Crowdsourcing

Sugar House can benefit from the high interest of its populace in community connectivity. It enjoys a great reputation for being a great place to live, with park space, great connections to the rest of the region, a great commercial core, quality (relatively) affordable housing, and people who are highly interested in the success of their community.

Lately I've been following a blog called Cooltownstudios, which focuses on a concept called "crowdsourcing." Similar to the concept of "outsourcing," crowdsourcing relies on the participants in the group to identify what they need in their community, gather a group together that sees a similar need, and once they reach critical mass, look for a sponsor or entrepreneur to meet that need.

From Cooltown:

Start crowdsourcing the kind of project you'd like to see in your city or neighborhood. Is it a coffeehouse? A coworking site? Attainably-priced lofts? You define the vision, then start attracting people to build up a crowd. What's next? Once you build up a sizable crowd of at least a hundred people; a beta community, we'll help you find a 'Sponsor', that is, an entrepreneur willing to work with your group to implement your collective vision.

Similar to the concepts of Web 2.0, crowdsourcing relies on the user to "create content" or to be the direct, driving force behind development of community assets. Crowdsourcing employs the tools of the virtual world (online communities, Facebook groups, etc), but has the added benefit of being able to use those communities to create something in the "real world" and see real community change.

This concept is similar to good old fashioned community activism. A recent effort that exemplifies crowdsourcing was the installation of lights at the Fairmont Skate Park. Users of the skatepark saw the need, and collectively gathered more than 1,000 signatures to petition Salt Lake City to improve the skatepark so that it could be used later into the evening. This effort benefited from having an existing physical location where interested people gathered frequently, and could be easily identified. Crowdsourcing can champion change for elements that don't currently have a physical location, but may have an as yet unknown group.

Sugar House Chatauqua?

In my comment to Kathleen's post I wondered a bit about how to make a community plan while at the same time creating a creative and collaborative process. One way to do that is to host events that both serve to educate the public about the community and the plan, while at the same time revising or creating anew the plan. Such events would both give strength to the core idea of creating a community plan and allow community members to create their own plans, linked tightly or loosely to the first plan.

In other words, I'm imagining something like a real-world wiki. The closest historical example is the chatauqua movement that educated and entertained millions of Americans between the 1890s and 1930s. The trick today wouldn't be to create a one-time event that drew hundreds of visitors to Sugar House--Brolly Arts has shown that it can do that with the Legend of Hidden Hollow, as have Lynne, Sheri, and the KOPE Kids. The trick would be to do it in a way that provoked face-to-face and online interaction between the events. How do we do that? How do we build the spirit of chatauqua (or local, democratic community-making) into the practices of local organizations, the classrooms of local schools, and the lives of local residents?