Reimagining the Internet
103. How did Vermont’s favorite civic social network turn into a climate disaster response network overnight? Michael Wood-Lewis Tells Us About His Local Good Web
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Michael Wood-Lewis from Front Porch Forum joins us for this second (maybe third?) appearance to help us kick off our Good Web series, where we’re highlighting the successful people building a better, smaller Internet. Michael was gracious enough to have producer Mike Sugarman up to the FPF offices in Burlington, VT to give us an inside look at how Vermont’s favorite civic social network runs.
This epiosde mentions the Seven Days article “Talk of the Towns: Neighbors Seek Plumbers, Lost Pets and Community on Front Porch Forum” as well as forthcoming research from two-time Reimagining guest Talia Stroud for New_Public.
Mike Sugarman:
Hello everybody, welcome back to Reimagining the Internet. I am Mike Sugarman and you are joining us for another episode in our Good Web series, where I’ve been going around and talking to people who run small social networks and working on the ideas and standards that make the internet better. And kind of just learning about how it works with the hopes of inspiring anyone listening to this to try themselves and get a sense of how they could actually do it. I am here today in person in Burlington, Vermont, which is closer to Canada than it is to Amherst, Massachusetts, with Michael Wood-Lewis in the Front Porch Forum offices, they’re really nice offices. And yeah, Michael Woods Lewis founded Front Porch Forum over two decades ago, is that correct?
Michael Wood-Lewis:
It’s been a while.
Mike Sugarman:
And Front Porch Forum for people who have listened to this podcast for a while, you know what it is. But for those who are not familiar, it’s a Vermont specific small social network. Each town has their own instance of it. You can talk about local civic matters. You can talk about people’s lost cats. There’s an interesting advertising model. But Michael, I’ll let you talk more about this. Welcome to the show.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Hey, thank you, Mike. Welcome to Burlington and to Vermont and to Front Porch Forum.
Mike Sugarman:
I feel really welcome here. I love Burlington and I love Vermont. I think Vermont is, don’t tell my school secretly the best of the New England states. So this is the second time, well, really the third time we’ve had you on, because we didn’t interview with you, but we also had you speak at the launch conference for the lab. But yeah, did I cover that intro well for people who might be hearing from you at the first time? Is there anything else they should know
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Sure, sure. Thanks for asking. Front Porch Forum started a precursor in 2000. My wife and I started at Valerie and myself in our own neighborhood. And then in 2006, we formed a business around it. And so we’ve been operating since then. The basic premise is every town and neighborhood in Vermont has its own local forum, online forum. It’s hosted proactively by our staff of online community managers. So every bit of content goes through moderation before people see it. That’s a big difference. And people can only sign up and participate in the area where they are. It’s not wide open.
So there’s several things that make it different than big tech models. So we’ve grown quite a bit. We have a staff of 30 people here. Our offices are small here. Most of our staff work remotely across the state. And yeah, I’m eager to talk more about it and what we’ve learned.
Mike Sugarman:
Not only have you been around for a while, but I get the impression that people who use the platform are really happy with it. And I think Talia Stroud, our friend Talia Stroud, who was our first ever podcast episode guest, and she was on in September of last year, she joined us again to tell us about some reason where she had been doing it on Facebook. Talia Stroud and her Civic Signals project did a recent study of front porch form and how users feel about it will be published by the time this episode runs. It’s very interesting. Could you tell us a bit about what she found?
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Well, I’m a big fan of Talia and her crew and their work. And so the Civic Signals work is basically a survey of users of different social media platforms. And their results have been out for a couple of years and she did that work with New Public. We had a conversation a while ago saying, hey, what would you think about doing the same survey with Front Porch Forum members? And so I have seen some preliminary results and, hey, it’s very promising. People have high marks for their experience with front porch form, which we’re thrilled to see. We’re also looking for ways we can do better. So I’m very eager to see the final report. And I think that’s coming out soon.
Mike Sugarman:
The whispers that I’ve heard is that this study includes a bit of a comparison between how people feel about Front Porch Forum versus how they feel about things like Facebook group, possibly even Nextdoor. I’m not exactly sure about Nextdoor. And then I think there was some way to assess if people who were not able to access Front Porch Forum, people in other states, how they would feel about it in comparison to Facebook. A way of measuring how they feel about Facebook groups by suggesting what if there were an alternative. And on those marks, how front porch form runs now was quite high across all of those. Super interesting. I think probably a question you get a lot, maybe a demand you get a lot, is when are you going to start expanding to other states? So Michael, when are you going to start expanding to other states?
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Well, that’s not on our roadmap. That is not where our ambitions lie. We feel like we have a lot of work here to do in our own home state. Vermont has this lovely bucolic reputation and a lot of it’s true. But we have our struggles here just like anywhere else. And what front porch form can contribute and is contributing now is making a difference, I feel, and what we can do in addition to what we’ve already provided. I think there’s a lot there for us. So we’re very focused on doing more in Vermont because there’s a need and because that’s, this is our home.
