[OSGeo-Discuss] Anybody Interested in Helping Out With a Town Meeting on Suburban Redevelopment for #dosomethingday on 10/8

[Miles Fidelman]

Hi Folks,

We're organizing a town hall meeting to kick off our program on 
Neighborhood Redevelopment, with an intent on building something like 
the Internet Engineering Task Force - lots of working groups, focused on 
redeveloping neighborhoods - particularly condominium complexes, built 
post-WWII, that are at risk of falling apart like the condo towers in 
Miami.

We need a movement to "Rebuild Suburbia" or some such, something like 
the Open Planning Project write large - crowdsourcing neighborhood 
redevelopment.  I've been planning on doing something around the America 
250 campaign - organize meetings in local communities about "where do we 
go next?"  And then the Harris Campaign, starts doing large group 
organizing - and FoundersForHarris wants to get a whole bunch of town 
hall & policy forums going on #dosomething day -10/8 - an opportunity 
too good to pass up.  So....

I'm looking for folks who might want to organize watch parties, local 
working groups, in their neighborhoods - particularly folks who live in 
condo complexes, maybe have a podcast or a blog - so we can build a 
permanent meeting electronic meetinghouse around neighborhood 
redevelopment.  A network of hangouts, and working groups.

Trying to pull this together in 20 days, so .. take a look - let me know 
if you're interested.

*_This Old Neighborhood: A Call to Town Meeting_*

*Neighborhood Redevelopment Strategies Program*

*New Ways Forward for America's Suburban Neighborhoods*

*Share Your Stories, Visions, Ventures, and Opportunities*

*Program Launch: #DOSOMETHINGDAY, 8 October 2024*

*Call for Hosts, Organizers, Presentations, Media Partners, and Sponsors*

*Pre-Registration & Pre-Conference Activities for Participants*

*... More in attachment*



SOME BACKGROUND
-------------------------------

By way of quick intro, I used to run the Center for Civic Networking, 
where we did some early work on "electronic town halls" - and later did 
a lot of work helping cities & towns launch broadband projects.  I wrote 
the books on putting the Internet in public libraries (/_All-Out 
Internet Access <http://civic.net/library.html>_/ American Library 
Association Editions) and municipal broadband (/Telecommunications 
Strategies for Local Government 
<http://civic.net/telecom/handbook/index.html>/  Government Technology 
Press. and Edited/Published the/Journal of Municipal Telecommunications 
<http://munitelecom.org/jmt.html>//),/and coined the term "Civic 
Networking." Details 
athttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mfidelman/ andhttps://web.archive.org/web/20040205011330/http://www.civic.net/.

Now, I'm focusing on the challenges of redeveloping aging suburban 
subdivisions, before they crumble into the ocean, like Miami's Champlain 
Towers.  I'm focusing first on the/Village of Nagog Woods/, where I find 
myself on one of our four condo boards, and our long-range capital 
planning committee - discovering just how ill-equipped volunteer condo 
boards are at long-term planning.  A lot of communities are on the verge 
of catastrophe - but few are even paying attention - and the lack of 
support is staggering. Hence my efforts to launch a program to address 
the issues.  I've been blogging our early efforts 
at/ThisOldNeighborhood.Net/ - but so far, it's an unfunded activity.  
I've been getting ready to scale up - pursuing funding from various 
sources, and possibilities for an organizational home.

I'd been planning to launch a major marketing campaign, in association 
with the/America 250/ activities ("let's do more than celebrate our 
past, let's gather in town meeting to plan our future") - when along 
comes the Harris Campaign, it's various mega-zoom town meetings, 
including Founders for Kamala, aimed at entrepreneurs.  The group is 
calling for folks to organize events - including town hall meetings & 
policy forums - for #dosomething day on 10/8 - which seems an awfully 
timely opportunity for us.  Particularly given Harris' focus on housing, 
middle class economics, and small business - it screams "buy local, 
build local."

So... We're planning some kind of coordinated series of panel 
discussions, on "Redeveloping Suburbia" - mostly as a recruiting 
activity, to get people's attention, and engage them in thinking about 
the future of their neighborhoods.  And... It seems a perfect 
opportunity to start building a network of local "civic forums" and 
community networks (harkening back to the days of FreeNets, and the 
attempt to build a network thereof) - conveniently, I managed to retain 
the domain "Civic.Net" - which I envision as the hub of an internet of 
hyper-local media networks.

I'd welcome the opportunity to chat about this - sooner, rather than 
later, given that #dosomethingday is 20 days away.  The best way to 
reach me is at 617-538-9249 (cell/txt - eastern time, best to txt 
first), or Facebook Messenger for video chat (Miles Fidelman).

Best,

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown

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