Fred Markus and I have something of a tag-team cheering section going
lately, but I want to pile on to something he said:
>Imagine how much more thoroughly the alarm about NRP could have been
>raised if there had been a municipal feed into a widely available
>electronic news source. Mpls-issues on steroids, I suppose. The kind of
>news source that would be de riguer on a public kiosk system. How about
>routine spin-offs from the Minneapolis Intergovernmental Relations
>Director's office, for example
This is essential in 21st century democracy.
First - since I already have enough city employees mad at me - I want to
give a shout-out to Jim Grathwol, the lobbyist for the Minneapolis Public
Schools. All session long, I received Jim's regular email updates about the
legislative session. They were detailed and informative (I now know more
about compensatory revenue than I ever wanted to.)
The neat thing about getting Jim's updates is that I didn't ask to be put on
his list - someone within MPS took the initiative to include me in. As we
try to improve digital democracy, this kind of proactive initiative should
be applauded. I also want to thank the police department, which is way ahead
of the game with 5th precinct and downtown email crime updates (there may be
more but those are two I'm familiar with.)
This winter, city coordinator Kathy O'Brien was nice enough to invite me in
the city's Digital Day to brainstorm about ideas. One thing I suggested was
a city list-bot - essentially a site where you could subscribe to certain
announcement-only newsletters. (City libraries would offer public access and
instruction for signing up and setting up email accounts. I believe Tim
Connolly has used library computers and Yahoo to participate on our list)
There would be several lists available - parks, public works, legislative
lobbyists, council members, etc. You could pick which ones you wanted, a la
Yahoo Groups, and unsubscribe when you wanted. City email traffic is public.
There's no reason why updates shouldn't be shared outside of city hall with
the citizenry.
These wouldn't be discussion lists, because you have to walk before you can
run. Plus, the management problems explode exponentially <grin>. My hope is
that the city would get comfortable informing citizens through email, then
we could move on to more sophisticated talkback concepts. (And this IS
walk-before-you-can-run: although the city's public information office has
an excellent fax notification service, they are not yet set up to do email.
They seem willing - note to city leaders...let's make it happen!)
I'm trying to demonstrate the capacity of email organizing and information
in King Field. We currently have a 350-person neighborhood email list.
That's only 5 percent of the the city's eighth-biggest neighborhood. Then
again, King Field has 100 blocks, so we have 3.5 email list members per
block - not bad.
We've grown by turning every neighborhood event for the last several months
into an organizing opportunity, gathering email addresses. We tell people
their names will never be sold or given to anyone for commercial or
political purposes, only for neighborhood announcements. We try not to
overwhelm them, sending out roughly one to three emails a week.
My publicly stated goal this summer is to get the list to 1000 people - 10
per block. That ought to be critical mass for folks passing on information
over the back fence. We're going to do this the old-fashioned way -
door-to-door canvassing. We're going to leverage the 350 people currently on
our list, Volunteers will take clipboards and postcards (to leave if folks
aren't home) around their blocks and get names.
This kind of organizing was planned before NRP's latest travails, but it
become crucial because of it. We've been subsidizing our neighborhood
newsletter with NRP funds, but we'll have to cut back frequency or length.
It's simply dirt cheap to keep people informed via email. Maintaining the
list takes some volunteer time, a bit of my hard drive space, Outlook
program, and ISP time, but that's it. Email has always offered the advantage
of immediacy, but it may become a necessity in post-TIF NRP.
We're going to pull this off. I believe the city can too. We should work
together to get this done. I'm open to further suggestions.
David Brauer
King Field - Ward 10
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