At the same time, us exporting what works here to a Phoenix suburb, you know, doesn’t make sense to me. There’s a lot of decisions that we’ve made daily, little micro decisions around optimizing front porch forum for our goals, our community building goals that are tailored made, you know, literally, that’s, we tailor them for our surroundings here. So I think lots of what we’ve got here can work other places, but that’s not our ambition.
And, you know, I, my answer to this question, because I get it a lot, as you said, is, you know, you walk into this incredible local vor restaurant. This one off place, it’s just, has all these relationships with local farmers and producers and makes this incredible food and has this whole community vibe and experience going. Do you walk in and say, wow, I know what you should do next. You should become McDonald’s and open up 10,000 restaurants all over the country, just like this one. Well, come on, that’s, that’s when you try to do that, you end up with what, McDonald’s with a salad bar, you know, it’s like…
Mike Sugarman:
And Maine McDonald’s has a lobster roll.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Right. So it’s like, you know, it’s hard, if not impossible or counterproductive, to try to scale up a local based success story. And I think we need to, I think as a culture, we need to be going in the other direction. We should be breaking down monopoly giants and saying, how can we replace those with a thousand local efforts? Not how can we take a few successful local efforts and turn them into the next monopoly, monopolistic giants?
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, certainly. And I think that, you know, for the past 15 years, a lot of times when we talk about successful businesses on the Internet, there’s been a conversation about scale around them. People who invest in these companies want to know how do you scale? Scale is a very low determined that situation. Scale means specifically, how do you scale to be as massive as possible, as profitable as possible, maybe not even profitable as much as revenue generating, right? Since we have plenty of giant Internet companies that will probably remain in the red until they’re liquidated. And that’s just fine for their investors. But scale doesn’t have to be maximum, right? You’re talking about scale can be Vermont.
And when you think about the scale of Vermont, you can start to think about the kind of scale as almost like an inward facing scale, right? There’s like always the more and more you focus on things you can do for this specific place, the more things you’ll find, the more ways that you can meet the needs of like this specific scale for the project.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Yeah. I mean, Front Porch Forum is a mission driven business. We’re a Vermont public benefit corporation, like a B Corp. And our mission is to help neighbors connect and build community. It’s all about more resilient local towns and neighborhoods. And, you know, that’s more important than ever.
When we started this undertaking, I would say that and I couldn’t go much further than that in conversation because I would seem like a crazy person talking about the sky falling. But now it’s very easy for people to imagine the next disaster. The next flood like we had here last year in Vermont, we had two big flooding episodes. The next pandemic, the next God forbid school shooting, you know. We’re living in a time of huge disasters and epic challenges.
And the places that are resilient that bounce back fastest are those with high social capital among the people who live there, live and work there. And so that’s what Front Porch Forum is in the business of doing is increasing social capital among neighbors, increasing the vibrancy of the local Main Street businesses, increasing the vitality of the local nonprofit sector, increasing, improving involvement with local democracy.
So strong resilient local communities, that’s the way to navigate our troubled times and, you know, the hard episodes that I think are going to continue to come before us. And so that’s what we’re about. So is there more work to do in Vermont? Yeah, of course there is. And in that framing, there’s always more work to do.
Mike Sugarman:
And I think a lot of people listening to this and I would certainly be one of those people if I didn’t already know the answer to the question I’ll be asking a little bit would hear what you’re saying and say you run a website that’s kind of like regular, it’s kind of like next door, kind of like Facebook groups—if we’re going to be as uncharitable as possible—like what impact did that possibly have on the impact of climate change on Vermont, right? We tend to see a lot of big promises being made by entrepreneurs who have internet businesses, which sound more and more ridiculous as the years go on and we see actually the impact of those companies.
And what I will say before we get into that very interesting story about the flooding that happened last summer is that there’s a really interesting article about how Front Porch Forum a relationship with building that social capital in Vermont. It came out, I think it was last fall in Seven Days. Seven Days is great all weekly, one of the few remaining all weeklies in New England. And I believe you worked with them, you gave them seven days of posts from Front Porch Forum. They did this really incredible deep dive into it.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
I think it was just one day. Oh, it was one day.
Mike Sugarman:
Oh, I thought it was seven days, seven days. But yeah, so if you’re…
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Maybe it was two days, I can’t remember. It was a small sample, so they didn’t need much. They did a fantastic job.
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, and if you want to actually read some reporting about that social capital, you can go there. But I mean, yeah, Michael, like what type of stuff was in this article? I thought it was really refreshing to see this stuff kind of put on paper.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Yeah, I encourage folks to take a look at that article. It’s at sevendaysvt.com. Just look for Front Porch Forum on there or go to FrontPorchForum.com and you can find it linked there. They did a fantastic job. There was a time when I lived and worked in Washington, DC in the nonprofit sector and it was in trade associations and all that. You’d see somebody do a study and they would flog that study for three or four years. And they’d do conferences and books and television documentaries and all based on really milking this one little piece of work.
