The Grass Roots Are Growing Up and Up
Today we're going to go just a bit off-topic and look at a post from Streetsblog Network member Aaron Renn on his blog The Urbanophile
about "The New Grass Roots." It examines in depth a few things that are
near and dear to our hearts here at Streetsblog and the The Open Planning Project, including the ability of the Internet to transform the public policy debate:
Photo by aussiegall via Flickr.
The
notable thing is that someone who is grass roots can now get a message
out in a way that matters. If bloggers aren't directly influencing
policy and decision making, they can at least be part of setting the
topic and parameters of civic discourse and debate. That's an amazing
thing if you think about it. Even ten years ago if you wanted to be
part of something like that, you had to have a platform to do it from
(i.e., be part of the establishment). Today, if you have something
compelling to say, you can put it out there and with a modicum of
self-promotion, your audience will eventually find you. In
the past you needed a platform to get your message out. Today, your
message becomes the platform. That's a radical sea change and I don't
think we know the full implications yet.
In a second post
elaborating on how grass-roots networks and open-source economic
development models can help make better cities, Renn concludes:
[W]hatdoes civic leadership need to do to take advantage of this? Partially,the beautiful answer is Nothing. The great part of a bottom-up movementis that it doesn't require anything from the top. The types of networksthat are being created will generate their own value. Indeed they areformed because they provide value to the people who participate...
Sowhile cities don't need to doanything to exploit these networks, they should certainly beencouraging them to form. If these types of robust blogs, locallyoriented social networks, and open source support organizations aren'tforming, that's a big point of concern. On the other hand, civicleadership should take care not to smother them with too much unwantedor unneeded "help". Sometimes the best policy is hands off.
ButI do think there is opportunity for active collaboration between theestablishment, or what we might think of as top-down leadership, andthe new grass roots, or what we might call the bottom-up world.
One network that's doing a lot of interesting work in this area is DIYCity,
"a site where people from all over the world think about, talk about,
and ultimately build tools for making their cities work better with web
technologies." They've got dozens of chapters in cities from Capetown
to New Orleans to Manila.
Our own national blog network brings together, literally on the same page,
more than 270 bloggers who write about sustainable transportation and
development issues. Take a look. If you know of a blog that should be
there and isn't, click the "Nominate a blog" button at the top of the
page and fill us in. And if you're a Twitter kind of person, you can always find us there.
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