A few years ago I came to learn of a website that was focused on the City of Yonkers. Some people absolutely loved the site and visited it regularly. Some of the comments I heard from people at the time was that it was not real news. Not real news you say? Does “real news” necessarily have to come from established mainstream media outlets? This site also would delve into issues concerning Westchester County and the entire state itself. Eventually the noise this site made got it banned from Yonkers City Hall. Clearly this “unreal news site” was making news and reporting local news more effectively than its mainstream competition. The significance of this could be seen when the mainstream NY Times did an article on this local news website and its proprietor. Hezi, the local citizen-journalist behind Yonkers Tribune had clearly built momentum. His was a grassroots people-powered effort at news and we need more of it to engage, inform, and activate the citizenry. Also driving the site was its open anonymous commenting structure. Some disliked this and wanted moderation. Agree with it or not, you have to acknowledge that this provoked discussion and participation on a city-wide scale. This is but one example of the future of civic involvement and activism that will combine the use of online tools and offline action.

In the book Momentum by Allison H. Fine at the end there is a brief case study about a grassroots group called Free Schuylkill Park (http://www.freetheriverpark.org/ ) that was successful in getting a railroad to create a crossing to go from the neighborhood to the park that is bi-cut by a railroad track. How did they do this? They used software that many of us are already familiar with, but what Fine refers to as social software. They were basically a grassroots group of citizens mind you. First they used a website called Citizen Speak to create a petition and got tons of people to sign it. Then they signed up with a blog hosting service called Typepad and started a blog about their efforts. Finally, they signed up with a firm called Constituent Mail to send mass emails to people. They eventually mobilized a ton of people and were successful using simple tools.

Locally, here in my town there’s a similar movement I’ve just learned about which I find sort of interesting. A bunch of people on my street of East Hartsdale are upset with my town’s parking laws. So someone started a website called Fix Hartsdale Parking (http://www.fixhartsdaleparking.com). They are using open-source software for their website and blog. They started a petition with the website Petition Spot and already have eighty signatures which is not bad for a small effort like this. Their goal is to put pressure on my town board in Greenburgh, NY to change the winter overnight parking ban on East Hartsdale.

As more people that sign the petition, the more there is a chance to build momentum. What they can do next is after you get people to sign the petition online, is to then get them to call, email, and snail mail the town council. Then you organize a bunch of people to go and speak at the town board meetings every time. The larger the group speaking at the town board meetings the better. I suggested that they knock the buildings on my block and put a flyer with a link to their website on the doors asking that people sign the online petition as well.

There is so many places you can go with online organizing. They could put up videos of the parking injustices on the video sharing viewing site Youtube!. They could “tag” photos of East Hartsdale parking issues on the photo sharing site Flickr. They can organize mini protests on the street through their website or on other event organizing sites. They can even reach out to other local blogs and websites. It’s going to be really interesting to see what local grassroots efforts can spring up using online organizing open-source tools. Angry that Yonkers public schools are underfunded? Let the Internet help you organize en masse!