Bloomington not yet a’Twitter

As I sat in the Bloomington Bagel Company Tuesday morning waiting for people to earn their $5 gift certificates by participating in a painless user study, I received a tweet from Ben Fulton:

Local paper is liveblogging the Monroe County Budget meeting. Pretty cool, too bad you have to be a subscriber though.

In that little splash from my personal information stream, I saw a glimpse of the future.

The Herald-Times covered the County budget hearings in real time through an updating comment thread.

In this future, there is hope for local media use of new media. Whether it was a mistake or intentional, the Live Blogging commentary was not subscriber-only. My big knock against the Herald-Times is the walled nature of their information. There are other news options available online, underscoring what a mistake it is for the H-T to restrict access to their current stories. The movement, though, seems headed toward daylight. The blogging efforts that supplement the main paper are welcome, and I’m elated to see real-time coverage of local events in a way that is open. For anyone interested in following reporter James Boyd’s coverage, the process continues through Thursday.

Second, there is a nice core of cyber-citizenry in Bloomington. I credit Ben not only with alerting me (and anyone else in his Twitter stream) to this online coverage but also in building a document as the information came through the pipes. I fully expect to wake up in the morning seeing a Bloomingpedia article using this information and maybe some Blogophereington analysis. That there exist people like Ben willing to take the lead, volunteering time to get information processed and published on the Internet is a big prerequisite for a sustainable online community.

Ben Fulton started a Google spreadsheet to keep tabs on the budget as it was being reported.

Third, we need some elected officials using Twitter. Sophia Travis has a great blog—which was down throughout the morning—and she regularly breaks ground with insider observations and commentary about Monroe County government. Sophia and her colleagues need to find a way to get that information out into the Tweet streams. This would have been a great event to follow if Warren Henegar, Vic Kelson, Jill Lesh, Michael Woods, Charles Newmann, and Marty Hawk all had the occasional 140-character post during breaks. Heck, James Boyd should be using the service, too.

Twitter is much more powerful in small groups than it is in a Scoble-like flood from thousands of followers. It is also an effective alternative to streaming media, like the local coverage provided by CATS (I have yet to make today’s stream work, btw). Video feeds contain everything in raw form, but raw is both time-consuming and impractical for re-use. This is an opportunity Bloomington should take to create another information outlet.

Fourth, the meta commentary is appreciated and is a vital part of community building. The live blogging (a loose use of the term here; it’s really a comment thread) by James Boyd contained the updates describing the day’s events and outcomes, but it also had tidbits like this:

Pretty soon I’ll be faced with the toughest challenge of the day: playing the ever-exciting game of musical parking chairs here on the downtown square. Since you can only park in two-hour increments, some of us are going to have to go downstairs and move the cars just a few spaces over. I’m planning on having to move the Camry six times before the day is done. Thanks for the free parking, though!

[…]

Budget haiku:

11 o’clock
The council takes its first break
We’re behind schedule

There is no shortage of irony that parking is an issue in covering a budget meeting.

Sharing content like this goes a long way to recreating the experience of sitting in a room for 12 hours with a bunch of politicos making decisions about money. It is an ordeal for all involved on site, an experience that doesn’t translate well to “Council Notes” in a sidebar of the printed paper. Meta comments can personalize the reporting and give readers an opportunity to empathize with the author or other readers. It is humanizing.

Also hitting the local tubes today was blogger Scott Tibbs’ perspective on online discussions through the H-T. It is a relevant post since it highlights one of the biggest obstacles with computer-mediated communication: How do you maximize the benefits of engagement while minimizing the parts that are detrimental? Clearly, there is a willing participant population, as evidenced by the defunct H-T forum and the one thriving at Monroe-Bloomington Talk, among others. What has been lacking in some corners is a successful integration of positive responses to negative comments that can build community norms. Short-term, directed activities—like today’s coverage of the budget hearing—provide opportunities for community members and content providers to work together to construct better behavior through response.

Congrats to James, Ben and the rest of the people contributing to the H-T coverage today. Maybe tomorrow, James can start using Twitter.