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High Notes of Low-Tech Tuesday

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Submitted by Andre Yap on 2010, August 4 - 7:21am

What a blast! Yesterday in New Haven we had our first of what looks like many Low-Tech Tuesdays. Our goal was to identify ways to reach people and organizations who have much to contribute to our social web, but who aren't readily accessible via social media and technologies (read: most of New Haven). For starters (as we will make Low-Tech Tuesday a regular meetup), some of the great ideas included:

  • Potlucks, which are many and varied and happen regularly across New Haven. Let's join them as much as we can, even if just one or two of us, listen to what their interests and visions are, and help achieve them through our social web.
  • Library, which is long-understood as a place for learning new things about both technology and community. We can do monthly "classes" or more open meetups building on the library's reach to invite and introduce new segments
  • Neighborhoods like East Rock, Westville, Fair Haven, West River, etc. all have their civic hubs/venues.
  • Fliers, preferably business-card sized with a simple call to action (e.g., Google "Civic Haven") that leads new audiences to our site.
  • Other social institutions? The above are good old fashioned social processes or venues that attract the diversity and mass of stakeholders we want. Can we think of any more?
  • Question was posed. What are the key demographics/groups we want to reach in New Haven? What are their potluck style gatherings?

All that said, this is the key action item that came out of Low-tech Tuesday: before we can reach out to broader segments of New Haven, we need to write up our vision and mission.

Here's a draft, with our invitation to post your comments in this public blog so that we can have an open process where all can participate.

Vision We have a vision of New Haven as a shining city of the social web: a place unlike any where community and technology make connections, conversations, and collaborations across our diversity of people, sectors and stakeholders happen as a matter of everyday life; where common ground can thus be forged and won, and mighty things dared and done - not in years, but in days.

Mission We are building an open place, which exists online and off and effectively bridges both worlds, where people and organizations from all walks of New Haven, enabled by social media and technologies can identify, connect, and coalesce around common visions and turn them into collective action. The measure of our progress are the visions, connections, conversations, collaborations, actions, and impact we make everyday. Even as we track each of them we know that our whole is greater than the sum of our parts.

Call to Action We invite people and organizations from our Greater New Haven area to participate in Our New Haven Project:

  • by sharing your visions or helping others achieve theirs;
  • by connecting with each other;
  • by joining our conversations and/or meetups;
  • by collaborating towards meaningful action and impact.

We are building the venues online and off, where any of us can perform all of the above. Coming soon in New Haven in the Summer of 2010.

Reposting from Rachel Heerema

Andre Yap's picture
Submitted by Andre Yap on 2010, August 6 - 2:09am.

[Reposted from Rachel's email] Wow.  What an impressive vision & mission.  I think I missed a great conversation.

I echo Aldon's idea of removing the word "organizations."  As much as I support the nonprofit sector in NH (and it supports me), I believe there will be more co-creative energy when the connections are people-to-people and not people-to-organizations.  I do have a concern that "facilitate" is a somewhat wonky word, while "build" gets the meaning across nicely.


One medium-tech idea: engaging people through text messages. Many working class people can't afford a data plan, but so many have cell phones with text message plans.  (Per Wikipedia, 60% of Americans use text messaging.)  Youth especially -- who need to be engaged in community-minded work & who we need to develop into community leaders -- primarily rely on text messaging over email.  Text messages are read more quickly than emails, so they're useful for time-sensitive communications/events.  While I am not an expert on text message distribution, I understand there's TextPlus, which runs group texting -- I think for free?  One GREAT example of the use of text messages: http://www.text4baby.org/, free weekly mobile tips on pregnancy & early care, sent based on date of birth.  The New Haven Early Childhood Council is working to bring this to New Haven.

So, perhaps we could push some of the web-based communications to text messaging to reach a diverse & younger audience.

Regards,

Rachel Heerema

Thanks, Rachel. Totally with

Andre Yap's picture
Submitted by Andre Yap on 2010, August 6 - 2:19am.

Thanks, Rachel. Totally with you on mid-tech/SMS idea - it's proven to be a scalable model too, even in developing countries, and so spot on with youth! Also, we might have a local API in Matt Browning's Intelliblast (I'll let Matt comment on that).

I'm also with you on people-to-people interaction. My strong feelings about including "organizations" in the discourse have to do with perspective. When we met last Tuesday, we talked about getting some of New Haven's landmark organizations to pledge their involvement. As, for example, the Mayor's office and the Economic Development Corporation have been involved in our social web initiatives so we want to bring organizations like Community Foundation, the New Haven Public Schools, Library, Yale, etc. to the table quite apart from and despite the fact that there are many people from these institutions who already take part in what we're doing. Organizations bring unique motivations, resources, credibility to the table

What do others think?

As a wordsmith that values

Aldon Hynes's picture
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on 2010, August 4 - 9:16am.
As a wordsmith that values concise mission statements, I like the ideas of the mission statement that Andre has crafted, but would propose making it much shorter and simpler.

To facilitate social media enabled spaces that connect people to take collective action to improve New Haven.

Comments: I've used space instead of place because it includes concepts of cyberspace as well as open space meetings., without losing anything. I have not explicity mentioned online and offline because while it is important, I believe it is sufficiently implied in connecting people and collective action. That said, I believe the idea of the combination of both online and offline is very important and needs to be spelled out in the vision. I have not included organizations in the mission statement for a similar reason. Organizations are made up of people. We are connecting people. This may be done through information technology, it may be done through existing organizations, as well as many other ways. All of this, I believe is better spelled out in the vision. That said, collective action is crucial. Metrics also, in my mind, fits better in the vision than the mission. The mission is to connect people to take collective action. The metrics are simply part of what enables that.

I also chose the word facilitate instead of build. Build, in my mind is a subset of facilitate. Some of what we use will need to be built, some exists already and simply needs other forms of facilitation.

Aldon, I'm with you for

Andre Yap's picture
Submitted by Andre Yap on 2010, August 5 - 6:26am.

Aldon, I'm with you for shorter. Catch 22 is if it's too short it could mean too many things - or nothing if you're new to the group &/or to social media.

How about this:

  • We both agree on making explicit "online and offline". You think it should go in the vision statement. I kept it in the mission statement because I think that's where people should get an operative sense of what it is we're doing. "Space" per se is much too vague.
  • People vs. Organizations - I think it's worth the distinction even if you correctly point out that the former includes the latter. Use myself as case in point: there are visions, ideas, projects I would think of on a personal hat (e.g., educational models that are more about learning vs. teaching) vs. organizational hat (branding CT as a destination for marketing, more efficient startup hubs in CT, angel investor tax credits, etc.).
  • I think it's also key to our mission to underline the process, not just the end point, but the path from finding common visions to turning them into collective action.

All that said, your thoughts on a new improved mission statement?

We are facilitating an open space, which exists online and off, where people and organizations from all walks of New Haven, can coalesce around common visions and turn them into collective action.