“…hardly available… despite significant community interest.”
Scott an interesting comment recently. He wrote:
“With the recent explosion in Eastown, I was interested to see how short term news has become online. Three days after the explosion, information was hardly available. There was no in depth coverage despite significant community interest. There was no hub to hold together the information. There was more grousing about traditional media than the sort of impactful coverage that could enlighten the community and quell rumors.
“I’m not saying that a tighter local communication will solve this, but it should provide a forum for such localized storytelling to reach an appropriate audience.
What would such a hub look like? Might is look like this? http://www.viget.org/1500-1502_Wealthy_Street_SE
From the site: Viget is a wiki for the City of Grand Rapids, MI started in March 2007 by Michael Greene, Paul Wittenbraker, and George Wietor. Trannie joined the team in August 2007. It is a collaborative project of Civic Studio and G-RAD.
Goal–It was formed with the idea of becoming a place to share the citizens of Grand Rapids’ collective knowledge about what IS a part of our fair city as well as to dream and theorize about what COULD BE.
Viget takes its name from the motto of the City of Grand Rapids, Motu Viget.
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Additionally, my google search of “explosion eastown” turned up a handful of photos, the Calvin College newspaper’s article, and a couple of MLive posts from a few days ago (more recent than Scott’s original observation). I didn’t read the MLive follow-up closely enough to determine quality. None of these things (except maybe the wiki) can be considered a hub, and there’s no telling how long any of the sites will persist.
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I think the Viget wiki is an interesting case. It’s been around for a year now. Who knows about it, what is it used for? How can the last year of the Viget project inform the forgr project?
A hub has to abide all of the constraints we place upon the physical problem of support. It has to be readily available and people have to know about it. Education and broadcast. I think the wiki is a very good thing and this sort of community knowledge base is important. What turns news into history? Once upon a time it was likely memory. This is perhaps still true, but archives create such a thorough database of our shared knowledge that history is becoming more about data mining. We need the data to mine. The wiki contributes to this.
Now a community hub is as much about emotion as history. A place to grieve, a place to share. If there were a place where the community felt it could express public emotions, without tampering with the historical mechanism, that would be interesting. How does a community remember itself?
More questions than answers I’m afraid.
severnspoon
March 17, 2008 at 11:24 pm