Now that John Murden has thrown down the gauntlet for web-savvy community builders -- twice! -- I find myself both excited that some new grassroots windows into the Richmond community might be opening, and mulling the idea of starting one for my community (the Rosedale/Ginter Park/Bellevue neighborhoods). Emphasis on mulling; a full-time job, three websites and a desire for a life away from the keyboard add up.
(Wikipedia has a nice summary of Richmond's neighborhoods if you're wondering where you live. And the Richmond Public Library's Newspaper Clipping Files answers the secret of Richmond's many hills -- a proposed 1937 city ordinance tried to put an end to speculation by naming the seven "official" hills, which are Union Hill, Church Hill, Council Chamber Hill, Shockoe Hill, Gambles Hill and French Garden Hill; the ordinance failed. In 1963, the Richmond Civil War Centennial Committee [gag] published "The 67 Hills of Richmond" -- because why would you stop with just seven?)
Church Hill residents have been fortunate to have John's talent and passion behind the extremely useful Church Hill People's News, which is about as good an online community resource as I've seen in Richmond. This past weekend, John stated a case that "there need to be more very local community-oriented blogs" in Richmond:
A hoodblog can serve to provide a more broad ongoing record of the events important to a neighborhood. While immediacy is a great strength of the email group, there isn't much in the way of available historical context (for example). A related facet is the level of access available to a website rather than an email list. I've heard from a number of folks new to the area that they found chpn while researching their move. Finding the site in turn led some of them to the Flickr group for the area. And, blogs can feed out to local blog aggregators such as RVAblogs.
Personally, I would like to be able to check in every once in a while with what is going in the other downtown neighborhoods.
He hit the web again this week with a follow-up to his first post, shaking the community website tree again. The Richmond Times-Dispatch's intention to start community websites (on a more macro scale than John is advocating) apparently pushed a few of Murden's buttons:
Mainstream media in the form of the Times-Dispatch has announced their intention to get into that space. From today's RTD:
Looking for more news from your neighborhood? Next Wednesday, Jan. 31, we're launching seven mini-Web sites on our DiscoverRichmond.com website, focused on Richmond, the Tri-Cities area, and Chesterfield, Henrico, Hanover, Powhatan and Goochland counties. The Web sites will feature a family of community blogs that will give you a place to post news from your neighborhood.
Now, there are plenty of reasons to believe that this will suck. Check out how useful their events calendar is, notice how completely not distinct their fake-ass blogs are.
No punches pulled there.
Putting his money where his mouth is, Murden has volunteered his expertise to help community-minded get their voices online.
