Flutterby™! : Roundabout notes

Ben Werdmuller's Friday links included notes about the New Public Local Lab announcement of their community engagement platform Roundabout. In the sign-up form they ask you to write a bit about how and why you'd like to bring their platform into your community, and I wrote the following:

I have been chronically online since the '80s, started an ISP in the '90s to expand my online community and cross that with my in-person community, and sociology grad students call me up to chat about being one of the early bloggers (still am). Over the years I've participated in various community email lists.

I accidentally helped found Petaluma Urban Chat (urbanchat.org), a 501c3 which works to educate and advocate on housing to meet community needs, alternatives to car mobility, sustainable municipal finance, all in the face of needing to adapt to climate change.

I'm even a Nextdoor lead, though I mostly ignore those duties, because...

I *hate* that I'm enriching Nextdoor through trying to bring some sanity to their horrific engagement bait. My reasonable neighbors have fled their platform.

I used to believe that online created fantastic communities, which is why I worked to bring the physical world online, but discovered that mostly I just was one of many people whose work destroyed those online communities.

So these days in my spare time (yes, I'm employed) working on building real-world physical communities, but I see a need for better communication, for better neighborhood level organizing, and, despite all of the evidence and experience to the contrary still believe that it may be possible to use online tools to do such things.

And the few Signal groups that are forming up don't seem up to the task.