Citizens’ Road Home (CHAT) Communications
Volume and Clarity
How do we turn the information that we have into an effective set of proposals and oversight?
We’re wrestling with two mailing lists, plus, a desire to get information out to a wide audience that doesn’t want to be part of an email list.
Here is a a strategy for CHAT. This includes the hard work and insight of Ray Broussard, Tom Henehan, and Melanie Ehrlich, who’ve been making great technical efforts. Let’s discuss this here on the Think New Orleans weblog, because other civic research projects are going to follow the lead of CHAT.
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Announcements
For announcements, the Think New Orleans mailing list is large and getting larger. Because, it covers other recovery issues, it has a reaches a larger audience.
Melanie has said that she wants to send more CHAT information out through the Think New Orleans mailing list.
The way I run the mailing list is as follows.
- Write an article with a nice photograph for Think New Orleans.
- Add the start of the article to newsletter. There is a “cutline”, where they can go to the website and read more. Otherwise, it’s a punchy summary, with a read more about it link.
This gets people to visit the website to read article.
Why is the website important?
Because of search engines. Search engines rule the Internet. We must make ourselves searchable.
Email cannot be indexed by search engine. When we email to one another, all this great information is invisible to search engines.
You miss all those people who are interested in the Road Home that do not happen to be in your address book. Does your address book have the 90,000 Road Home applicants? Mine doesn’t.
You will find that the more information you put in a permanent web page, the more visitors you will get. A perminant page is one that does not change. You can add to it, like comments, but you do not delete it. It acts as an archive.
That is, you create an archive. Google loves archives. It will index your archives, and when the right person types in the right keywords, you’re website will be at the top of list.
It’s like sending an email, except that you sent it directly to the people that care.
Google is like a matchmaker of the days of yore.
When a person types in search term, like ICF Contract, low and behold, it offers up the ICF International page of the New Orleans Wiki. The one that CHAT created with it’s public records requests.
Submitting to Think New Orleans
Here’s how you can submit an article for Think New Orleans, that in turn gets posted in the newsletter.
- Go create a Writeboard.
- Write up what you want to say in the Writeboard.
- Go to Flickr Advanced Search and search for pictur
Then share that Writeboard with me.
Story Telling
We get a lot of anecdotes about the Road Home Program. We share them with each other to keep ourselves righteous and dedicated. They make us angry. They keep us from falling under the spell of more promises, more platitudes.
I’d like to feature more stories form the Road Home at the Think New Orleans weblog. We can create a new category, which will create a new section of the weblog, where we can gather these anecdotes.
It can be a daily reminder of the horrible failures of the Road Home Program. Maybe then people will stop saying that we’re living off handouts.
Grr…
Road Home Wiki
We now know more about the Road Home than anyone out there. Whenever I get a question, I send it to our mailing list and get answers.
We need to take the sections of the Road Home and record those answers, to the best of our ability, in the New Orleans Wiki. This does not become authoritative, we can put the usual disclaimers, and link to the official website.
But, we do know more about the program. We know what has been promised. If people have heard of tender, of post-storm evaluations, we need to have that in the New Orleans Wiki, so they know that it’s not just their imagination.
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