My blogging has been more irregular than I’d have liked so far this year, and the reason has largely been the time I’ve been putting into a project which quite possibly represents the ultimate in what my training and experience over the years (in teaching, science, computer software, journalism and website design) has led to.
Early this week was the official launch of the community website I’d been dreaming of building for quite some time. Detailed planning took place in November last, building occurred over December and January, and during February and March I was showing it to key people (the ones who can help me advance the concept and foster contributions to it) and adding in some basic content.
Of course this website will never ever be “finished” (I certainly hope not!), but now it has sufficient skin around the bones for it to withstand public viewing and invite participation. The site is called Motueka Online and it’s located at www.MotuekaOnline.org.nz. I’m not putting the link here just to get more traffic to it from this blog, but rather to show what I believe a non-commercial community website is capable of offering.
If you’re not sure what I’m on about here, just a bit of background. Last year my wife and I moved to the wonderful district and town of Motueka in Tasman, at the north end of New Zealand’s South Island. This was not just a random or hedonistic (“lifestyle”) escape to a lovely, gentle climate and vibrant, green landscape; rather, it resulted from a strong desire to be part of a productive, caring and hopefully sustainable community. I wrote about it in this blog.
I believe that a community worth living in is one which gets better as each member contributes to it. It’s a good community because people give to it as often as they use it and take from it to fulfil their own lives. So for me it’s a matter of finding what I can contribute, from my kitbag of abilities and weaknesses, that will help make this a community I can love.
My recent background in journalism and website design made this project a pretty sweet combo – a non-commercial website based on a sponsorship model (to make it sustainable into the future) which uses the voice of the people for its content, and which provides the information they need for daily living. Plus, it’s starting to look fun and interesting.
So, the result is there to see and judge. I’m now going to reproduce here the latter part of the speech I made at the launch event (after the bit where I demonstrated the site), and perhaps you can better understand what I’m trying to say. Here goes:
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This website is unique in New Zealand, and possible one of very few of this type around the world. Now that’s a bold claim indeed! Is it fair comment?
Before launching out on this project I did a lot of research – mainly among New Zealand community sites – and this is what I found:
- There are many commercially oriented town and community websites which exist primarily to list businesses in the area, with items of local community information, news and events largely added in as extras. The excellent Motueka i-Site is one of them. In essence, the success of their operation is based on the model of “news and information supported by advertising”. These sites fill an important niche, and often do it really well.
- I found quite a few small non-commercial community sites that look like they were noble ideas when they started out, but have since slipped into disrepair, clearly not maintained for months or even years in some cases. Most of these community websites comprise little more than three or four pages, serving communities so small that there are very few events to report and few businesses to support them. Nice try, but no prize, I’m afraid.
- At the other end of the spectrum, I found some large and informative city or district sites which are run and maintained by paid staff working for local bodies. Tasman District Council’s website is clearly one example, as is the Christchurch website maintained by its city library. All of these excellent sites are, however, what I call top-down information sites. I’ll come back to this concept shortly.
- I did find two delightful grassroots community sites operating for villages near big cities. One is based in the Heathcote Valley, a suburb of Christchurch, and the other at Tamahere, a satellite settlement of Hamilton. They are both up-to-date, intelligent and driven by community voices rather than by their local body masters. However they struggle because they have insufficient population to be able to attract a wide range of contributions and information.
I believe that Motueka Online is the only site in New Zealand of this size with broad-ranging, community-driven content that is not for profit, not driven by the need for active advertising. In this respect, I believe it is unique. How has this been achieved?
- First, there’s the size of Motueka, which is just about ideal for this to happen. There is enough going on in and around the town, including a wide range of activities and interests, but not so much that it needs full-time staff to publish and maintain all the information.
- Secondly I believe the mindset of the people of Motueka is unusually oriented towards their own community, more so than most other towns in New Zealand. We’re a distinct town with a distinct identity, and we’re proud of that.
- Thirdly, Motueka’s growth and well-being is being guided by a number of skilled and dedicated community leaders, such as yourselves.
- And finally – and I don’t know how to say this without sounding conceited – I happen to be living here after many years of experience in journalism and website design, and have the time to maintain the site.
I’m going to finish off with a few thoughts about information management over the centuries, and about how much this has changed in recent years. I want to compare two paradigms or models, which I call “top-down” and “bottom-up”.
Over history, the publication of information was controlled by the top-down process. We all know about how authorities such as the church were able to keep the medieval masses in place by controlling information to them. This continued largely into the mid 20th century, with the wealthy classes controlling the means of publication.
Since the 1980s though, desktop publishing allowed ordinary people with average finances to publish their own flyers, newsletters, magazines, and even newspapers. But even then if you wanted to expand your audience into the mainstream media you had to sweet-talk newspaper reporters and other media to publicise your story. It was still largely a top-down flow of information.
As I mentioned earlier, local body websites such as the council’s, provide heaps of information, along with the ability for people to formally respond with submissions, but this is a very controlled and still largely top-down communication.
Since the arrival of the mainstream Internet in the mid-1990s, however, the ability to self-publish has widened spectacularly, and bottom-up publication – of sorts, anyhow – has absolutely taken off. Anyone with an Internet connection and a cheap computer can publish their story and their beliefs online, through their own conventional websites, or through blogs and Facebook pages and the like. And with Google, their audience can find them.
However to many people, particularly those of us over the age of 30 or so, the pendulum has swung too far. Cyberspace has become a free-for-all, with people shouting opinions and wasting endless hours in chat rooms, Twitter pages, blogs and so on. Not only are many people scared to enter and take part in that world, but the more realistic ones also know that, with so much noise there, they are unlikely to be heard anyhow. Millions of voices are competing for attention.
Today, if you want to express yourself or your ideas or publicise an offering, basically you have the choice of three options – 1) paying for an advertisement, 2) persuading an editor to take up your cause, or 3) shouting the loudest on a social networking website.
Motueka Online offers a template for a compromise that may just be the ideal for medium-size communities. It publishes content supplied almost entirely by community members. The contributions are moderated by community members to ensure satisfactory security, privacy and respectfulness. The website also does have some official top-down information, but it’s been massaged and summarised to suit readers with limited time on their hands.
It’s what I’ve been calling bottom-up. Maybe grassroots is a more familiar term. Motueka Online has been designed to provide and encourage easy access for anyone to participate.
But, as the cliché goes, we all have to use it or in time we’ll lose it.
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