By Nathan Alderman, J-Lab Online Editor
When the town of Arlington, Mass., let its Web site fall into disrepair, David Coletta and his fellow citizens didn’t wait for local government to fix it. They created a whole new site of their own.
“People had counted on (the city’s site) as a source of information,” Coletta said. “It was not doing that very well.”
Coletta, a software engineer, already ran a popular e-mail listserv for Arlington citizens. Working with six other community members, he built upon that existing community to create LiveFromArlington.com in late March, 2004. The site offers local news and information written by Arlington citizens and edited by Coletta and his fellow volunteers.
The e-mail listserv, however, active since the late ’90s, played a significant role in giving LiveFromArlington.com a ready-made community and information source right from the start.
The listserv now reaches 1,400 subscribers and generates 50 to100 messages each day. LiveFromArlington’s volunteer staff cull the best postings from this list and add them to the site, ensuring a constant stream of fresh content. “It’s as good as we are diligent,” Coletta said, “so it’s a little variable.”
Time is the community site’s biggest challenge, Coletta said. He and his fellow volunteers all have families and jobs of their own. Fortunately, they don’t need to put much effort into keeping the site going. “You could imagine that without much maintenance, the site could easily die,” Coletta said. “That hasn’t happened. We have a small but useful group of people (outside the staff) who regularly contribute useful information.”
Thanks to the open-source Geeklog software powering the site, any of the site’s roughly 600 members can submit a new story or comment on an existing one. The staff maintains a fairly hands-off approach to editing users’ posts; offensive, illegal or personally damaging material is prohibited by the site’s usage policy, but Coletta said the only problematic posts he’s had to edit involved the posting of copyrighted material.
Coletta sees Arlington as an ideal location for a community Web site. “There’s a long and rich tradition of citizen participation in government,” he said. In addition, many of the town’s 40,000 residents work in either the high tech or “helping” professions such as medicine, teaching or social work. Arlingtonians are “community-minded and comfortable with technology,” Coletta said.
Not surprisingly, political topics and other disputes draw the biggest audience on the site. “Controversy really attracts eyeballs,” Coletta said.
The discussion boards, where users can post their thoughts and opinions about town matters, are one of the site’s least used features, Coletta said, “If I had it to do over again, I would get rid of them,” he said. Because every story put up on LiveFromArlington.com already has a space for users to add their comments, the discussion boards are redundant. And the people who’d be most likely to post comments on the boards are already involved with the listserv. In addition, the forms used to post messages to the boards are more complex and less familiar for some users than the simple process of sending e-mail to the listserv. “E-mail is a terrible tool to use for discussions,” Coletta said, “but it’s very, very easy to use.”
A donation box posted on the site has drawn only meager contributions from users, but Coletta’s expenses for the site are low enough to make it an “inexpensive hobby,” he said. “The costs of running the Web site are small, incremental costs on top of the costs of running the listserv.”
Coletta and his fellow volunteers have considered a number of options to expand and enrich the site, including a Webcam, a print edition, or sponsorships from town merchants. Internet search engines tend to direct users’ searches for local shops and restaurants through the LiveFromArlington site, an advantage Coletta would like to leverage in cooperation with those businesses. At present though, neither he nor the other staff members have enough time to make such ideas a reality.
One possibility would bring LiveFromArlington.com full circle. The town of Arlington, in the wake of its Web site failure, has formed a committee to investigate better ways to serve their citizens online. “It would be interesting if the town formed a partnership with LiveFromArlington,” Coletta said. He believes there’s a lot more the site could do to help its community. “I don’t feel it has reached its full potential.”
