led TreePeople in LA)
• Senior Care and Inter-generational Connections – Reducing isolation of seniors in their homes and connecting people across generations
• Small Business Promotion – Recommendations exchanged on very local, often independent service providers
• Transportation – Opportunities for carpooling, car sharing emerge
• Local Food – Opportunities for garden sharing, splitting Community Supported Agriculture shares and other bulk food sharing emerge
• Diverse Community Cohesion – “Ice breaker” opportunities that introduce people of different racial, ethnic, and social groups who live very near each other to each other
• Education and Community Service – Opportunities to efficiently match tutors, mentors, etc. in extremely and close proximity to neighborhood youth – tapping Baby Boomer retiree capacity within walking distance as well as community service opportunities for youth
• Recent Immigrant and Refugee Integration and Support – Provide an open and less intimidating way for new Americans to connect with and come to understand their neighbors (and vice versa) – note our current Ford Foundation funded Inclusive Social Media initiative: http://e-democracy.org/inclusion
• Sustainable Broadband Adoption – Create meaningful reasons for those less likely to use broadband due to perceived irrelevance to find measurable value in the Internet locally
• Rural Community Building – The dynamic nature our neighbor directory circle being based on “nearest neighbors” would connect relatively isolated households organically, could also connect year-round and seasonal residents
• Youth Employment and Experience – Encourage the surfacing of demand for babysitting, yard work, snow shoveling and other services visible to the parents of minors who can play “agent”
• Community Building, Civic Engagement, and Social Capital – Building community capacity for communication, listening, understanding, respect for difference, openness to new residents, advocacy on shared goals (from a new stop sign to graffiti removal to greening their block), etc.

This list may seem pie in the sky, but real life examples of such activity are already taking place on our current Neighbors Issues Forums  and other sites across the Locals Online community. [Next generation project] is required to bring this opportunity to vastly more people and places.

[END]

THIS POSTING IS NOW CLOSED. Feel free to send your resume for consideration in future outreach rounds. Also, we may have additional opportunities for those who can assist us with outreach to the Karen community in St. Paul as well as native Spanish speakers who reside in South Minneapolis. Contact us per the information below.

Please share this post far and wide with anyone you think might be interested.

Do you speak Ethiopian? Hmong? Burmese? Somali? Oromo? Or Spanish? Or one of the many languages spoken across St. Paul? 

Do you have deep ties to the long established African-American, Latino, or Southeast Asian communities in St. Paul?

Or perhaps you are really really good at organizing and have a passion for inclusive community engagement – online and off.

And you are looking for part-time summer contract work.

Thanks to the generous support of the Knight Foundation for our Inclusive Community Engagement Online initiative our “Be Neighbors” outreach campaign will reach thousands of new St. Paulites one person at time this summer. Perhaps surprisingly, we’ve found in-person outreach to be our most effective bridge building tool for our very online work.

We want lots of applicants. Apply today.

If you don’t have the time or flexibility for our paid work, you can volunteer to help us at major festivals or consider our St. Paul Outreach Advisory Group.

Here is a copy of the official job posting text put together by our Outreach Coordinator, Corrine Bruning:

Join E-Democracy’s “BeNeighbors” 2012 Summer Outreach Team!

E-Democracy.org builds online public space in the heart of real democracy and community. Our mission is to harness the power of online tools to support participation in public life, strengthen communities, and build democracy.

We are launching a new grant-funded inclusion campaign to grow our St. Paul forums with the greatest diversity possible to over 10,000 members in three years. We’re also planning fundraising to include Minneapolis and other communities in future years.

• Do you care passionately about building inclusive community?
• Do you believe commitment to diversity is an important institutional value?
• Do you want to be part of raising diverse voices?

If so, consider applying for one of 9 part-time, contract outreach positions. These new outreach staff will work both individually and with a team to recruit members for our neighborhood forums primarily among African-American, Southeast Asian, African immigrant, and Latino communities.

