History

From Community

The Community Communication Project was inspired by an epiphany that Philip Luckey had in 1993, while doing the camerawork for a documentary on Chattanooga Venture's ReVision 2000 (a continuation of the successful Vision 2000 events in 1984). He began to surmise, What If... these grassroots, community-focused facilitated meetings were to happen more often than every decade or so? What If... there were an environment or setting within a community where the people could learn how to communicate better and, in the process, share more with each other, all on a regular basis (weekly, daily, hourly)?

Philip's early attempts at finding ways to realize parts of this vision had mixed success. A large part of the problem (then and now) was adequately explaining what he was trying to do. In 1994 Philip worked together with others in the Chattanooga area who had similar interests in broadening how the city communicated, leading to the creating of Community Link -- an effort to put together an information resource for the community as well as the means to access it. Here is a partial transcript of the very first meeting, and here are some old emails (1993 1994) that touched on the subject (thanks to flutterby for archiving the emails!). In a sense, this meant a "bulletin board system" mixed with databases and lists (content), and public access computer-based kiosks scattered around town on street corners, in libraries and schools as well as more individual access to information (distribution). Though this scratched the surface of the potential for community communication, the Community Link eventually ground to a halt after a few years; in hindsight, the goals were perhaps too optimistic given the resources and capabilities available at the time. The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web led to a later appreciation of what the group had been aiming for, as well as raising the bar.

As time passed, Philip continued to be haunted by the over-arching vision of "a community that communicates effectively and efficiently." How, though, would he achieve that? Perhaps a convening a "Community Communication Conference" to educate and intertwine existing organizations and citizens? Or putting together a living laboratory - a Community Communication Workshop - to test theories and ideas in a real-world setting? Along the way, he wants to discover or develop guidelines for creating that infrastructure for distribution; perhaps it could scale to suit a neighborhood, a campus, a city, a nation? As he says, "Our communities are content-rich, but distribution-poor."

Now, in 2005, Philip has decided to make another concentrated effort to move closer toward understanding that "vision of the Big Picture" burned into him over ten years ago: By identifying and inspiring people, by gathering information, by discovering support and partnerships, and by finding ways to test the ideas of how communities can share information within themselves.