Case Study in Local: Oakland Local

Oakland Local is launching today! Oakland Local is a news & community site for Oakland, CA, USA, focusing on social justice issues including climate change, air quality, food access, arts as activists, and identity, race & ethnicity.

About Oakland Local

Oakland Local is launching in partnership with 35 local nonprofit, neighborhood & community organizations: it combines postings of partner organizations’ news and information with blogging and with reported stories from a top quality news team.  The news team includes: Susan Mernit, Amy Gahran, Kamika Dunlap, Kwan Booth, Ryan Van Lenning and others.Oakland Local is also media partners and collaborators with Spot.us, Newsdesk.org, The Center for Investigative Reporting, New America Media, Endless Canvas, Youth Rising, Youth Radio and Youth Outlook as well. The site offers forums, a directory of 320 local nonprofits and a blog directory of 180 active local bloggers!

You can also connect with Oakland Local on twitter and facebook.

Getting Local

There’s a lot of very cool activity happening lately around local websites.  The social web has opened a lot of doors for communities and collaborations and changed the way many people view the definition of community—on the web, communities can form easily and quickly around ideas, interests, and anything else—as physical geography isn’t important.  Now that social media tools have reached a certain level of ubiquity for those online (we can’t forget that many people are still not even online at all), we see people and groups turning the tools back around to help connect those who ARE geographically close.

The latest work we’ve been doing with the Social by Social concept (using social tech for social good) is to help apply the ideas and lessons we originally wrote about for nonprofit organizations to also be applicable to the work of local governments and communities (moving from connecting communities of interest to communities of locality).  It is fun and interesting work and I’ll probably be blogging more and more about it soon.

I’ll be watching Oakland Local to see how it evolves and grows and how the community reacts and uses it.

What do you think?

Have you used a local website before or started a local community network online?  What would you want to see included on a community website for your area?