Location: Saint Paul with some travel in the Metropolitan Area

Description: Work as part of a team to develop and carry out diverse community outreach. Tasks are likely to include tabling at community events and venues (including outdoor events in sometimes inclement weather), interacting with attendees and/or presenting at neighborhood meetings and events, doorknocking and posting flyers, and conducting face-to-face, phone, and online recruitment. The team goal for the summer is to recruit 4,000 new members to the Saint Paul neighborhood forums by focusing efforts on our most highly diverse, low income neighborhoods. Imagine the possibilities for empowering all voices!

Your outreach efforts will be supported by initial training, weekly team debriefs, coordinated outreach strategies and activities, and shared lessons in inclusive outreach and digital technologies. You will also work closely with other E-Democracy staff, contractors and volunteers to develop, refine, and further the goals of the inclusive outreach campaign.

Time Commitment: 15 weeks from May 21st through late August 2012. Contractors will work 10-20 hours per week and must be flexible, reliable, and able to work mostly late afternoons, evenings, and weekends, sometimes with short notice.

Rate: $12.50/hour. As an independent contractor, you are responsible for all of your own Federal, State, Social Security taxes, and any insurance you choose to carry.

Requirements:

• Passionate and enthusiastic; positive outlook and willing to lead. Inspires other contractors and volunteers to do high-quality organizing and outreach work.
• Proven ability to work as part of a team. Willing to pitch in to help others with day-to-day project tasks (event logistics, preparing/delivering materials, record-keeping, data entry, etc.)
• Excellent personal accountability and follow through. Can meet deadlines and manage multiple tasks in a fast-paced work environment; highly flexible and able to handle high- stress situations. Highly self motivated, self directed, and organized.
• Effective communicator. Values and fosters open communication; uses and understands the importance of active listening skills, and is an effective public speaker with above-average English-language writing skills.
• Detail oriented and respectfully work with volunteers.
• Willing to learn and values self-improvement. Able to accept and offer praise and critical feedback; seeks and offers feedback and evaluation.
• Reliably and consistently available via email and mobile phone.
• Must have reliable transportation to anywhere in the Twin Cities, including ability to haul materials for events and activities.

Desired Qualifications and Experience:

We are looking for exceptional people who may have talents in the following:

• Experience or training in leadership development, multicultural outreach and communications, political science, online civic engagement, digital technologies or other related fields.
• Field outreach or organizing in diverse communities (tabling, doorknocking, etc.).
• Bilingual in Hmong, Spanish, Somali, Ethiopian, Burmese, Oromo, etc.
• Deep connections to the targeted communities, including involvement in neighborhood/ community organizations.
• Proficient with Google Apps, social media, and digital video devices.

How to apply: Send a statement of interest describing your qualifications and resume with three references to by Wednesday, April 25, 2012. We hope to make decisions by May 11: Use the subject line: Community Outreach Leader Application. Include any questions in your email. No calls please. For more information, about this effort, please visit: http://www.e-democracy.org, and click on both “Blog” and “About”.

We are seeking members for our St. Paul Outreach Advisory Group from all background and walks of life in the city.

With our “Be Neighbors” outreach campaign we will bring in thousands of new online Neighbors Forum over the next three years. Our outreach team (hiring now) will be all over the place this summer.

But will “numbers” really matter? Will numbers alone make the neighborly online experience useful and relevant to the many diverse communities within St. Paul? We don’t think so.

Without the true and deep engagement of St. Paul’s diverse communities in shaping and guiding this project, the bridge building across cultures in St. Paul’s local communities we seek will simply not happen or only reach certain communities. Along the way we need tactical forum-by-forum, neighborhood-by-neighborhood input on how to continuously improve both what our crucial volunteers do as well as our staff team. More important than that, we need partners across St. Paul who work to bring the many voices of their diverse communities into a neighborly trust-generating vibrant online community life exchange that seeks in part to respond to claims that diversity inevitably reduces cohesion.

National surveys say people who make over $75,000 a year are five times more likely to be part of a neighborhood e-mail list or web forum than those who make $50,000 or less. And while whites and African-Americans participate near equally, Latinos and likely newer immigrant groups are participating far less often. We can do better than that. We can show that there are open, accessible, and empowering models (beyond the often private virtual gated communities that many commercial efforts tend to promote) that deliver “soulful” community results.

