Hi Folks,
We're organizing a town hall meeting to kick off our program on
Neighborhood Redevelopment, with an intent on building something like
the Internet Engineering Task Force - lots of working groups, focused on
redeveloping neighborhoods - particularly condominium complexes, built
post-WWII, that are at risk of falling apart like the condo towers in
Miami.
We need a movement to "Rebuild Suburbia" or some such, something like
the Open Planning Project write large - crowdsourcing neighborhood
redevelopment. I've been planning on doing something around the America
250 campaign - organize meetings in local communities about "where do we
go next?" And then the Harris Campaign, starts doing large group
organizing - and FoundersForHarris wants to get a whole bunch of town
hall & policy forums going on #dosomething day -10/8 - an opportunity
too good to pass up. So....
I'm looking for folks who might want to organize watch parties, local
working groups, in their neighborhoods - particularly folks who live in
condo complexes, maybe have a podcast or a blog - so we can build a
permanent meeting electronic meetinghouse around neighborhood
redevelopment. A network of hangouts, and working groups.
Trying to pull this together in 20 days, so .. take a look - let me know
if you're interested.
*_This Old Neighborhood: A Call to Town Meeting_*
*Neighborhood Redevelopment Strategies Program*
*New Ways Forward for America's Suburban Neighborhoods*
*Share Your Stories, Visions, Ventures, and Opportunities*
*Program Launch: #DOSOMETHINGDAY, 8 October 2024*
*Call for Hosts, Organizers, Presentations, Media Partners, and Sponsors*
*Pre-Registration & Pre-Conference Activities for Participants*
*... More in attachment*
SOME BACKGROUND
-------------------------------
By way of quick intro, I used to run the Center for Civic Networking,
where we did some early work on "electronic town halls" - and later did
a lot of work helping cities & towns launch broadband projects. I wrote
the books on putting the Internet in public libraries (/_All-Out
Internet Access <http://civic.net/library.html>_/ American Library
Association Editions) and municipal broadband (/Telecommunications
Strategies for Local Government
<http://civic.net/telecom/handbook/index.html>/ Government Technology
Press. and Edited/Published the/Journal of Municipal Telecommunications
<http://munitelecom.org/jmt.html>//),/and coined the term "Civic
Networking." Details
athttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mfidelman/ andhttps://web.archive.org/web/20040205011330/http://www.civic.net/.
Now, I'm focusing on the challenges of redeveloping aging suburban
subdivisions, before they crumble into the ocean, like Miami's Champlain
Towers. I'm focusing first on the/Village of Nagog Woods/, where I find
myself on one of our four condo boards, and our long-range capital
planning committee - discovering just how ill-equipped volunteer condo
boards are at long-term planning. A lot of communities are on the verge
of catastrophe - but few are even paying attention - and the lack of
support is staggering. Hence my efforts to launch a program to address
the issues. I've been blogging our early efforts
at/ThisOldNeighborhood.Net/ - but so far, it's an unfunded activity.
I've been getting ready to scale up - pursuing funding from various
sources, and possibilities for an organizational home.
I'd been planning to launch a major marketing campaign, in association
with the/America 250/ activities ("let's do more than celebrate our
past, let's gather in town meeting to plan our future") - when along
comes the Harris Campaign, it's various mega-zoom town meetings,
including Founders for Kamala, aimed at entrepreneurs. The group is
calling for folks to organize events - including town hall meetings &
policy forums - for #dosomething day on 10/8 - which seems an awfully
timely opportunity for us. Particularly given Harris' focus on housing,
middle class economics, and small business - it screams "buy local,
build local."
So... We're planning some kind of coordinated series of panel
discussions, on "Redeveloping Suburbia" - mostly as a recruiting
activity, to get people's attention, and engage them in thinking about
the future of their neighborhoods. And... It seems a perfect
opportunity to start building a network of local "civic forums" and
community networks (harkening back to the days of FreeNets, and the
attempt to build a network thereof) - conveniently, I managed to retain
the domain "Civic.Net" - which I envision as the hub of an internet of
hyper-local media networks.
I'd welcome the opportunity to chat about this - sooner, rather than
later, given that #dosomethingday is 20 days away. The best way to
reach me is at 617-538-9249 (cell/txt - eastern time, best to txt
first), or Facebook Messenger for video chat (Miles Fidelman).
Best,
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why. ... unknown
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