Lisa Williams, Placeblogger, and the return of the Local Community

Photo by JD Lasica

Lisa Williams has extensive experience as a online community organizer and builder. Her current project, Placeblogger, support blogs about geographic communities. Through generosity and a light touch, she’s able to bring readers, funding, and a broader context of belonging to many communities at once.  And she’s damned thoughtful about how she approaches it.  Read on!  ~Sarah Dopp

Q: How would you explain Placeblogger to someone who’s never heard of it before?

Placeblogger is the largest searchable index of local weblogs.  If you want to know who’s blogging in Timbuktu, we’ve got ya covered.

Q: What’s your role in the project, and in the community?

I started the site in 2007 as a way to answer a simple question:  how many blogs really were doing journalism and online community for geographical communities?   At the time I started looking, in 2006, we found that 1 in 7 Americans lived in a community served by a placeblog.  Now it’s 1 in 2.  I don’t know of any other form of community media that’s had that kind of explosive growth.

One thing I’m not:  I’m not the pope of placeblogging, nor is Placeblogger the Vatican.  I’m really against efforts to “professionalize” any placebloggers who don’t want to do that.  Most placebloggers run their sites as a labor of love, and I think we have to respect the kind of authority that gives them to run their sites however they please.

There are three ways I want to help:  One, I started the Placeblogger Angel Fund to fund investigative reporting at grassroots news sites.   Two, I want to get placebloggers connected with each other.  Three, I want more people to find and participate in their local online communities.

Q: What do you love most about the community?

I love that placebloggers have dug underneath the bland, big-box chain retail surface that’s encrusted so much of the earth to the deep magic and humor that resides there, that is still under there, and will always be there.  Placebloggers get that communities are the ultimate inside joke.

Q: What makes the Placeblogger community stand out, to you? What makes it special?

In a strange way,  Placeblogger is an anti-community.  Over the years I’ve been running it,  I’ve had countless approaches from large media organizations, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs who wanted to enhance their own professional standing or make money off the thousands of people serving their local communities by writing blogs, ferreting out news, and being a local watercooler.   Some wanted placebloggers to abandon their own sites and write for theirs; others wanted to indoctrinate them into the values and standards of their own profession.  My least favorite of these were people who wanted to give placebloggers ethics training, as if somehow they were inherently untrustworthy.

Placeblogs don’t look like each other, and that’s good.  They don’t look like conventional news organizations, and that’s great.  What’s happening isn’t a community where shared values and practices are being passed back and forth — it’s a giant pool of simultaneous experiments aimed at figuring out how to save journalism and civic engagement for the next century.

Someday, the day will come when we have a professional organization and get together and have panel discussions.  But that day hasn’t come yet, and when it does, I’ll be a little sad about the end of the great florescence, the great gold rush, of competing ideas and ideals.

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Getting the Whole World to Dance

Here’s about as clear a snapshot as you can get of a Culture Conductor…

Watching this never fails to choke me up, and I wish I could articulate why.

Here’s how he organized it (mostly online)…

You can check out the rest of the project at http://wherethehellismatt.com.

If I only talk about one thing for the next ten years, I want it to be this.

If I only talk about one thing for the next ten years, I want it to be this: Community structures.

But first, hi, I’m Sarah Dopp. Have we met yet? Maybe? Okay, here’s a refresher on my story…

Right now, a lot of people know me for creating Genderfork.com, a volunteer-run community expression blog about gender variance.  That puppy is a machine of love. All of the content comes from community members, and it pretty much runs itself. Three blog posts a day, an original stream of twitter content, 20,000+ unique visitors a month, and an active community of commenters who adhere religiously to our “Be Nice” policy with minimal moderation. All of that is built around a very obscure, very controversial issue: the rejection of gender norms. And the project can go so much further.  We just kicked off a Tumblr presence. And we’ve got a group of people setting up community forums. And we’re talking T-shirts. And performances. And a book. The momentum is absolutely there, and it will probably all happen, but not because of me. It will happen because of the people who feel passionately about it.

Despite how it looks sometimes, gender isn’t really my topic.

In my offline life, I host a monthly open mic in San Francisco.  It keeps me connected to my roots: I performed spoken word poetry regularly (weekly!) at a microphone through high school and college, eventually winning poetry slams and joining a team for it. One summer night in 2003, I decided it might be cool if I started publishing some of my friends’ work online. I built the website — TheWRIT.org — and within a month it had turned into a 30-contributor online magazine. We did another the next month. And the next month. By Christmas, there were over 100 local writers involved. By March, we had remodeled the site to let people upload their own writing and get workshop-style feedback from other writers.  A year later, 5,000 people were using it.  (That project is now closed… a long story that I’m looking forward to telling you.)

Meanwhile, it had also become clear to me that writing wasn’t my topic, either.

Since both The WRIT and Genderfork took on lives of their own, I’ve often joked that whenever I get excited about something, I accidentally poop out a community about it. It makes me nervous sometimes. What if I get excited about something boring next, like air conditioners? Can you imagine? Me? The Queen of the Air Conditioner Community? It could happen. (Well, not really, because I don’t find them exciting. But still.)

When you start a community based on passion, you become a part of it. It bonds with your identity. Moving on is hard.

So let’s make this absolutely clear. At the risk of becoming a meta monster, my topic is community structures: how they’re created, how they’re organized, and how they play out with real people affecting their paths.  If I only talk about one thing for the next ten years, I want it to be this.

But let’s make it bigger than that. Let’s build a collection of resources to support people who are doing the work, and make it easier for people who are interested in the field to get started.  Let’s strengthen our understandings of Best Practices, elbow out sleazy manipulation, and work together to raise an army of army-raisers.  Let’s get to the meat of the subject, honor the nuances, identify the commonalities, and try to write down what works.

I have lots of people I want to introduce you to, and this is a very exciting time for me.

Thank you for being here.

Love,
Sarah