3DN community portals
Community Portals
- Community Portals are designed to facilitate Three Dimensional Networking. The attention of most people is one dimensional - focused on how they can obtain what they need in the value flows through the community. Building a better world requires us to shift the attention of more and more people to how we can change the pattern so it works better for all of us - more and more people thinking in three dimensions about creating new flows.
- Businesses, through marketing, attempt to change the pattern all the time. They seek to attract attention to change the flow to increase the volume of business. Social purpose organizations such as Daniel Bassill's Tutor/Mentor Connection are attempting the same thing with far fewer resources. That is why I think I can get support from existing businesses and social purpose organizations to build a community asset that facilitates more and more people thinking about how they have the power to change the pattern and how that power might be used most constructively.
- What should that asset look like? It should be useful for people in the same way that the local paper is useful. It should be the medium that people choose as the way to keep in touch with what is going on around them.
- Right now, each of our portals to the internet is our browser, our bookmarks, our favorites and our e-mail. I'm sure some people have better set ups than I do through which they do such things as catch up on the news, check the stock market or sport scores, etc. How can we make the portal more useful to none tech people?
- I am thinking of a internet portal with information specific to the location of the person. What would your grandmother like to see in her portal? I am thinking such things as what is playing at the local theater, special events coming up in the neighborhood, gossip about the neighbors, the business directory, local news and politics, . . . and a discussion of ideas about ways we might improve the neighborhood. Every thing in the portal already knows grandma – so she is not constantly logging in – but she can also customize her site or expand its area of search at will.
- Any other ideas?
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Comments
Comments
I think we should focus on stuff that is not already readily available. People could already have a lot of this stuff at their fingertips simply by making the local newspaper's website be their homepage. They would have local (and national/international) news, stock quotes, what's playing in the local theater, weather plus a lot of other stuff.
What the don't get, though, by making the local newspaper their homepage, is access to:
- a chance to participate in an ongoing discussion about how to make their community better
- information about local businesses and local organizations including information about ownership and business practices
- they don't get to exchange goods and services with those organizations without using cash
These things are in my opinion the real value added of community portals.