And Front Porch Forum, it’s kind of the opposite problem. We are flooded every day with amazing stories or leads to stories that we can’t keep track of. They’re just like pouring in over the transom of neighbors helping neighbors, of community coming together, of issues coming up that are tough to address.
So this newspaper, Seven Days, turned some reporters loose on a pile of postings from, I think it was just one day. And the postings they picked, I have to say, were pretty underwhelming. They weren’t the ones that we would have picked. But they went after them and dug a little, you know, scratch below the surface and each one blossomed into a really beautiful vignette of everyday life in an array of communities across the state.
And in each case, Front Porch Forum played, you know, I’m blessed to be able to say, played a pivotal role. Front Porch Forum is often a catalyst or starting point in good things happening in a local community. It doesn’t do the good thing, but it brings the two parties, the eight parties, whatever together, or it reveals this piece of information that people didn’t know, or it is a place where someone can get an idea out on the table that catches fire or makes a need known.
And, you know, if not for Front Porch Forum, these good things wouldn’t have happened. But we’re not the ones doing the good things.
Mike Sugarman:
Just to get really concrete about it, can I get a recent example? And you don’t even have to say the name of the town. You can anonymize as much as you want to anonymize, but just make it concrete for our listeners.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Sure. Let me reference the actual newspaper. So looking at some of these examples, a woman in the town of Montpelier, or a state capital posted to her neighbors, “Any recommendations for someone who can make a dress? I need one for an event, and I can’t find what I’m looking for. Reach out if you or someone you know is skilled and interested.” And she got all sorts of really sweet responses, including someone who wanted to make a dress for her. They became friends that happened. The woman was able to go to this event. You know, a beautiful story underneath that simple request.
Another one was from a principal of an elementary school in Starksboro. She posted, “To celebrate the first real snow. This is last beginning last winter. Might you donate a sled to the kids at our school? Our students would be so grateful.” And turns out she’s when the reporter went to talk to her, said, “Oh, I do that every beginning of every winter. And I get mittens and sleds and you know, all the stuff that at recess time is hard to keep track of and kid kid can’t be out in the snow with one mitten. We have to have stuff ready to go.”
Oh, another very moving one woman wrote in in the town of Middlebury. My husband was an avid collector of all things history, military, and jazz. I cannot bear the thought of just throwing these items away. While I’ve donated some things, there’s still so much more. If you would like to peruse this very large collection, we can arrange a date and time for you to stop by. And the woman got really, again, heartfelt response from a number of people who came by.
If you’ve ever been yard sale when the aggressive folks show up, you know, this wasn’t that crowd. This was people who were very interested, but also, you know, recognize one was going through loss. And she said now she knows where where all this stuff is. It’s around town. She’s got to know some of the people and she has those further connections.
Mike Sugarman:
I mean, how is this different than something like Facebook groups? Like why do they need Front Porch Forum, why is from for good for them?
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Well, everything about Front Porch Forum that we’ve developed since 2020, or sorry, 2000, one of those two numbers, is designed around a community building goal. What would help develop social capital among neighbors? That’s very different than what’s gone into the algorithms at, you know, big tech enterprises. You know, their goals are to excite people to, you know, keep people looking for 24 hours a day to, you know, and we’ve all heard and read about, you know, how that what that’s done in the 2016 election 2020 election, etc.
Front Porch Forum is at its at its core: anything you could do on front porch form, you could do in a different general big tech, big tech site, like a localized Facebook instance, or, or a Nextdoor. Or you could do it through some other big tech offering that’s a vertical. You want a restaurant review, you know, you want to ride to the airport, you want lodging for your visiting in-laws in the community, you know, you could use Airbnb, you could use Uber, you could use Yelp, you know, for those kind of things.
Our proposition is use Front Porch Forum and talk to your clearly identified nearby neighbors about these everyday things. And they’re so close that you’re going to end up interacting at some point with some of these people in person and actually build social capital. And when the person says, hey, you know, you get 10 offers of a ladder to borrow, you borrow one, later one of the people who offered a ladder who didn’t need asked for something, you’re going to, you’re going to jump in because there’s some a sense of reciprocity going on there.
So, yeah, it’s, it feels, we strive to make it feel very much like it’s owned by each, there’s a sense of ownership within each community.
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, let’s talk about the kind of the early days of Front Porch Forum. A lot of people listening to this who might be interested in, you know, starting their own small social network or just even taking part in an experimental one, they might feel like I’ve never really seen one of these start. I don’t really know like where this comes from. I don’t really understand what the early days are supposed to look like. What were those early days for you? I mean, what’s the genesis of it? But also like, yeah, when it was you and your wife trying to like get this thing off the ground, like, I assume you had another job. But I also assume that there were a lot of kinks that you had to work out along the way.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Yeah, in our particular case, it’s a different era, right? We started in 2000 in our own neighborhood to meet, to scratch our own itch. We wanted to know what was going on in our neighborhood better. And so we started with this crazy state of the art technology, artificial intelligence. No, email, email was a crazy new thing in 2000. I mean, not brand new. But at a residential level, people had maybe had an email address at work, maybe they had an AOL kind of address at home that was for the whole family, you know, that kind of era we were dealing with. And so we just, our question was, well, we want to get everyone’s attention, like once a day, for a few minutes. How can we do that? Email. And so that’s, that’s how we got started. And almost immediately, it was successful and popular, you know, social case, you know, people wanted to see what neighbors had to say. And they wanted to share their two cents, their need, their offer, their question, their joke, their whatever.
