Tom Champion and DSLJ in today's Globe City Weekly

[ron_newman]

On page six of today's Boston Globe City Weekly supplement: Champion logging off blogging experiment, by Peter DeMarco.

This is the second time I can recall seeing Davis Square LiveJournal mentioned in the Globe. The first was also an article about Tom, back in March.

The article has a big photo of Tom, brief quotes from leko and me, and more substantial quotes from Tom.

Comments

[gilana]

Wow, the Globe really doesn't get LOLcats, do they?

Yay Tom Champion! He was an invaluable addition to T@F's show Friday night, and a fabulous guy in general. A real pleasure to get to meet him.

[spatch]

I don't think it's so much a not "getting" the cat thang is it is realizing it'd take too much time to explain (or even reference spelling-wise), especially considering the article's aimed at a general audience.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

oh good. i was worried the article was going to be way more annoying than that. but it wasn't all "OMG TEH INTERNET DRAMA!"

i disagree with the mayor about the position of an internet ombudsman. i think there absolutely is a place for that. i don't think the communications director is the right guy to fill that position, though.

while 311 is great and i'm all in favor of it[1], there's something to be said for an official source that is 1. local, 2. interactive, and (perhaps most significantly) 3. available for collaborative and collective feedback. 311 is an individual thing. there's something to be said for engaging part of the community.

i don't think livejournal is quite the right place for an internet ombudsman to do their thing, however. (neither are the uncontrolled wilds of the somerville news comments page...)

and a somerville wiki IS RIGHT OUT. :)

[1] in particular, i love having an easy way to report things like broken traffic signals. it makes me feel all municipally responsible.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

> i disagree with the mayor about the position of an internet ombudsman

I agree. Though I was sorry to see Tom Champion go from DSLJ (and excited to hear he'd return when no longer in political office!), I understood and respected his reasons for leaving. But I agree that there absolutely would be a place for a real "internet ombudsman" for the city.

It really was a joy having Tom Champion "guest star" at the T@F show on Friday night. He was just hilarious (not surprising, given his former stage career) and it was great to meet him at last.

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the difference between 311 and ${ONLINE_SOLUTION} is persistence of collaborative information. With 311, an individual gets an answer, and that is the end of the process. This is suboptimal, as it means multiple question/answer cycles for the 311 staff, and the previous question/answer cycles fail to benefit other residents.

A persistent, collaborative approach makes a good deal of sense. Yes, even a wiki. I think a wiki (probably restricted-edit) maintained by the 311 folks, giving persistence and accessibility to the stuff with which they deal like an FAQ, makes some sense.

[lizzielizzie.livejournal.com]

A 311 FAQ of sorts would save them a lot of time and effort.

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

> Wow, the Globe really doesn't get LOLcats, do they?

I think the description of the cat avatar pretty much takes care of it.

I think like others here have noticed, the issue is that the journal moves faster than the real world. People need to remember that this isn't a World of Warcraft chat line, and that sometimes only preliminary information is available, and the full story might come out over several days.

Also for those Wikipedians on DSLJ, there's been a dispute on WP's page about DS on whether or not to include a link to our journal. I think the multiple mentions in the Globe are a pretty ironclad justification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Davis_Square

[purpless77.livejournal.com]

I think what happened with Tom shows how "dangerous" the Internet could get for a city official. Imagine someone making a similar mistake as he did with the assault that happened and the victim tried to press charges or went to the media with a fabricated story, etc, etc. It could have gotten really ugly. The Internet can be very useful but communications easily get misconstrued and some attention seekers don't know when to stop. Over the years around the Internet, I've seen many ugly correspondences morph into things they were never meant to be. This community might not be as negative as other places around the net but that thread about the assault got ugly and only victimized the victim even more. Not because of Tom but what some posters had to say about her.

I think 311 has been great and we have many great contributers who seem to know a lot about the happenings in Somerville. The Internet is just TOO flawed. While, I'd love to see Tom come back and agree he was an asset to the community, I agree with the mayor.

