Somerville Voices

Community online forums have been around for decades, but Somerville Voices is cutting new ground in citizen-driven independent media with high journalistic integrity.  It began in May 2007 with a group of residents interested in forming a new media collaborative, and the website now promotes an open forum for broad-based dialog, covering important community issues and events, produced by and for people who live or work in the city.  It demonstrates the constructive capacity of internet technology to connect a local community to the places, events, and opinions that matter to residents.  Somerville Voices is a completely volunteer-run project.  Some of its innovations and impacts are as follows:

* Crowd Funding -  Somerville Voice is considering the implementation of a unique funding idea called "Crowd Funding".  Online journalists can present reporting ideas with a budget that can be directly funded by readers.

* Meeting the old with the new - by employing a board of volunteer citizen editors, the online journal has helped create a safe environment for "old Somerville" and "new Somerville" to engage directly, and outside other hostile online bulletin boards or print editorials.