Townsourcing; or, the promise of localized community media
I like to think of Burlington, VT as “the biggest little town in the Northeast,” not because we’re especially populous (the metropolitan area has just over 200,000 people; compare that to Boston’s 4.4 million, or Providence’s 1.6 million), but because the community here is so unique and varied. Thanks to the near ubiquitous availability of high-speed internet, we’re also a well-informed and well-connected community, and our IT sector is thriving. Because of this, when it comes to local politics, I’ve had an easier time here than anywhere else I’ve lived learning about and discussing the issues and the candidates.
While Burlington’s traditional print media outlets (the daily Burlington Free Press and the alternative weekly Seven Days) are strong and well-written, there are also good online sources of news and information. A huge number of people subscribe to their neighborhood’s Front Porch Forum and voice their opinions through that venue, for instance, and our city government does a fairly good job making information available. There’s local politics weblogs: BurlingtonPol.com, the Vermont Daily Briefing, and She’s Right to name a few. And we have CCTV, our local government-access television channel that also streams live on the web during big events.
It’s no surprise to me that the combination of a strong IT sector and easy access to lots of quality information and debate leads to a vibrant and involved community. This was demonstrated well yesterday on Vermont Town Meeting Day 2009, the day when towns across Vermont hold their town meetings and elections. Last weekend, Bradley Holt of Found Line put together a website to aggregate social media feeds related to this annual Vermont political process. tmdvt.net pulled in content from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, and weblogs via Technorati, collecting loads of real-time news and thoughts in one central location. Word of the site spread quickly, and the local news sources joined in, both contributing to the feeds and pulling them onto their own Town Meeting Day news pages.
But beyond the “official” news sources, local community members also took part, tagging their tweets and photos and blog posts appropriately so that they’d show up, and it was their contributions that really made the project take off. By harnessing and encouraging the enthusiasm of the people of Burlington and the rest of Vermont, tmdvt.net instantly became the go-to site for live election coverage. To describe this effect, I’d like to coin the term townsourcing: a localized form of the popular social-web concept of crowdsourcing. I look forward to seeing how it can and will be used more and more to encourage participation in local politics, media, and culture.
Thanks, Bradley, for putting together such a neat experiment, and thanks also to everyone who took part. May next year’s tmdvt be even better!