By joining our St. Paul Outreach Advisory Group, we can build something for our community and demonstrate nationally that social media in “public life” can truly build bridges among races and cultures in local communities. Be part of this innovative online first. We can do it.

Here is the full outreach group description. And from our Outreach Coordinator Corrine Bruning:

“Thanks to generous support from the Knight Foundation, E-Democracy has committed to inclusively reaching 10,000 participants across Saint Paul on our online neighborhood forums over the next three years (for more information, visit: http://e-democracy.org/inclusion

“We are committed to intentionally serving our whole community, and are combining strong partnerships with on-the-ground outreach to invite those who wouldn’t otherwise find out about these neighborhood forums. In the latest census Saint Paul reached 44% people of color as are 75% of our community’s children in the St. Paul Public Schools. Our goal is to leverage existing community networks and create new avenues to bring full representation to our online neighborhood forums.

“To facilitate and help guide this outreach, we are creating an Outreach Advisory Group to serve as process stewards, share best practices, and be a sounding board. Please see the description and responsibilities below.

“We would welcome your application. We also ask you to forward this to invitation to others or to nominate excellent candidates. To apply, email Outreach Coordinator by Wednesday, April 25 and respond to the three questions below. You may also include other information (background, resume, etc.) if you wish.

• “Why you are interested in serving on the Outreach Advisory Group?
• “Be it through District Councils or other organizations active in local parts of St. Paul, how are you connected to cultural or community organizations or Saint Paul neighborhoods?
• “What desired goals and responsibilities as outlined in the Outreach Advisory Group Description interest you most? Please be specific if you can.

Thank you!

To learn more about E-Democracy, please visit, E-Democracy.org, and click on “About.” To learn more about the grant funded work, see: http://e-democracy.org/inclusion ”

As a new Knight Foundation grantee, we were excited to get started with the lesson sharing portion of our Inclusive Community Engagement Online grant. Part of our strategy is to leverage Knight’s amazing work with community foundations on news, information, and engagement. We specifically sought to plant seeds of interest in our upcoming training webinars (fall 2012) via this week’s Media Learning Seminar.

The conference had a number of top notch speakers and here are two keynotes that struck at the heart of our ongoing online engagement work.

First is Eli Pariser’s speech on the “Filter Bubble”:

Second is Ethan Zuckerman’s speech about building digital bridges among people who often self-segregate online:

Ethan and I had a chat the evening before. When he mentioned raising the voices of the Somali community in Minneapolis as an example in his speech, it provided an opportunity for me to comment about the power of connecting diverse communities locally online. Thanks Ethan!

Throughout the conference, this place-based inspired crowd (some 400 folks, mostly from community foundations) were in my view looking to add greater engagement to their four years of work with local news and information. While some foundations were attending MLS for the first time, many were now arriving at the intersection of place, information, and the desire for bridge building civil engagement online (and off). Our “shop” sits at this intersection along with others in the Locals Online field.

As I met many people for first time at the conference, I would say, “We connect neighbors online to build community and raise diverse voices.”

I’d mention our new “Be Neighbors” campaign and our goal to reach 10,000 participants in St. Paul. I’d say getting to 10,00o will not mean much if our numbers and crucially the voices heard do not reflect the great diversity of that city (44% people of color, 17% foreign born, etc.). From a social value point of view, while it is “nice” that middle upper income neighborhoods with high home ownership with relatively high levels of existing social capital are getting e-connected, the change the world opportunity is to work with (not for) neighborhoods of all kinds particularly diverse, lower income areas that are not being served or at worst avoided by the “hyperlocal” .com world online.

Then I’d get asked, when did you start this work? And when I said 17 years ago, their jaws would drop.

And here is how this connects to my call for “bubble popping bridges.” It is back to the future time.

My response was something like this (the long version):

Waaaay back in 1994 we created the world’s first election information website. We were listed as one of the first “Politics” sites on this web page hosted in some dorm at Stanford called Yahoo. Well, when the election was over, people kept talking on our MN-Politics e-mail forum … it was kind of like the first Facebook Page about democracy tied to place … we even used real names years before Facebook. What we discovered by accident was that it was our role to be a trusted neutral host of online dialogue among people who disagree. In ’98 we went local with the online townhall in Minneapolis and found that more women participated, more elected officials, more journalists, and crucially someone would post and then at an in-person community meeting someone would say, “Hey, I read your post.”

