Help Us Talk About Social Equity
Note: The prompt for the April 2nd blogging event has been announced. More info is available on the event page.
Event Details
Prompt Question: How is technology impacting social and economic divisions in cities?
Event date: April 2, 2013
Host URL: http://cityminded.org/cal/group-blogging-event-social-equity
Have you ever heard of a group blogging event? It goes like this:
- A prompt question and event date are announced to the public on the host website
- Bloggers write their response, include a link to the prompt question, and schedule their post to publish on the event date
- On the event date, all blog posts publish and the host website maintains a list of participating blogs and bloggers
I’ve run a few of these group blogging events in the past, and they are always very interesting. The quality of results depends a lot on the quality of the prompt question, so coming up with a great prompt is always the biggest challenge.
Benefits
These are some of the benefits I’ve seen from these events in the past:
- The event helps to coalesce and define the borders of a given online community
- This helps “introduce the community to itself” in a formal, organized way that most members find fun and interesting
- The topic of the event tends to dominate the dialogue of the community, through both blogs and social media, for several days (sometimes longer)
- This groundswell of coverage and debate on the prompt can create a viral interest in the topic – which can be an enormous benefit to a worthy, underdeveloped topic within the community
Finding the right question
With the help of our friends at the urban accelerator Tumml, Meeting of the Minds is organizing a group blogging event for April 2nd on the topic of social equity (see Wikipedia for a worthy, underdeveloped definition of social equity). How do future cities address the challenges of the urban poor? And how can we start thinking about that today?
As I said before, the greatest challenge for us is finding the right prompt question – and we’re hoping you might be able to help us.
The best prompt has these defining attributes:
- It elicits a strong response from the reader
- It is not a leading question
- Similarly, it has no “right” answer – it could generate a wide variety of valid responses
An example
By way of example, allow me to show you a successful group blogging event that included an excellent prompt (in this case on the topic of illegal file sharing within the creative class):
To a Mother Concerned About File Sharing – MusicianWages.com
Leave a comment below
As I said, we’d like your help finding the best prompt question for our group blogging event. I encourage you to leave your ideas in the comments below, or, if you prefer, to write to me using our Contact page (all messages from the contact page come directly to my inbox).
Thank you so much for your help and we look forward to including you in our April 2nd event.
Dave Hahn
Director of Communications
Meeting of the Minds
I’m excited to hear everyone’s ideas on this.
I’m particularly concerned about the rising socio-economic inequality in the United States. The middle class is rapidly shrinking. Professor William Julius Wilson discusses this in an NPR piece here: Ending Poverty Is Possible. WJW writes that a number of the urban poor have now moved to inner ring suburbs. I’m interested in hearing strategies for coping for both inner city poverty and inner ring suburban poverty. Do they both require the same job, economic and social policy strategies? It seems they may need different approaches given their differences in access to transportation, access to education, access to services, and even food justice issues.
So many issues here to discuss and so few solutions out there that seem to be working. Professor William Julius Wilson says we can eliminate poverty. I hope many of you can help us dive into this more.
How do we reconcile and address, and most importantly prioritize responses to diverse policy priorities that compose “a sustainable transportation system”?
- Reducing emissions might lead us to focus on people who commute long distances in large vehicles. This may mean premium-priced rail-based transit services.
- Improving mobility for all members of society may require us to place an emphasis on affordable point-to-point bus services.
- Identifying reliable and sustainable sources of funding while sending the right price signals may lead governments to adopt higher fuel taxes, tolls and congestion charges. In the long-term, funds can help provide better transit for all, but in the short term, these may hurt low-income car-dependent households, although tax credits and exemptions could be contemplated.
- Limiting urban growth can reduce housing affordability in the absence of cohesive and effective housing policies. But in the long-term, costs to society are reduced and transit services can be more effective and efficient.
How do we coordinate social, fiscal and environmental imperatives, and especially the different time scales?
Great suggestions, Antoine. As always. We will add this to the mix.