Alan Gutierrez

John Gregory suggests that my mission is as follows. To realize the power of syndication for good.

Mission Restatement

I’ve developed a mission statement for Think New Orleans. I’m going to restate the mission a number of times while I blog, so I can find something that is punchy.

Think New Orleans is a non-profit organization community effort whose mission is to help New Orleans communities share information in such a way as to maximize the reach through syndication and search indexing.

Or more simply…

Think New Orleans is all about getting New Orleans soaking wet with Google juice.

I have to find a million ways to say it. It has to be the same thing every time.

Syndicating New Orleans

We’re now working on turning the Think New Orleans blog into a group blog for community organization.

The organizers of the FQTH and L9 Homeowners, Jimmy Delery and Rep. Charmaine Marchand, have been working with me to organize their communiciation online, and movng foward, to create an online record of the decisions in meetings.

Christian Roselund has been digitally recording these meetings. Pending the delivery of a compact flash digital audio recorder, I’m going to fan out with and gather more audio.

The audio is an important service for those who have to choose between relevant meetings, or for those who have to miss meetings due to their busy post-Katrina lives.

Diaspora Volunteers

Learning to blog is not a precondition to community participation.
As I did in Ann Arbor, I’m going to maintain an e-mail list that will serve as a work queue. If a community organizer wants to share information, they can e-mail it, with attachments, to the work queue, and a volunteer from the NOLA bloggers can put the posting in place. The blogging volunteer is at liberty to punch it up with links to relevant articles.

This division is important. People in New Orleans are overwhelmed and simply don’t have time to learn new software.

They will never see the benefit of syndication, because it will be too long in coming.

It is far more important the community organizers and citizens communicate in the high-bandwidth, high-signal, low-noise medium of face to face conversation.

Got off the phone with Vince Keenan of Publius. We argued. That’s what we tend to do. Vince is socratic. It drives me nuts.

After a couple hours of mayhem, I sum up the Think New Orleans mission.

The mission of Think New Orleans is to bridge the social networks New Orleans with the syndicated social networks of the contemporary web, by creating an incentive for New Orleanians to post to syndicated and indexed forums that can better disseminate their information through web applications that search and categorize syndicated content.

“I like ideas that have to crawl around for a little while, so they can toughen their bellies before they stand.” said Vince.