Then in 2005 we were discovered by the UK government and they gave us our first major funding so we could share our model in England. While there remains a huge market failure with the city-wide online civic participation, in Oxford and Bristol they wanted to try forums at the “neighbourhood level.” What we found was that local elected officials engaged the spaces directly – why? These were their real voters and our real names and strict “no naming calling” rules made these spaces just safe enough for them to avoid the virtual quicksand they perceive in more political chest beating spaces online (or insanely nasty anonymous online news commenting).

When we brought the neighborhood model back to Minnesota (I volunteered in my own neighborhood), we decided to open up the model informed by the far broader community life exchange we saw on neighborhood YahooGroups in the DC area in the 1990s and parent forums in Brooklyn, etc. We also crucially said let’s do this for all kinds of neighborhoods and invest scarce grant resources into lower income, highly diverse, high immigrant neighborhoods. While volunteers did almost all of the work in our non-funded areas, we bolstered our peer to peer support among volunteer Forum Managers from each of the now 50 community areas that we serve across 16 communities in three countries.

I’d then say, “Let me show you our secret technology.”  And then pull out my clipboard with our St. Paul Neighbors Forum sign-up sheet on it and say, without signing people on paper at diverse community events from Rondo Days in St. Paul to the Hmong arts festival there is no way we’d have the starter point diversity we have today. In fact, my sense is that when we give out 1,000 fliers we get maybe 10 new people.

Sometimes I would mention that our biggest competition is the question “Why not just use Facebook?” To which my reply was that we leverage Facebook by piping forum excerpts into Facebook Pages and subject lines into the Twitter, but that while Facebook Groups are pretty much just like e-mail lists, the fact that people can join add their “friends” without their permission, that you can’t share attachments, and crucially that your only orientation option with new members is to delete (AKA censor) our civility/local scope rule posts rather than lightly pre-moderate new users (or spammer) is a real problem. But overall, the use of any commercial third party social media tool that you can’t customize properly means paper sign-up sheets are out and the real inclusion that comes from that appropriate technology is dead.

I’d conclude and say, thanks to the just announced three year grant from Knight and additional funding will seek to serve areas outside of St. Paul with deeply inclusive outreach, we are in a position to share lessons widely (and learn from others too) via the 300+ Locals Online community practice that we host and via webinars and training in the fall (request info). We were also going to offer fee-based intensive assistance to other communities wanting to adapt our lessons deeply in their community and if they really wanted to have their community become part of our network (rather than roll their own site/project) we’d love to explore how we can make that happen (request info).

At least a dozen foundations and many of the non-profits mixed into the audience expressed interest in our future webinars on this topic (planned for fall 2012, subscribe to our blog via e-mail or join Locals Online) and two community foundations asked us how they might join our network and in particular tap our inclusive outreach work. I noted that inclusive takes real resources, so assuming volunteer capacity at the core for each community/neighborhood forum serving in that crucial Forum Manager role, the cost is tied to how many people they want to recruit, how reflective do they want that to be of income, race, education, etc. in the community (meaning not just the folks who already show up to meetings), and do they want resource more intentional “bubble popping, bridge building” engagement via the forum. A key lesson is that getting diverse communities in the virtual room is only the first step. The forums need to be relevant to those communities in terms of the information shared and topics discussed. In some neighborhoods, it will “just work” and in others we pro-actively work publicly as well as behind the scenes to generate forum exchanges that reflect the diversity in the room.

So as Eli spoke about the bubble and how Google search and your Facebook news stream is personalized to show you more of what you want (e.g. ice cream) and less of what you might need (vegetables), I thought about how our lack of resources thankfully kept us in the many-to-many e-mail list/web forum centric space as blogging, then social networking put either an editor or you in the center.

As Ethan spoke about how “guides” help share Global Voices with the world online, I thought about how we might work with our participants to open up windows into our diverse communities where we live near each other but don’t really access the same physical gathering spaces.

