Yes, They Hear You
Interesting tidbit from this week’s Bricktown Urban Design Committee. Jim Cowan, director of the Bricktown Association, and Avis Scaramucci, owner of Nonna’s and a member of the committee, both acknowledged receiving emails concerning the proposed Holiday Inn Express. And a partner in the development team for the hotel, John Sweeney, reported reading comments at www.okctalk.com. Sweeney spent part of his interview with me answering questions and comments registered on the online forum.
-Steve
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Just as a correction, okmet.org has been having some server issues- the old URL still works via redirection, but the forums can be accessed by oktalk.net/bb, not okctalk.net.
I think that this entire decade has been about realizing the true power of the Internet. We all played around with it and got email addresses in the 90s, sure, but now it has become perhaps THE fixture of society.. Myspace rockets small unheard of bands to superstardom, Facebook rules college campuses, YouTube has millions of people quoting random videos that are made in people’s backyards… The Internet is a powerful thing, and it can be as powerful on a local level too.
That’s what we’re committed to, is connecting people across landscapes that get it and learn together and hopefully the back-and-forth in an environment with the urban and sustainable emphasis that I like to push can benefit OKC and move OKC in that direction. I think that OKC, more than other communities, is really being changed and becoming more and more wired by this whole deal. Sites like OkMet.org and OkcTalk.com offer broad forums that anyone can join and should join. I definitely can’t and don’t speak for OkcTalk.com, but what people find at OkMet.org that we pride ourselves on is that we are usually right about this stuff and on a whole, we operate cohesively as a great online community that most importantly a lot of people have learned from.
I actually never thought I would see that day that we got the kind of exposure through the mainstream media that we’re getting now, all thanks to Steve. This brings new challenges and rewards. The Internet, as it rises and as it strives to become more credible and influential, must remain (and again, only speaking for my site) sensible and thoughtful While moderation is never the answer, it is important to have the kind of online community that actually CAN be taken seriously if it is to be taken seriously.
The reason I say that is that a lot of forums of our likeness are just utter train wrecks page-for-page. I mean seriously, especially this one:
http://forums.seattletimes.nwsource.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=44
Steve,
I actually know John Sweeney as he is a friend of friend’s of mine and I see him out from time to time. I sent him a message through our Myspace accounts just saying that I knew that he would do what is best for Bricktown regarding this situation. I told him to go and checkout OKMet.org (the physical address is actually okctalk.net) to see what we (the community) on the boards had been chatting about concerning this project. I’m glad to hear he followed through & I look forward to seeing how this project goes along.