And during that six-year period, I was the moderator, but it was like a five minute a day commitment, you know, didn’t take long, 10 minutes on a big day. And, but what I did was I, in my background is engineering, I like to, you know, scientific method, I like to experiment and like data and keep track of things.
And so I experimented. I said, well, everybody’s anonymous. How does that work? You know, does that help towards our goals of helping people feel more connected to their neighbors and to this neighborhood? It didn’t. So then I swung the other direction and everyone was had first and last name and their street address and their email address, everything on display that seemed too revealing. So we throttled back. Things like that, what if we had one person who wanted to post six times a day, began to dominate the conversation. How do we deal with that? We had a person who, you know, liked to tee off on people. How do we handle that?
You know, basically, we started, we had to tackle all these kind of design and moderation questions one at a time. And we did it experimentally. And we settled on not a carved in stone model, but, you know, a model that we could still flex on.
So when we started the business, 2006, we had a running start of what was working in one pilot neighborhood. And we took that elsewhere. And we’ve continued to evolve it using the same experimental approach, but it’s largely the same model.
Mike Sugarman:
I mean, what you’re describing sounds to me like how a lot of people around America start a small business, which is they have an interest and it becomes a hobby. And it becomes a hobby they put more work into. And they try to, you know, whether it’s sell those lemon bars to their neighbors or actually make an attempt at, you know, opening the music space. They try to get out in the neighborhood and like then learn how to run this thing. I think what I’m hearing from you is that you didn’t have something like an angel investor or any kind of like incubator that you were working in. This was something that just kind of grew out of time that you had and support you got from people who were using it.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
You know, some people organize an annual block party. Some people coach the little league. Some people organize a cleanup at the park every Spring. This was my neighborhood contribution is how I saw it. Yes, I had a full time job. I was running drinking water and wastewater trade association kind of environmental organization for that time. And then I left that job and in 2006, looking for a new gig, just had the birth of our fourth kid in six years. And I thought, perfect time to start an unfunded startup.
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, time to buy your health insurance.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
And so in hindsight, you know, no sane person. I asked lots of people for advice. Here’s my idea. What do you think? And they all said, I love what you’ve done as a volunteer in this one neighborhood. But are you insane? Like, no, go get a steady job.
And anyway, I didn’t do that. Instead, we started Front Porch Forum. And there’s a lot of 80-hour work weeks for multiple years for sure. And not really pulling down any real pay. So we did not take on investors. We bootstrapped. We, you know, sweat equity situation. And that became out of my experience with angel investors in a previous startup where I was a mid-level person—raise a million bucks, hire 40 people six months later, everything blows up and lay everybody off—this felt too important to me personally, to do that approach with is kind of counter to how I operate personally. And so to me, it was the slow and steady. And so here we are.
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, certainly. And I mean, I want to go a little bit more through the story of like, from then until now, but let’s fast forward for a second. How many people work here? I mean, if you’re willing to tell me like, what does your budget look like? We’re sitting in an office. It’s, you know, it’s not Facebook’s office in—where’s Facebook Palo Alto or something? It’s, it’s just a really nice little two floor office that in a building shared with seemingly like potentially psychologists and some other small things like that.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
We have some wonderful neighbors here massage therapists. So you walk in, you can smell the massage oil and get you just get loosened up to smelling it. Yeah, no, we’re we have a head count of 30 employees. I have a terrific team of people that I get to work with every day. A core of us work here in the office. You know, five, six of us here and the rest work remotely.
Mike Sugarman:
How much does it cost to like run the actual like, computer stuff, right? Like servers and all of that? Like, is it expensive? Because I think some people would look at a major social media platform and be like, Oh, the reason why they have so much revenue is because it’s really expensive to like, put something on the internet. But I’m guessing if you have a staff of 30 people and you’re only catering to Vermont, it can’t be that it can’t be billions of dollars.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Our biggest expense by far is payroll. Okay. Oh, okay. Yeah, you know, it’s paying those 30 people.
Mike Sugarman:
A lot of them are moderators?
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Yes, the biggest. We have four teams are community team, which includes the moderators, our sales team and marketing, who sell our advertising. Our tech team, we have three full stack developers. And then our small operations team that do all the accounting and HR and other important stuff.
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, where does that money come from? Like revenue.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Our revenue model, we have three primary sources and occasional fourth. So we sell advertising to local businesses. And when you hear a digital and advertising, you know, it’s easy to immediately think of the giants and their surveillance based advertising. That’s not what we do. Our advertising model is much more simple. And I think honest and transparent. You buy an ad in Middlebury for this week and it runs. And anybody participating in the Middlebury Front Porch Forum will see that ad. So it’s not all the other things that come with big tech advertising.