Serendipity is at the center of our model. We’ve found that if you get local enough, the relevancy of place in the “common interest” can trump most people’s tendency (now further amplified by computers) to filter out and avoid stuff we would not click on. Meaning, at the neighborhood level we can have a shared community information stream with conversations that cut across all the silos of public service and community and cultural groups around us. In three of our neighborhoods we now reach over 20% of households everyday. My own neighbors forum is now approach 1,000 members not including the many visitors who come to the open to world (in Google) website. When we compare this to the 1% of households willing to show up on our mostly politics city-wide forums, reaching 20% of people – everyday people – is a watershed for our work.

Whew, that was a long blog post. What are your reactions to these speeches or the many other sessions in their video archive?

P.S. If you have actually read all of this you’ll probably find our Neighbors Forums slide presentation interesting and, heck if you have an hour to kill watch the webinar version:

Cross-Posted on the Knight Foundation Blog 

Quick Links: St. Paul Press Release, Project Info, Locals Online Community

Do you have a “go to” place online where you connect with your neighbors?  A place where you can get to know people who live near you with incredibly different backgrounds, cultures and interests?

Isn’t it awesome? I think so.

In my own neighborhood of Standish and Ericsson in Minneapolis, I am digitally surrounded by almost 1,000 of my neighbors – about 20% of the households in my area – on a public online “neighbors forum.”

In just the last few weeks, we sent deep dish pizza sales through the roof at a new pizza delivery place struggling to get established, generated local elected officials’ help to take on the FAA over surprise airplane route changes rattling windows, directed neighbors to local Girl Scouts for cookies, and helped a mom find out how to request a new stop sign at a dangerous intersection after she posted saying, “I want my children alive.” Last fall when I started a topic about what are we thankful for, a Dakota neighbor spoke of traditional Native American sites walking distance from all of us.

We want to help spread these type of forums to the diverse communities St. Paul that have until now been less likely to use them.

Starting this week (press releases, etc.), our non-profit is working to inclusively connect 10,000 St. Paulites online – or 10 percent of households – through our volunteer-led network of 16 public digital neighborhood forums.

Over the last two years, we’ve been piloting efforts in the heavily East African Cedar Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis and the very diverse St. Paul Frogtown neighborhood with large Southeast Asian and African-American populations.  Our success is embryonic, but extremely encouraging.

With Knight Foundation support, we have a crucial opportunity to demonstrate that inclusive community engagement online works at scale across an entire central city. We seek to demonstrate that all neighborhoods, regardless of income and the diverse communities within them, can and must be part of an integrated neighbors online revolution.

While Facebook is awesome at connecting friends and family, a PewInternet.org studyfound that the typical Internet user has only five neighbors as “friends”. They do have a healthier average of 16 “friends” from voluntary groups, of which I assume many are local. However, despite the perceived potential of Facebook, expecting it to magically connect people as “neighbors” through its typical use is misplaced. Local “public life” and how you interact with those you do not know or have not yet met in your community is fundamentally different than how you use private life connections.

In our experience, Facebook must be leveraged for sharing and more on our system. But simply put, a typical Facebook user posting a community-related question instead on my local neighbors forum would reach over 175 times the number of neighbors in one swoop. That is powerful and can generate far more useful, geographically-relevant information.

Nationally, there are no hard numbers about how widespread forum spaces are. There is a patchwork of “electronic block clubs” using Facebook Groups, the large neighborhood orparent e-mail lists on trusty old YahooGroups, and the areas covered by the many “network” players like Front Porch Forum in Vermont, Oh So We, Hey Neighbor, as well as the long-time academic-led I-Neighbors platform. Most of these network sites generally create private neighbor spaces online (our primary model is public).

However, despite the fact that our neighbor connecting field is reaching millions of Americans there is more to the story. There is a long way to go to serve most people.

Our experience and a closer look at the numbers presents a real divide that must be tackled now.  For example, when it comes to the online neighbor “joiners,” 19% of Internet users in households who make over $75,000 a year participate. Meanwhile, lower income Internet users in the $30-50,000 range participate at 7%, and under $30,000 a year only come it at 4.4%. We need to act now, before we look back in a generation and see that only certain areas and certain people actually benefited from our digital community engagement movement.

