VillageToolbox Blog

To me, the following story points to a possible reason why good communities don’t just develop on their own.  The folks of sunny acres had a bunch of ideas for ways to improve the community. We prioritized our wants, spoke to the folks in park planning, and decided on a way to go about getting what we wanted.  One of our first priorities was a park bbq.

Now, I’m not sure if you’ve seen these simple metal bbqs that show up in parks and campsites and such.  Basically they are a simple metal box, with a grill, welded to a post, stuck in concrete. BYOBriquettes kinda thing.

Anyway, we want a big one in the park.  The idea is that it serves as a sort of catalyst for spontaneous zero-planning community events. Friday nights would be ‘eat your dinner at the park’ night. Whoever shows up, comes to the party. Anyway, we think it’s a great idea.  It’s got lots of community support, so here we go to the city.  Our first and best contact has been one of our city councillors, who is standing behind the idea, and being very supportive.  She put us in touch with the community planning officer at the city.  I was very impressed after our first meeting.  She was enthusiastic, motivated, and passionate about finding ways for the city to help communities excel.  She got me excited about the possibilities. Two days after our second meeting, she was fired.  It seemed the city saw no value in what she was doing.

We pushed harder, getting a meeting with a junior planner in the parks department.  He seemed generally enthusiastic about the idea, and promised to send it up the pipe. We got as far as the head of the parks department, who said, in effect, he can’t be bothered. And the whole thing collapsed like a house of cards.

What’s crazy about this is not that the city doesn’t want to do it.  We’re not asking for anything more than just permission. The community is happy to do all the work. But it seems that city employees just aren’t that interested.

So on we fight. June, our councillor, is still poking at various options, and we are trying others, but I fully expect it to come to the point of me standing in front of city council, asking them just exactly what is wrong with a city where communities are actively discouraged from bettering themselves.

Actually it’s a good thing.  I’ve been spending my Village Toolbox hours lately taking care of design issues, administrative stuff, and (I’ll admit it) the odd night of doing nothing at all. Anyway, tonight, I need to reconfigure our internal server, then it’s back to actual real honest-to-goodness coding.  Yippee.

It’s a good thing.

Yesterday, being a lovely sunny Sunday, we took the family out for a hike, doing a geocache in the puslinch area.  As we approached the coordinates, the gps pointed us down a narrow path into the undergrowth.  In we charged, and soon the path began to narrow, the branches scraping our skin, the mud sucking at our shoes, and just as we began to consider the wisdom of our route, we burst out into a lovely serene sunlit patch of poison ivy.

And that’s why today, I am itchy.

Our local citizen’s group, Guelp Civic League, is putting on a conference in a few weeks. Communities In Action is of interest to me from two points of view. One, I might be able to convince another strong community to get involved with the early stages of VillageToolbox, and two, it is probably a good place to push forward in my bbq fight with city hall. More on that soon.

Friday night of last week, Crispin Hellion Glover was in town, doing his Big Slideshow and showing What is it? on Friday night, and It is Fine, Everything Is Fine on Saturday night.  I went Friday night, since I wanted to see the movies on some semblance of order.  Glover’s a strange man, and his books showed it.  (He takes old books for the 1920′s on things like Concrete Inspection, and judicously cuts, pastes and adds to make them his own)

What is it is the disturbing story of a young man’s obsession with snails, salt, and his social standing. His inner turmoil plays out on screen like a greek tragedy, except with Shirley Temple hawking Nazism. Worth a watch, particularly with Glover there afterwards, talking about his film making process.

Of the two films, I somewhat regret not seeing It is Fine, Everything is Fine, as I suspect it is the better of the two films, but if your the type of person to enjoy Eraserhead, or even Twin Peaks, then I would suggest that both movies are required viewing.

I’ve been working on making the landing page for non-members a bit nicer.  Hopefully something that does a better job of conveying the purpose of the site without all the extra stuff they don’t need.

Next priorities are a decent moderator engine, getting the privacy policy and terms of use in place, and then a bit of a rewrite on the gallery and toolshares, based on Blair and Co’s feedback.

I noticed it’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote anything.  Life has been busy lately with a big deadline at Barking Dog, Supergroup website has been pushing its first deadline, and a few other clients have been waking up and asking for time, so we’ve been pretty busy.  I’ve been putting in an hour or so a day on VillageToolbox, just to keep things moving forwards.

My main focus has been on improving the pre-signup experience (landing page and Browse communities).  The site changes should go live soon, as soon as I am happy with the css.