thank you for the interesting blog post and your comments about the ourbania web community. We, the ourbania team, are aware of the fact that the community still has improvement potential. The community is still in the beta status of development and we are strongly committed to improving usability and offering more benefits to the users. Therefore, we really appreciate your helpful and detailed feedback in your comments about ourbania.com.

Currently we are busy updating the site to offer new features so that the citizens get a wider spectrum of activities and improved communication possibilities, as the new profile modules. From now on, you are able to link specific buildings to your profile to show your relatation to the object. Additionally, we are about to re-organize the building and blog categories. The change in categories will make the choice more flexible and less predefined while creating urban items and writing blog posts. In your comments, you also mentioned widgets. This feature is already in our development process. As soon as it will be ready for daily use, the team will publish some more information on the ourbania blog.

Concerning the number of buildings and projects in the community, we strongly rely on the user’s activity, their professional skills and experience. Currently, we also focus on buildings in countries and continents which are only marginally covered on ourbania.com to this day.

All the best from Germany

Dennis
ourbania.com

Yet for the most part, cities and communities appear to be too small to generate enough people participating to propagate and maintain a high-powered wide ranging community information base for a particular, smaller, community. I remember being intrigued by an early cleveland wiki, but it disappeared. In the region, there are wikis for Hyattsville and Riverdale Park.

Another issue is the gigo issue, the quality of the data. One of the big problems with flickr and “folksonomies” is that people want to develop their own ways of tagging information (which is a powerful thing to be true) but not having a set of common keywords and tagging conventions, at least for stuff that matters, like vacant properties, leads to big problems. E.g., with flickr, why someone keyword tags hundreds of graffiti photos”public market.”

(Even I modify my tags over time, adding more specific tags like “street sign” “tourist information” or “historic marker” as my sense of the information and topic becomes more specific, and my failure to consult indexes like those used to keyword articles for newspaper databases like Proquest.)

But yes Web 2.0 technologies can be harnessed and used by more focused, tighter groups, who set data standards, check, etc., and move forward.

Of course, then there is the issue of the city responding-caring. That’s a whole other issue, one that involves John Friedmann’s work among others… (that’s now my latest academic and real interest transformation, rather than merely innovation or change, of government institutions) Just because the data is there doesn’t mean there is accountability or a desire to respond. Plus the issue of overall responsiveness (such as Capstat programs) vs. individual agency responsiveness and a culture of accountability.

This drives me almost crazy, especially wrt DC, which has an almost nonexistant accountability culture in local government.

Speaking of Web 1.0 or really Internet 1.0 pre-web, I seem to see a drop off of participation on local community listservs in favor of blogs. Since a few active participants fuel most of the active discussion on listservs (a corollary of the point made above) losing just a handful of active discussants can cripple a listserv.

We’re trying to do something similar at http://www.VillageManager.net for community folks who manage communities. We are adding communities weekly. Of course, this is a Beta site. We’re building as we go.

Chris