Finally, with our “online townhall” foundation dating back to 1994 when we created the world’s first election information website, we feel that public engagement (meaning open to all, even Google search) is crucial for maximum power and community agenda-setting. We care about people having a voice that has a real impact on local government and the local media. We specifically seek to build online spaces that encourage local public officials to engage with their voters or those they serve in a very public and accountable way.

Disturbingly, PewInternet.org’s Government Online study found that while 25% of white Internet users are are considered to be “online government participators” only 14% of Latinos and African-Americans are as well. Between elections, the world is run by those who show up. Having one segment show up at nearly twice the level isn’t good for democracy or our communities.

When you combine these divisions, it seems clear without action most lower income, highly diverse neighborhoods and the people who live in them will not have the same powerful opportunity to build community, gain their voice and enjoy the simple neighborly fun so many people are enjoying today.

See our detailed compilation of numbers in our Why Digital Inclusion for Community Voices article.

Read more about E-Democracy.org in The Pioneer Press.

For some video context see the Knight version of the blog post.

Full Project Details  – PDF Version – National Press Release (Pending)

New campaign will connect St. Paul’s diverse communities online

Knight Foundation awards E-Democracy $625,000 for community-engagement effort to bring together 10,000 culturally diverse people across St. Paul neighborhoods

February 15, 2012 (St. Paul, Minn.) — A new campaign aims to bring together St. Paul’s diverse communities through online forums where neighbors can stay informed, get connected, and build community.

BeNeighbors.org, launched by E-Democracy, is setting out to reach 10,000 neighborhood forum participants in St. Paul over the next three years, bringing the total percentage of households engaging with E-Democracy’s many online forums to 10 percent citywide. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is providing $625,000 in support.

“You can ‘like’ anything on Facebook, but if you ‘love’ St. Paul come to BeNeighbors.org,” said Steven Clift, founder of E-Democracy. “Join us if you’d like your neighborhood to be safer, stronger, and cleaner and more informed, connected, and neighborly.”

The new Be Neighbors campaign will include special efforts to boost participation from St. Paul’s lower-income areas, communities of color and recent immigrant communities. A volunteer and paid outreach team will connect with St. Paul’s growing Southeast Asian, Latino, East African and African-American communities through community events and partnerships with local organizations.

“Technology offers unlimited possibilities for people to connect. We need projects like BeNeighbors.org to ensure that everyone has a spot at the virtual table, and a chance to engage and take action to strengthen our communities,” said Polly Talen, Knight’s St. Paul program director.

Be Neighbors will strive to reflect online the diversity of the city, which is now 16 percent  African-American (including newer East African immigrants and refugees), 15 percent Asian (including the large Hmong population and newly arriving Karen refugees from Burma), and 10 percent Latino.

In addition to providing an inclusive, common gathering space for diverse communities, E-Democracy’s neighborhood forums help neighbors stay informed about and respond to crime, ease the way for newcomers to settle into new surroundings, connect local families through community events, and provide access to service recommendations from neighbors.

While the typical Facebook user averages fewer than five neighbors as “friends” on Facebook, E-Democracy’s neighborhood forums are closing a digital divide, connecting neighbors, and promoting community engagement. In some areas of South Minneapolis, for example, more than 20 percent of households are active participants in E-Democracy neighborhood forums.

“The City of St. Paul welcomes this creative online opportunity to connect diverse neighbors across our great city,” said St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman. “We look forward to how we and other community institutions can build partnerships that support community solutions.”

“This audacious online initiative will bridge the rich diversity of St. Paul, which will become the most inclusively connected community for neighbor-led two-way exchange online anywhere,” Clift said. “Knight Foundation’s support can help position St. Paul as a national leader in the next generation of digital inclusion efforts that raise community voices and promote local problem-solving.”

About E-Democracy

Originally launched in 1994 as the world’s first public election information website, E-Democracy now hosts more than 50 local Issues Forums in 16 communities across three countries (New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Through engagement and inclusion efforts, E-Democracy strives to harness the power and potential of the Internet to engage people of all kinds.

