Neighbors Online: Connecting Communities for All Workshop

Los Angeles, Thu. Jan 31 - 7 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.

Westside Conference Center - Pepperdine University

Join us for a dynamic two part conversation on building inclusive online community engagement in neighborhoods.

• 1. Neighbors Online Networking - LA and Beyond - Who is doing what locally? Multiple tools and models from around the world.
   
• 2. Inclusive Community Engagement Online - Stories and lessons you can adapt and use in your own community are emerging from the world's largest effort to inclusively connect 10,000+ diverse neighbors online in St. Paul, Minnesota by 2014.

 The gathering will be facilitated by Steven Clift, with Minnesota-based E-Democracy.org. Steven, as Ashoka Fellow, has spoken about online civic engagement across 30 countries since 1993.

Virtual Introductions: After you register, please join the Locals Online and/or Digital Inclusion online communities of practice to introduce yourself.

Details

A similar workshop was held in Seattle and San Francisco recently. These slides also include a new short post-Sandy section on using online neighbor connecting for disaster response and community recovery.

1. LA Neighbors Online Networking - Who is doing what?

Part one will start with a friendly networking roundtable where you are invited to share a few minutes about your online neighbor connecting efforts or put your “I am just getting started” questions on the table. Let’s highlight great online neighbor connecting efforts already happening in the region (here is what we found in Seattle for example).

Together, we will briefly introduce conversation-based neighbor connecting “tools” many of us use like simple e-mail lists, forums, Facebook Groups, NextDoor, etc. and dig into why, when, where, how (public v. private) as well as introduce inclusive outreach and engagement that matters to diverse local communities.

2. Inclusive Community Engagement Online - Lessons to adapt and deploy locally 

Part two will provide an in-depth presentation with extended discussion on E-Democracy’s BeNeighbors.org outreach effort to build inclusive and integrated online community engagement in lower income, highly diverse, high immigrant neighborhoods in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Why inclusion? Online neighbor connecting is useful and powerful for those who discover it, yet among the divides, the Neighbors Online study of the Pew Internet and American Life project found that households making 75K a year are 5 times more likely than those making 50K or less to be a member of a neighborhood e-mail list or forum. 

With 2 years of pilot funding from the Ford Foundation and now extended St. Paul funding from the Knight Foundation through 2014, the BeNeighbors.org effort hopes to exchange lessons with projects around San Fransciso and beyond. By openly sharing our challenges and insights, we hope to learn from the work of other great projects.

Sponsors

This is event is being organized by the non-profit BeNeighbors.org outreach initiative of E-Democracy.org. Co-Sponsors include:

Contact

If you have questions about this event, please contact E-Democracy.org at contact@e-democracy.org or 612-234-7072.