That’s our biggest revenue source for sure. And that’s sold by our in-house team of sellers. So they have business relationships with hundreds and hundreds of businesses, nonprofits, government agencies all around the state. They offer marketing advice. You know, we have good solid relationships, just like a small newspaper sales team would have. You know, you’re not trying to make a quick buck off somebody or building long term relationships.
Our second product is paid access. So paid advertising is kind of you buy a one way message. Paid access, you pay money to participate on the forum, the back and forth. So a small business or a nonprofit can join this single town where they are located. So you can, if you’re a nonprofit or a corner store in Bennington, you can join the Bennington forum.
It’s free. If you want to be able to post more frequently or have a nicer directory listing, that kind of thing, you can pay us 10 or 15 bucks a month for different tiers. Different tiers have different attributes. That’s all self-serve. That’s a small fraction of our revenue.
Then we also sell something called custom access, a kind of enterprise solution for government entities. So if you’re a solid waste district, a regional planning commission, things like that, and you want to reach 20 or 40 of our forums, you pay for that access. And you can participate and you know, stay tuned in. So we’ve had like, I remember one solid waste district, the person would set up alerts and every time someone on a forum would say, “What do I do with these old tires?” Or, “Does anyone know if they’re going to pick up on Memorial Day?” This person would jump right in and not just answer that person’s question. She’d put it on that forum, assuming other people would want to know too. And so she, you know, it was a great tool for her work there.
And then our third area of donations. So we’re not a nonprofit. So any donation is not tax deductible. But we started asking after getting several unsolicited donations over our early years. People would just send us a $20 bill or $100 check. I asked them, I’d call them back and say, “What do you, what, you know, it’s a free service. What are you doing?” And they said, “You offered me thousands of dollars of value. Like, at least I can do, you must have expenses. Here you go.” And so we finally decided, let’s just ask and see what happens. So we run annual campaigns. And that turns out to be a significant part of our revenue as well.
Mike Sugarman:
What is the user experience of it like? And do people seem pretty satisfied with it? I mean, you’ve talked about experimenting a lot. And I guess this is one of those areas where I’m curious to hear about what the experimentation process looks like.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Front Porch Forum offers in every town in the state, every neighborhood, a local forum, a business directory and a community calendar, as well as search across those three. So Montpelier has that, Middlebury, Bennington, Burlington. And every member can view that through our mobile app or our website, in the forum, it’s also delivered via email as one option. So then people, of course, can access it via phone, laptop, desktop, tablet.
And so the basic user experience has been evolving over time. Originally, it was email, forum, laptop. And now more and more, it’s mobile app, you know, on the phone or the web or email on the phone. And so we’re, you know, it’s an open question about that user experience. But the basic experience is brief and daily, you know, five or 10 minutes a day is what we’re looking for.
So, you know, we’re breaking a very classic Silicon Valley, you know, social media rule of try to hold people 24/7. You know, we just want them for five or 10 minutes a day, draw a few connections to the local community. Maybe it blossoms into something in that moment. Most likely not. But the next day or next week, they’re in line at the post office, they’re picking their kid up from school, you know, they’re getting their whatever their shoveling their snow, raking their leaves, and conversation real and in person blossoms. And that’s, that’s what we’re after. That’s the, I’m trying to say is Front Porch Forum, the digital experience is just the leading edge. The full experience is knowing more neighbors living in community, having a recurring potluck or block party or cleanup day or coming together on a for a tough school budget meeting. Like that’s, that’s the full Front Porch Forum experience is real and in person.
Mike Sugarman:
I think about how you mentioned a few minutes ago that earlier on, you were trying to discourage the behavior of one person dominating by posting a lot, right? A lot of other things online, that’s actually what they’re trying to incentivize, right? They certainly don’t mind if some people are posting a lot. In fact, they hope everyone is engaging with it as much as possible. Seems to be run almost in diametric opposite to that imperative.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
You know, Front Porch Forum is a really strange thing. I mean, we started doing this, as I said, in 2000. Craigslist existed, but not much else, you know, that’s still around was out there. And we’re, we are in a, you know, a beautiful but kind of backwater corner of the country of the world. And we’ve kind of had our head down doing our thing. Yeah. And we’ve developed our model, not by looking at big tech for inspiration.
Most of our, of our leadership here doesn’t really use a lot of big tech social media. It’s not a draw for us. And some of us do, and that’s fine, you know, we each have our own approach to things. If most of the population is learning one language, and then there’s some other little sleepy isolated corner and a different part of the region, it’s developed its own language and it’s, it turns up being very different. And they actually think of things quite differently. That’s, that’s Front Porch Forum.
So we’re this very different set of assumptions, set of goals, but we’re, we’ve stayed laser focused on our goals over time. And as has big tech, but it’s just laid bare, our starting ambitions, you know, our ambitions weren’t to take over the world, to the masses, much attention and money and power as possible, it’s been to, you know, fulfill our social goals in, you know, this small state.
Mike Sugarman:
I think that that’s like a really nice way to kind of finish answering the question of why aren’t you going to be starting Front Porch Forum Illinois.