With its BeNeighbors.org campaign, E-Democracy aims to give less represented communities such as low-income families, immigrants, and people of color an effective community-wide forum for addressing issues that are critical to their daily lives.

About E-Democracy founder Steven Clift

Steven Clift, 42, is an online strategist focused on the role of Internet technology in democracy, governance, and community. A public speaker across 30 countries, he is recognized globally as an Ashoka Fellow for social entrepreneurship. Locally, he was recently added to St. Paul’s Neighborhood Honor Roll for E-Democracy’s work in St. Paul’s Highland Park as well as given the “Good Neighbor” award in the Standish and Ericsson neighborhoods of Minneapolis.

Contact: Steven Clift, 612-234-7072, , Twitter: @democracy

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged.

Contact: Knight Foundation St. Paul Program Director, Polly Talen, 651-325-4268,

Knight Foundation Vice President/Communications, Andrew Sherry, 305-908-2677,

More information

For more information about Be Neighbors and to join E-Democracy’s online Neighbors forums: http://beneighbors.org

For details about the “Inclusive Community Engagement Online”grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation: http://e-democracy.org/inclusion

Give to the Max Day was a big success.

We’ve doubled our number of donors to over 150 total on GiveMN.org, with 76 donors contributing on or near Give to the Max Day. We raised $2,215 which earned our local “Leader’s Challenge” match of $1,000.

That means we now have $3,215 in 2012 to support grass roots neighborhood and community Issues Forum outreach – primarily for our forums that do not currently have special grant funded outreach support.

Your donations are a huge thank you to our dedicated local volunteers – our local “forum managers.” Without them and their time, there would be no online public space for your community or neighborhood.

Your donations will support our efforts to further support their dedication and energy:

• Printing of posters, handouts, and other outreach materials distributed locally by volunteers. (Become one and help get the word out. Our forum volunteers need your help.)
• Tabling at key community events – a crucial part of our in-person outreach strategy.
• Special “inclusive” outreach leveraging field work by our outreach team. Our inclusive outreach grant funds have specifically supported forums in lower income, highly diverse areas. Your donations will make it possible to extend diverse community outreach to the middle income neighborhoods where participants donated. For example, we can pay our Latino outreach leaders to do some work in the Standish-Ericsson neighborhood where just over $500 was donated.

Being part of Give to the Max Day was a great opportunity. Across this Minnesota-focused event, over 47,500 donors donated $13.4 million to about 4,000 nonprofits. This reminds us how important it is to ask those who support our work or find a real benefit from our forums to contribute toward their success. While 76 donations is our most at one time ever, we need to do more to support all of our forums with your donations. In fact, it is not too late to donate this year.

This year we set up a team challenge to extend inclusive outreach in our Minnesota forums. Almost $1,000 of our $2215 raised came in via our local volunteers – in order of the amount raised:

• Steven Clift, Minneapolis Standish Ericsson
• Sara Bergen, Minneapolis Powderhorn
• Peter Fleck, Minneapolis Seward
• Jeff Ueland, Bemidji
• Nick Cross, Minneapolis Phillips
• Jason Stone, Minneapolis Nokomis East
• Jonathan Carter, Saint Paul East Side
• Sally Fineday, Cass Lake Leech Lake
• Dan Haugen, Minneapolis Northeast

Thank you team! (Now let’s rev up the outreach engine  . )

Here is what we heard from some of our donors:

• “I learn SO MUCH about my neighborhood through E-Democracy. Keep up the great work!”
• “An excellent, non-partisan source to discuss local news and social issues. MPR – watch out!”
• “E-Democracy is one of the best ways to address and discuss local issues. I think this is especially true in rural areas where the options for news and discussion are far more limited.”
• “The battle for democracy will be won or lost in our local communities. E-Democracy is helping us win the battle by creating the public spaces for our conversations about our communities.”
• “One of the very best sources for information and discussion of state and local issues ever! That includes MPR! Thank you E-Democracy.”

Cross posted from CityCampMN. E-Democracy.org as a co-host of this event and Steven Clift was the “convener.”

