El Encanto Estates   Homeowners Association

"to promote the social welfare of El Encanto Estates and its environs"

Comments on the Aims, Content, Administration, and Openness of the EEEHA Website

Aims

The Articles of Incorporation and the Bylaws of the Association state that the Association's business and first specific purpose is

• "to promote the social welfare of El Encanto Estates and its environs".

An Association website might contribute by:

• informing and possibly entertaining our neighbors;
• fostering a sense of community;
• inspiring action on our neighborhood's problems and those of the City;
• informing others outside the neighborhood.

For the website actually to contribute, it must be used regularly by a significant number of residents, perhaps once per month by half of those who pay dues, and more often and by more users when there are prominent neighborhood or community problems.

All we can supply is information. To generate repeat visits, this information should be useful, it should be entertaining, and it should be added to frequently.

Content

The following gives possible categories of information; neither the set of categories nor any set of specific examples (square symbols) is intended to be a complete, exclusive list.

• history with photos, including reminiscences or memoirs by neighbors;
• association information:
  • articles and bylaws of EEEHA;
  • history;
• directory;
• photos;
• maps;
• useful web links and phone numbers;

• calendar of events:
  • social, such as Spring picnic;
  • Association meetings;
  • City Council meetings, Planning Dept., etc.;
  • cultural;
• topics important to El Encanto and its environs:
  • agenda and minutes of Board meetings;
  • current board and committee membership and duties
  • El Con;
  • City government;
  • Rio Nuevo;
• bios with photos:
  • new neighbors (interview as part of the Welcome Wagon);
  • selected == agreeable "old" neighbors;
• interactive discussions (web-based or email; difficult to start), e.g., on:
  • should the neighborhood provide or arrange services?
    • pick up a child at school when parents cannot;
    • cooking demos;
    • computer demos/help;
  • should there be frequent neighborhood events?
  • what should added to the Board's agenda?
• guest speakers at Board meetings or Special meetings, with residents encouraged to attend and participate;

• brief essays on a topic, giving several points of view, e.g., on:
  • central city development: by the Chairman of the Planning Commission, an architect, a neighborhood activist, a developer or mall owner, a Councilman, or however many such persons can be convinced to contribute;
  • property values and what affects them;
  • local political races;
• brief essays of any sort, preferably but not necessarily coherent, preferably written by a neighbor;
• pointers to provocative or stimulating or amusing websites, e.g.:
  • Nobel awards, Science online, Nature online, ...;
  • Chinese websites - cooking, etc.;
  • the Hackers Dictionary;

One does not know a priori what type of information will attract a particular group of people and cause them to revisit a website regularly. Archival material might be of wide interest, but interest might be exhausted after only one visit. Neighborhood events, apart from the annual picnic, might be considered bothersome. Residents might not be curious about their neighbors. Didactic or polemical essays might seem boring.

We have in the site statistics a report on what people choose to view, and a trial-and-error approach is a reasonable way to decide what content should be emphasized. The relatively few who know about the site at this time, mostly Board members, appear to favor photos, site statistics, and history -- not an implausible ranking.

For the record and perhaps for amusement, you might want to look at a list of website aims and prospective content that I wrote before starting to develop the website. I did this to assure myself that there could be value in the exercise, enough to justify the effort about to be spent. Please understand the list is a set of notes to myself, written without intending that others read it. The date of last modification is December 14, before any content was laid down. This list has substantially more detail than given above.

Administration

I view the Webmaster as an Editor:

• the Board selects the Webmaster, with mutual agreement on aims and, broadly, on content for the site;
• subsequently the Webmaster has final say with regard to the specifics of site content and design;
• if the Board disagrees sufficiently strongly with the way the site evolves, it replaces the Webmaster.

The site content must evolve. This requires active participation of more than one person in identifying topics and in creating and eliciting contributions.

• we form a committee composed of the Webmaster and two others, preferably Board members, charged with management and creative direction of the website.

The website being new must be advertised. Email is the only logical way to do this -- those who don't use email are equally unlikely to browse the web:

• when the website content changes, or perhaps monthly, we notify all email-competent residents of what is new and one hopes interesting.

We have about 50 email addresses for residents. One expects there are at least twice that many connected to the net.

• we poll by telephone all residents to get a complete list of email addresses.

I would hope that some of the content of the website would be of interest to residents of Colonia Solana, El Montevideo, Miramonte, Broadmoor-Broadway, or Sam Hughes; and vice-versa.

• we contact the Boards of nearby neighborhoods to arrange for an exchange of email addresses or for cross-posting or for some other method of notifying residents of one neighborhood of relevant new content on websites of the other neighborhoods.

At the last Board meeting (February 11, 2002), there was substantial disagreement between myself and many, perhaps most of the Board on what personal information should be accessible on the website. I suggest the following as minimal openness:

• List of Board Members:
  List of Committees with Memberships:
  • publicly accessible;
  • member's name and some method of contact: one or more of:
    {business {address|email|phone} | home {address|email|phone}}.
  
  
• Minutes of Board Meetings:
  • publicly accessible.
  • To address what I remember as points raised last meeting:
    • accountability and openness are moral absolutes for a public organization;
    • if there is majority agreement at a Board meeting that some part of the discussion must be private, call an executive session and record in the minutes only this call and the topic;
    • if you believe what you said is actionable, then you shouldn't have said it before 10-20 people;
    • it would be beneficial for El Con management, the Planning Commission, our neighbors who agree with them, etc., to know what we think, if they do not already know.
  
  
• Online Directory of Residents (name, address, phone number, email, dues paid):
  • accessible only to residents (login-name--password);
  • no phone listing if phone is unlisted;
  • all residents notified of option to withdraw all or any part of listing from directory (i.e., after directory is assembled, allow for opt out).

I imagine that other contentious matters will surface. With regard to privacy, none should be thornier than the above. With regard to website content, the questions are likely to be of balance or bias, or of the line beyond which provocation becomes gratuitous insult.

Openness

I had intended to write a few paragraphs explaining why I believe one should not be fearful of choosing to expose personal information on the web. Those paragraphs grew into a short essay, mostly irrelevant to this discussion, and possibly an exercise amusing only to myself. The essay is elsewhere: Technology, Luddites, Privacy, Openness, and Manipulation of a Fearful Populace. A possibly relevant excerpt follows:

Some, possibly many personal computer users believe that something fearful will happen, owing to their having an insufficiently high level of computer security, or owing just to their being connected to the net: inundation of their email account by spam, destruction of computer files, theft of personal files, theft of identity, theft of property, stalking, assault.

There indeed are problems with computer security (a determined and informed person can break into perhaps any computer), spam (pervasive), computer viruses (common and destructive of computer files), privacy (publicly accessible databases tabulate information most would want kept private), crime (it's certainly out there), etc.

However, these problems, where they involve harm to self or property, are of low probability, and where of appreciable probability, are an inconvenience (small in the case of spam; easily avoidable in the case of viruses). Exposure on the net should not induce fear.

.....

The consequence of a violation of web privacy is inconvenience. Inconvenience, particularly if of low probability, should not block acting in accordance with an ideal of trust and openness, chimerical as the ideal might be.

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URL: http://elencanto-tucson.com/Home/Site-Phil.html
Last revised: March 5, 2002
John Rupley: rupley@u.arizona.edu