Foundation President Comments on Communities, "Cyber" and Local

Alberto Ibargüen, President of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has a commentary in the October 10 issue of the Philanthropy News Digest. Speaking to the necessity of information to democratic engagement, Ibargüen reveals part of the rationale behind the Knight Foundation News Challenge: helping local (or "physical") communities cope with the emergence of "cyber" communities as a place to connect and share information.

Cyber communities continue to form every day. They don't need our help. But physical communities, the places where we live and work, do need our help. The news and information we most care about is not fiction or entertainment or even opinion. We care about news in the public interest, the news the citizens need to run their democracies and their lives. And our democracies are organized by geography.

Much has been made about how cyberspace creatively destroys physical space, about how the Web gives people with common interests all over the world a way to work and play together. I agree that tech-savvy teenagers — all of us, really — have a greater capacity these days to appreciate that what happens in a far-off part of the world can affect our lives here. And that's good. But I also think we know less about what's happening locally.

Ibargüen raises some of the same issues that have come up in the Hub2 Project, which I am currently involved in through a course at Emerson College. (More on Hub2 in an upcoming blog post.) Namely, do new technology tools work to displace local communities, or can they be used to strengthen them?

I know that, from my own experience with SCI, I feel more connected to what's going on in Woburn because of the new, "2.0" version of SCIWoburn.org. This is mainly due to news feeds we've installed from the two major local papers in Woburn. When I'm working on the site, or even just randomly visiting it, I'll see a headline on the front page that catches my eye, and open it in a new tab. Using a tool like the Community Guide also allows users to visualize community projects and services in map form, which, for some reason, makes me feel more 'ownership' of the community and the physical boundaries that define it.

That said, Ibargüen seems to be talking more about the more well-known, and hence national or globally-focused, social networking tools that we all know and love. But there is a push for more locally based, decentralized versions of these tools or programs similar to them, and it's good that the Knight Foundation is interested in supporting them and encouraging others in the foundation community to do so.