[turil.livejournal.com]

I actually think that the Communications Director is exactly the person who should be out there in the world (internet and otherwise) communicating important things about the city. I think what caused problems was that Tom was trying to answer questions that other departments were in charge of answering and not attributing the information to it's source.

For example, a simple "The police have informed me that..." And "I spoke with so and so at the such and such department and they suggested that..." And if there is a miscommunication or incorrect information, all that is necessary is an apology. We all make mistakes, no matter what our job is. That's comppletely understandable. Apologize and move on. No dramatic exits necessary! :-)

Also, I don't think Tom should have taken on the role of problem solver. He's job is to help people communicate, and that's far better done directly rather than with a middleman. Helping people find out where to get information might be something that he could easily do here, safely and easily.

And I also hope that he comes back under another name, as a regular (not as a city official) contributor on his own time with his own personal interests, if he finds the community enjoyable.

[spatch]

For example, a simple "The police have informed me that..." And "I spoke with so and so at the such and such department and they suggested that..." And if there is a miscommunication or incorrect information, all that is necessary is an apology. We all make mistakes, no matter what our job is. That's comppletely understandable. Apologize and move on. No dramatic exits necessary! :-)

Unfortunately, this is the Internet we're dealing with, where mountains are made from molehills on an hourly basis. purpless77 is correct in saying that things get blown way out of proportion, and all the prefaces in the world wouldn't have stopped someone from getting their knickers in a twist over what Tom said, especially if they were determined to get 'em twisted in the first place.

I agree with you that Tom shouldn't have taken on the role of de facto ombudsman, but I know all too well that people posting online with relative anonymity tend to see "ombudsman" and think "punching bag." And I don't think Tom saw that coming.

[an-art-worker.livejournal.com]

It was an interesting experiment but the reasons for stopping are valid.

On the other hand it occurs to me that maybe the idea is right but the LJ forum was the wrong place: what if Somerville ran it's own online forum that was both "official" and moderated by the appropriate city person (and/or one of their aids).

Now I understand that there are not the resources for this, there is probably all manner of liability, and there would be the potential for abuse - so this is a complete fantasy -but having an on-going "town forum" grouped by neighborhood, interest groups (business owners, arts, etc.) would be rather unique.

where the people are

[cos]

To communicate effectively with people you often have to go to where they are. Creating a city forum in and of itself wouldn't necessarily serve the same purpose (though it could be very valuable), because if that's all that happened, it would mainly be seen by people who have a specific city issue they want to participate in, or that minority who know they want to follow city issues. The advantage of someone from the city finding and stepping into places where communities already are, is that it's more inclusive, and draws people in who wouldn't have otherwise known they were interested. This LJ is an example of such a space, though not the only one. If people from the city participated regularly in spaces like this (and others) where communities already exist, the city as a whole would be more integrated and communicate more effectively. A city-sponsored forum with the specific purpose of addressing the city, wouldn't have the same effect.

Re: where the people are

[an-art-worker.livejournal.com]

I mostly agree except that there are so many forums etc that there is no way that any mere human could cover them all. Also, it is perhaps a chicken/egg thing: if Somerville had online forums and made it known, people would migrate there, esp. folks who wouldn't ordinarily do LJ or any of the others.

Anyway - doubt it would ever happen but Tom Champion's brief tenure here was a nice look behind the city government curtain.

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

You wouldn't want an "official" forum for a variety of reasons.

One of them is we'd invariably end up with something with a wonky interface, with lots of scripting and chrome, that will only work with Explorer.

Another is soapboxing. Have you ever seen the comments that people write on the newspaper web sites? Enough said. Also there would be no ability to ban difficult users because theyd have 1st Amendment protections under an official forum.

And another is the same problem we ran into with this forum. People, sometimes unreasonably, expect official sources to be omniscient.

[makoshark.livejournal.com]

That's a wonderful article and good press for DSLJ. Of course, it really is too bad that Tom is not going to be hanging out here anymore.