christopherjohnston’s posterous

How Do We Go From Ideas To Action

At the last Net2NO meeting we were in a new venue and it seems that along with new venue we took on a new focus. Where earlier we were about bringing together technologist in the city it seems that now we want to use the minds and skills of these brilliant individuals to enact social change in the city.

We had a few 5 minute brainstorming sessions and I copied down some of the ideas that emerged from them.

Get City Council to support local small businesses
Volunteer in schools to teach the teachers to use the technology available to them
Get community organizations to collaborate and share information or at least aggregate everything they know and publish it in one place on the web.
My contribution was to turn vacant lots all over the city into vegetable and herb gardens. The harvest from those gardens could be sold in community farmer's markets. (Turns out that Hollygrove is already doing this)

While all these ideas are great, the one thing we need before we can make any of them work, is buy-in from the people that live in the community. The ideas are useless if the people in those communities don't want them.

Ok, so we know that we need great ideas and we need buy in from the community to implement those ideas, but there are two critical steps missing.

How do we, or more correctly stated, who do we get to bring these ideas to the community? Then, once the buy-in happens, how do we organize and get people to show up to implement the ideas.

The first one is the biggest problem. Unless we have a framework for moving from ideas to action we just had great evening engaging in intellectual masturbation but didn't accomplish anything for the people and communities we claim to care about.

I'm not saying that the concept is not noble I just see flaws in the execution. I want this to succeed. I want us to accomplish real results. Do you, the three people reading this, have any ideas you would like to offer? I'll give you the credit and I'll do the work just help me make it happen.

Christopher M. Johnston
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