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The Community Communication Project is an attempt to find better ways for communities to interact, to share
information -- to communicate. Ideally, this would lead to the identification
or discovery of a model (a group of principles or structures) that could
scale to fit a particular size community (say, a campus or a neighborhood
or a city and so on). Imagine trying to solve a community problem and
being able to tie into the most appropriate, effective, and efficient
modes of communication you need: whether printed newsletters and flyers,
video and television, web and email, facilitated group meetings, radio
and telephone, personal contact, and so on.
Imagine developing a comprehensive, or unified, way for our communities
to communicate: to communify who we are, where
we are.
While there are several pieces already available and some already in
use, the puzzle still hasn't been pieced together into a comprehensive
picture. It is exactly that picture we seek. The slogan I return to again
and again is "Our community is content-rich, but distribution-poor." Share the wealth.
WikiWikiWiki
I've been dabbling with the use of Wiki technology as a way of keeping project information accessible (and editable). One test of this is available at community.wikicities.com. What's a wiki, you ask? In short, it's a way to present information in a format that can be updated by others on the web, like the Wikipedia. To quote, " A wiki is a website that allows users to easily create pages and edit pages others have created. The markup is very simple and requires no knowledge of HTML. For example, surrounding a word with [[double square brackets]] will turn that word or group of words into a link." Intriguing ideas and philsophies.
Upcoming Features
During my annual visit to San Francisco the second week of January, 2005, I visited some organizations involved in their own slice of community communication: Creativity Explored, AccesSF, and BAVC. I intend to write a series of articles over the next few months discussing how they affect their community, and how their lessons might be applied to a comprehensive approach.
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