We will have a more detailed review of CityCampMN soon.

For now, here are some news articles, blog posts and other items.

A key outcome is that that Bud Fisher volunteered to call a “what’s next” meeting in January 2012 with the dozen or more volunteers who raised their hands to explore what’s next. To join Bud and others, join the CityCampMN online working group.

Also, everyone should join the global CityCamp Exchange for useful exchange across the 2.0 and local government, community, etc. space.

Over 40 donors giving over $1300 US can’t be wrong – join them now through Midnight Central: 

DONATE on Nov. 16 starting at midnight Central time U.S.

Donations from E-Democracy.org supporters
from the world accepted and encouraged!

The third annual Give to the Max Day is Wednesday, November 16.  More than 42,000 donors logged on to GiveMN.org and gave over $10 million to Minnesota charities on Give to the Max Day last year.

These past couple years we’ve worked hard at inclusive outreach. We focused our 2010 efforts on the low income, high immigrant, highly diverse neighborhoods of Cedar Riverside in Minneapolis and Frogtown in Saint Paul. Your support is helping make this progress possible.

“E-Democracy.org has been our platform to talk to each other and raise our issues with government officials. Without this forum, our voices in our neighborhood would have been silent. I thank all the volunteers and the management of E-Democracy for giving me and others in Cedar Riverside the chance to air our ideas and concerns…”
—Cedar Riverside forum member

“When I reach out to communities where I’d be seen as foreign, perhaps we can all be seen as part of the same struggle to make a better community—that may be where we find commonality… I don’t have to be a Black person to relate to a Black person. We can have conversations about what’s affecting our community and what we can do together to change.”
—Frogtown outreach staff member

“Segregation—whether cultural or economic—contributes to the silence, and the lack of sense of community.”
—Cedar Riverside Forum member

In 2011, we expanded our efforts to start several new forums in the urban core. In addition to recruiting new volunteers across almost all of St. Paul, we had special efforts in Phillips and Powderhorn in Minneapolis.

We  have just opened or are recruiting to open new forums in these neighborhoods:

Minneapolis

• Audubon Park
• East Harriet
• Kingfield
• Linden Hills
• Loring Park
• Near North Heritage Park

Saint Paul

• Como
• Dayton’s Bluff
• Mac Groveland
• North End
• Summit Hill
• Summit University-Rondo
• Union Park (Merriam Pk +)
• West 7th Fort Road
• West Side

And just this fall we are revitalizing our efforts in northeast Minnesota with the Cass Lake Leech Lake forum and their majority Native American community.

We’ve never had this many new forums in the pipeline in our organization’s history.

As an E-Democracy forum member, you there are two ways you can help us build on these efforts to invite your neighbors—whatever their national or racial origins may be—to have a voice through the E-Democracy Forums!

Make a Donation on Give to the Max Day—November 16!
Your contribution of any amount—$25, $50, $100 or more—will help advance our work for inclusive civic engagement and can be amplified to increase your giving impact to the E-Democracy:

Win a Golden Ticket! $1,000 will be given to a random donor’s nonprofit of choice every hour.  You could be that donor!  You can log on to E-Democracy’s donation page as early as 12 a.m. on Wednesday, November 16, or make several donations throughout the day for more chances to win.

NEW THIS YEAR!  $15,000, $10,000 and $5,000 prize grants will be awarded to the top three small nonprofit organizations—with budgets under $750,000—which receive the most dollars on Give to the Max Day.

Join the E-Democracy 2011 Team Challenge!
We’re building out a team of volunteer Forum Managers and ardent supporters to help us on Give to the Max Day. Join your Forum Manager’s team or create a team of your own!

Our goal is to raise $500 for each forum. 80% of the funds raised will be dedicated to outreach in that forum’s neighborhood. Donations from multiple team members raising funds for the same forum will be combined. Dollars will be spent on further outreach as determined by the Forum Manager and E-Democracy.org and must be spent in 2012.

Visit E-Democracy’s donation page now to learn more about E-Democracy’s inclusive outreach work.

Please make a donation of $10, $25, $50, $100 or more in support of E-Democracy!