New "community" discussion forum

[lmermaid501.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing many of you also got a postcard in the mail advertising a new discussion forum (ourcommonplace.com). While attempting to be "local" and making it seem like it was started up by Somerville residents ("a couple of neighbors and I were talking..."), it's hard to do that when you forget to change the name of the city in your form letter ("an online community newsletter and bulletin board just for Sudbury residents.") It seems dishonest to try to make it seem like it's locally driven. Does anyone have more info than is available on their web site? Seems like an interesting startup tech effort by some Harvard students but it's unclear from the site whether they actually work with local communities, or just have manufactured "local-looking" spam mail.

Comments

[rickyporco.livejournal.com]

As far as the "venture to guess that a number of those emails would be spam from their commercial partners", here is our privacy policy: https://www.ourcommonplace.com/somerville/privacy (https://www.ourcommonplace.com/somerville/privacy) . This should save me from having to write another long response but in short, no, we have do not have commercial partners, no we will not sell your email address to anyone. Again, I put my email address on every single one of those flyers for this very reason, so nobody would have to guess.

I'm not sure why this matters much to a group of tech-savvy folks that I assume use sites like facebook, google, livejournal, patch, yelp, etc, every day (all of which are for-profit entities) but, long before OurCommonPlace was incorporated as a for-profit company, Pete had tried to go the non-profit route. He filed as a 501c3 and spent nearly 6 months while working in his hometown of Falls Church to see whether or not a site like this would be useful to his neighbors, meeting with many groups and private investors and pitching them the idea. He was unable to get a single dollar from any private investors for a non-profit social networking company, and very quickly realized that his dream could not be possible if there was not a dollar towards the cost of servers, and decided if he could fuel the idea by instead incorporating as a for-profit company. Nearly one month after that, the same folks who had turned him down before were now interested in helping fund the launch of his first town. I think this should speak more to the broken system of funding non-profits as well as the angelic stigma that comes from them, than the intentions of Peter Davis upon founding this company. Let's not forget that Karl Rove's "American Crossroads" is a nonprofit entity, that I'm sure has less honest motivations than OurCommonPlace.

If anyone is interested in actually talking about this project, I would be happy to. Don't hesitate to reach out: ricky@ourcommonplace.com, but please, please, keep it reasonable. I much prefer to engage in conversation with other civic-minded folks like myself and some of you, who enjoy new emerging technology, rather than defending myself from accusations of dishonesty and sinister intentions.

Thanks,

Ricky