Last week we asked readers whether blogs can help “design” a community.  This poll question followed up on an earlier video featuring a presentation by Tim Brown explicating his concept of “design thinking.”  In an era where everyone “has a blog” and hyperlocal websites are fast replacing newspapers as people’s primary news source, we were interested in igniting a conversation about what is now the purpose of weblogs given that they have become both ubiquitous and utilitarian (sometimes simultaneously). 

Only the ill informed still brush off weblogs as “online diaries” unworthy of their attention.  That said, it remains to be seen whether in a new media landscape citizen journalists, community development activists and artists can move the local site from being a medium that “covers” a community to one that “designs” a community, a site which engages a broad array of stakeholders to realize its utility for them as individuals and as an object contributing to a larger goal or aspirational set of ideas and values.

As NP continues to evolve, this last point becomes more urgent, not only because it will inevitably decide whether NP stays alive, but more importantly whether the goals, aspirations, ideas and values that we share with our readers come to fruition.  By no means are we suggesting that NP is critical to realization of this mission, but rather what we are suggest that there is no better time for all of us in Crown Heights to consider how our community is being designed than the present. 

Consider for example, some of the things that are going on simultaneously in the area:

• Longtime political incumbent Al Vann facing a serious challenge from Mark Winston Griffith
• Scores of new shops and restaurants popping up along the Franklin and Classon Avenue corridors
• Spikes in crime
• Revitalized art scene
• Sustained activist effort led by members of CHRM to counter the city’s Bedford Armory Proposal

Why are all these things taking place here? Why are they taking place now?

Cofee shops and political campaigns do not build themselves, nor does a site like I Love Franklin Avenue tend to itself.  These things are happening here in Crown Heights because the people, the ideas, “the designers,” and more importantly the will to design, and to innovate resides within this, our community, our village, our county, our block, our zip code, our district–and dare I say it–even our hearts. 

Over the next few months as NP morphs into its next incarnation we will be paying closer attention to the designers at work and at play in the area.  Having gotten to the point where it’s become obvious to everyone here at NP that stakes are high in Crown Heights, we want to now take them higher.

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