Blogger Uses Petition Site to Create Better Transportation for NY

Post authored by Ethan Oringel of Green Brooklyn 

When I started Green Brooklyn in December 2006, I knew that I wouldn't be doing much promotion for the site, nevermind advertising, and that I wouldn't even really have enough time to create content and links as much as I would like. I was busy starting my green communications consulting company, Aequus Green Communications, and working with clients to pay the bills and increase the portfolio. But in the first 6 months of 2007, I was experimenting with social networking and bookmarking tools on Green Brooklyn, including and especially the Care2 News Network, and saw such a great result that I decided that I needed to redesign everything ASAP.

Six months later, and despite being delayed again by work, a new template for GBK, and eventually several additional green sites, is almost done. It will be a powerful grassroots greening machine; with bloggers, writers, and volunteers all contributing to local greening efforts; and held together by the added sticky-ness of good dynamic content, great search engine optimization, and of course that Web 2.0 stuff.

Just testing all this stuff out in early 2007, it became clear to me just how important it is for an organization to have a full-time staff position whose role is to manage the group's presence in the various Web 2.0 spheres -- driving your organization's content deep into the blogosphere.

Recently, one Green Brooklyn cause has made some waves despite starting off as what I thought was just another post about a local transportation issue. Heather McCown of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn kicked off the idea of restoring ferry service from Brooklyn to Manhattan, as it is a more environmentally-sound and significantly faster commute to lower Manhattan than driving or taking the bus. Turns out, it's a 15 minute commute by ferry as opposed to one hour each way by subway or bus.

For a city with a traffic congestion problem, an air pollution problem, and a public transit problem in some areas; the cause is a natural fit. When it was clear that Ms. McCown -- who got over 1,400 signatures on a petition to restore ferry service -- was onto something, I decided to add to her total by creating an online petition on The Petition Site.

The rest is history, but in the next few weeks, the story was in several local newspapers and blogs. The articles about the ferry all included the petition URL, and it gave us some good  grassroots publicity. People definitely saw the URL in the local press and on local media websites and responded. It was a very popular topic on Green Brooklyn as well, and the traffic spike from the press made October 2007 the best month in Green Brooklyn's first year.

The ferry initiative has been so well-received by the community, that Ms. McCown, who started this whole drive amazingly less than 4 months ago, has co-founded what is now the Sunset-Ridge Waterfront Alliance. The SRWA is just getting started, but soon enough it will be providing grassroots greening and alternate transportation programs for residents and children in Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, and Brooklyn Waterfront communities.

This is all just a great example of the way that Web 2.0 -- if you want to call it that -- really does have potential to create rapid change. Use with care! You might help start a non-profit, by accident.

As for the newly re-designed grassroots greening website loaded with networking tools? It has so much potential that I'm almost afraid to touch it, much less launch it. Besides, I'm too busy with clients.