Alan Gutierrez

If you build it, they won’t come. They can’t. They are on the phone to contractors. They are out at the neighborhood fesitival or a neighborhood meeting. When your focus is the people that surrond you physically, going online to communicate with them is not only counterintitive, it’s counter-productive.

California can throw up a web site, and if, out of billion users you get a hundred thousand, you can make bank. Our objective in New Orleans is dissimilar.

Here we are drawing from a pool of a million, few of whom have ready Internet access, many have no computer at all. You cannot count on these people to self-orgainze. Social networking software is designed to organize people around interests or personal objectives, not around neighborhood and civic objectives.

We cannot count on people to self-organize online. It won’t work. I hasn’t worked. It is not working.

Do not delude yourself into thinking that a smattering of NOLA bloggers and LiveJournal comunities amounts to government oversight or neighborhood planning.

The goal it not to build an online community.

The goal to reconstruct a familiar form offline community more commonly known as a city.

A neighborhood web site is no more an online community, than a neighborhood newsletter is an onpaper community.