I kind of think of it in this way. I always have my kind of like music oriented ways of like thinking through things. But if you take like the kind of national record industry, there’s not a whole lot of accordion music that has been very commercially successful. I can think of a single accordion artist that’s been commercially successful: “Werid Al” Yankovic, who’s a parody artist, right? It’s like part of like bit he plays accordion. Isn’t he such an annoying nerd?
But there’s really vibrant accordion music cultures in a lot of different parts of America. New Orleans has Zydeco, which is really cool. If you see it, it’s actually some of the most exciting live music you can hear. And the Zydeco scene is a really embeded when New Orleans is really a community center. And it’s a great melting pot of all the different kind of Creole identities.
And there’s also really popular accordion music or was I don’t think it exists as much anymore, but to some extent, like with Southern Wisconsin and well, Illinois, like Northern Illinois, you have your polka, right?
But you couldn’t take Zydeco and just drop it in the Midwest and expect people to enjoy it. And you couldn’t take Wisconsin polka and bring it anywhere else and really expect people to enjoy it. I dare you to try. You can’t just take these locally developed things and just export them. Or should you, right? Like why would we want to try to make New Mexican Zydeco happen? Maybe it would be cool, but it’s like a nicer idea than it would probably be in terms of like a tangible reality.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
For the record in grad school in the state of Illinois, I had a Zydeco record.
Mike Sugarman:
You made a Zydeco record?
Michael Wood-Lewis:
I had one. And I enjoyed it.
Mike Sugarman:
Oh my God, I thought we were going to get real news here.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
So somebody dropped Zydeco in Illinois and you had one person who went for it. Yeah. So there you go. I hear you.
Mike Sugarman:
I mean, but those are also the things that make America really exciting and vibrant are these local cultures, these things that don’t have to work everywhere.
This has been coming up a lot. It’s like something we’re circling around is this McDonald’s metaphor. You brought up McDonald’s earlier in a very similar way. Ethan and I talked about this, we talked about it on an episode recorded for this series. That like a lot of how America seems to be developed these days is you have these kind of like local highways where you can’t really like walk on the side of them. They’re like big box stores. And that’s kind of like an urban center of sorts. But we know that like actually that’s pretty bad design. And that is in what helps foster small businesses, right? Like people just prefer a Main Street, like a vibrant Main Street. And yeah, I don’t know. Our Main Streets aren’t about having things that work everywhere. And our Main Streets about what’s good for building that local community.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
We know that’s a big part of our model. You mentioned, you know, should Front Porch Forum use advertising? Advertising for us is not a necessary evil to cover our payroll for our community good. It’s part of the community good. We don’t have a policy to refuse advertising dollars from, you know, big box stores or big tech or anything, but they’re not coming knocking on our door, you know, and we’re not knocking on theirs. 99% of our advertisers are small local enterprises and nonprofits. And you know, they get a great return on their investment with us and they come keep coming back. And we feel like we are, you know, we, we are very good at stirring up something of interest to local people in every community in the state. And then we say, well, who can benefit from that? Well, certainly the local businesses can, the local nonprofits, local government. And so we let them have a little for free, and then we charge them beyond that. And that’s how we cover our expenses. And that’s to add more to the, towards our social goals.
Mike Sugarman:
I want to stay on Main Street for a moment. So if you were on Main Street in Montpelier, let’s say last July, you were probably standing in a couple of feet of water, right? I think Vermont kind of has this place in the popular imagination as a place that is fairly immune to climate change, right? You’re not going to get the droughts and wildfires that Southern California gets. You’re not going to get the ice melt that Alaska has, right? Vermont has water. Vermont has green stuff. There’s some elevation. But there was a really bad flood almost a year ago, affected the state in a major way.
And I think I remember talking to you around that time. It had some literal downstream ramifications. A lot of the agriculture in Vermont is still going to be suffering for a long time from the contamination that this flooded kind of kicked up.
And yeah, I also know that it was something that Front Porch Forum was involved in some capacity in getting involved in. And to kind of give the snapshot for listeners when I checked in with you last summer, you’re basically telling me that you had this big spike in donations during the COVID pandemic. People were locked at home. They were using Front Porch Forum more. And that gave you a little bit more rainy day money. You used it in a really interesting way. And I’d love for you to tell our listeners about your response to the flooding that happened last summer.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
No place is immune, including Vermont from climate disasters and other disasters. We’re supposed to have a big outdoor staff meeting on top of a small state park, mountaintop last summer. And a lot of it got shut down because of wildfires in other states.
Mike Sugarman:
And in Canada.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
In Canada, yeah. And the smoke had come down and made it unsafe to really be outside and breathe. So yeah, no place is immune. But a lot that is in some sense, a lot of rivers and streams and lands in the area close up and along the coast and coast comes in with a huge amount of water and areas in the state. But Vermont definitely has this susceptible to flooding. We have a lot of rivers and streams. And when a hurricane blows up, along the coast, east coast and comes inland, it can dump a huge amount of water in areas of the state. And so the two foot wide stream turns into a 100 foot wide raging river for an hour and just takes out roads and infrastructure and threat to human life. So we had big flooding twice last year.
And as you mentioned, coming through the pandemic, we saw a surge in our advertising. More and more businesses wanted to reach Vermonters because they were changing their business operations and because they needed to hire and other things. And we saw a surge in donations, just very timely and appreciated from our members.
And so yeah, in looking how to invest those funds, the first thing we did was we invested in our staff. We had not been able to pay for health insurance up until that point and had a subpar retirement offering. And so we were able to finally offer health insurance and a good retirement benefit. Additionally, we’ve had some holes in our organizational chart that we just had to leave vacant because we didn’t have the resources to fill them, we were able to hire some critical people. And so that’s great. So that was our first step.
But then this flooding disaster hit in ’23 and we went into kind of an emergency footing, and started doing several things to be more responsive to the needs out there.
One of the attributes of Front Porch Forum is we have posting limits on different account types. If we don’t put limits on it, then certain account types will overwhelm the platform. If you’ve got everybody paying attention, well, it’s a great place for a realtor to come in and talk about real estate constantly or whatever it might be. And so we have these various constraints. And so we then selectively change those constraints. So town officials involved with public safety, all the constraints came right off, other moves like that, critical nonprofits.
But one of the things we were able to do in addition to those moves was realize Front Porch Forum is very localized. And so if you’re in Moretown, small little town near Montpelier, you can see into Moretown forum, of course, and you can see if you go onto the website or mobile app, you can see what’s going on in surrounding towns, but it’s a little cumbersome. You have to go, want to go and look at it. But you can’t see beyond that.
And so we realized with the flooding, it really was a regional event, as a matter of critical public safety. And so we created very quickly in a matter of a couple of days, a new feature where all the content that was tagged as flood related could be seen by anybody in a given county across the whole county. We call it our disaster response board, plural, each county had one. And they proved very popular.
And we ran that for multiple months until the crisis subsided and well into the recovery period. And then we shut it down and we’re looking at developing new features along those lines that we can, when there have been disasters in the past, the pandemic going way back to tropical storm Irene in 2011, we dealt with each one of those disasters as a one-off.
But now what we’ve learned is these aren’t one-offs, like they’re coming. And so now we have kind of a kit of a collection of steps that we can take to be of more value to our communities during these moments of crisis. And so we’re getting better organized. So the next time, knock on wood, this happens, whether it’s a flood or wildfire or pandemic or whatever it might be, we’ll be able to flip the switch and tell all our staff, okay, we’re on emergency footing. So you know what that means, this list of 10 things.
Mike Sugarman:
Can you give me an example of how people were using these features?
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Sure. I think of it in two basic ways, the professional responses and the citizen, you know, the individual folks. And so professionally, you have certainly first responders and town clerks and highway foremen and nonprofits who are running relief efforts, et cetera, using Front Porch Form to get information out clearly, over and over, that was a critical role.
Mike Sugarman:
I think it’s very clear why this is a unique and interesting story, because it’s pretty rare to hear about anything on the Internet developed with the kind of resilience model, right? Thinking about not only how we can respond holistically to a crisis right now, but be proactive and try to look institute that in the future. It certainly is kind of unheard of with, again, I almost feel like it’s not worth beating the dead horse of corporate social media. But obviously, that is the thing that stands in stark contrast to, right?
I feel like there are two crises that people are talking a lot about at the moment who pay attention to, let’s say just small town America, use that as like an umbrella term. One is a kind of lack of participation in local democracy. And another is a loss. This is the buzzy term I’ve been hearing, the loss of like third places, right? The kind of place that’s not work or home that you can go meet other people. I think what you’re describing, it’s like it’s really tempting to be like, here’s your small-d democracy. But I actually think what you’re describing is something that’s like on a lower level than that. It’s kind of like the substrate that even makes it possible for people to talk to each other and get more involved, civically get more involved, socially, like know your neighbors, have some kind of relationship with them.
Like you actually do need to start at that much lower level. Then you can start, I mean, elections come a lot later after that.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
I’ve shared this before, maybe with you, but somebody told me years ago that Front Porch Forum acts like the fertilizer in the soil of community. And it’s true. It’s very fundamental, simple stuff. But you can’t eat fertilizer. You’re not going to admire fertilizer. It’s what gets planted in there. And front porch forum doesn’t really do the planting. It’s the people who participate, but without fertile soil, the disconnected community, one person comes in and tries to get something started, it’s very hard.
And so Front Porch Forum is just trying to create an environment where good things can happen.
Mike Sugarman:
And I should add, so in the lab, we have kind of experience coming from the other side of it. We had software called Smalltown, which you’re aware of, basically a Mastodon fork that was attempting to be kind of portable social media for civic engagement. So you want to start small town in your town, you can spin that up and have conversations and something that looks like Twitter about whatever.
We were working with someone who came to us, who was just a local community member somewhere. I’m not going to give any details about this whatsoever, aside from the story. But they were like, look, we want Smalltown. Smalltown seems great. My town uses Facebook, my town uses Nextdoor. It’s bad for all of these reasons that you agree with me about.
So we were like, great. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s help you set this up. So we help this person set it up. And we gave them kind of a handbook of like, here’s some like things you can use to try to engage people to like get them on the platform. The reality is part of the reason why we’re not putting a lot of energy into the Smalltown platform these days is because we weren’t very good about researching how to get people onto a network like that and make it replicable. And this guy fell, you know, astray of that. He realized that.
And in about a month, he was not trying to run that Smalltown instance anymore, because it wasn’t getting the engagement because it wasn’t getting the people. And it’s to me a really good lesson in you don’t just spin this stuff up overnight. It doesn’t just work because you put it on the Internet. Like no technology just works because you like put it out there, right? I could put a car in the middle of the woods. If there’s no other to drive it, it just turns into a pile of rust, right?
So one of the interviews in this series is with Charles Broskoski from Are.na. I think he says it on mic. Front Porch Forum is the one of the key inspirations for Are.na. And he said something really interesting during that interview, which is that he doesn’t want to run the most profitable social network he wants to run the oldest social network and the slow and steady approach that they’ve developed is really inspired by what he’s seen at Front Porch Forum.
What do you have to say to a potentially younger generation to a potential new generation next generation people who haven’t even started attempting to build projects like this yet? But what what’s your advice for them? What’s your words of wisdom to have words of support?
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Figure it out. Get inspired. Yeah. Be tenacious. Go for it. Yeah. You know, we had an opening and and we saw it and we took a gamble and we went for it. And it’s been a long struggle. And it’s where I would say, you know, having a good level of local success right now. And that feels terrific.
But you know, I just met with a group of UVM seniors yesterday, graduating from a community entrepreneurship program. Similar kind of questions. And you know, it’s my answer there was the same. It’s like, have enthusiasm, get an idea, go for it. And if you really believe in it, stay on through the hard times, the lean times. If it hits a rough patch, you don’t see a way forward, then fold up that tent and live to fight another day. You know, figure out what the pivot is.
Vermont like so many places, has an aging population. And, you know, I’m in my fifties now, I can’t pretend to know. My kids are just entering their twenties. I can’t pretend to know what a 25-year-old, 35-year-old wants and needs. And so, you know, in a digital sense or many other ways. So that’s going to take people of that age demographic to figure out. But use big tech as it makes sense, but don’t get used by them.
Mike Sugarman:
What’s made it worth it for you all these years?
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Well, this has really been my dream, you know, to live in a community of my choosing. My wife and I have moved here in the nineties to raise a family in a community where I could be, you know, draw on a paycheck to do something I care about and love. My wife gives me a hard time saying, you know, I’m good at being the boss, but not being a subordinate in the workplace. And so I guess that’s worked out for me here. I have to ask my colleagues how they feel the same way.
But yeah, so what’s not to feel enthusiastic about? I mean, it’s great. And, you know, one other thing to turn this on its head a little bit. But when I think about trying to do something like Front Porch Forum in a different era—in the ‘60s, in the ‘70s, in the ‘80s, in the ‘90s—it would be the equivalent of having a local town or neighborhood printed newsletter that comes out once a day full of information, full of content from the neighbors, from the town clerk, from the library, from the corner store, from in every single town and neighborhood in the state.
That would have been a crazy business to build in 1970, 1980. That would have cost untold millions of dollars to try to pull off. And yet here we are with a small group of people doing it very effectively. And so we live in a time of incredible opportunity that the tech and everything offers us. But man, there are a lot of challenges.
Mike Sugarman:
Yeah, certainly. And I would say to anybody who hears that and goes, oh, well, I want to start my little software project, but it sounds hard as like, you know what, any job you get, there’s going to be period of time when money’s a little tighter, there’s going to be a period of time when things aren’t determinate. You’re going to be questioning like, what am I even doing here? So if you have something you care about and you have an idea about how to do it, it’s all a risk, right? I mean, it’s a risk to, you know, try to work for the same company for 40 years. That’s not a sure shot either.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
I will say I also have drawn inspiration. I’ll mention my family. Our oldest child, Ben, has severe disabilities and he passed away now several years ago when he was just about 16.
Mike Sugarman:
I’m sorry Michael.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Yeah thank you. And I miss him terribly. And his, you know, our whole family misses him, all our other kids and my wife and I. But what I took away from one of the things I took away, I should say, from Ben’s experience was not to, was to go for it. You know, what, you know, this one precious life, are you going to spend it in a defensive posture worrying about the next this or that? Are you going to just get out there and try to make something happen?
And I recognize, you know, I’m a white male who came from a solid family background. Had a lot of privilege. And so it’s easier for me to say that than perhaps many others. But still, I stand by it. You know, what are you going to do with this one precious life you have? And none of us know how much time we have.
And there’s, you know, the world is full of beauty and love. It’s also full of suffering and justice. And I figure, you know, the more people we have working to ameliorate the suffering and justice and to bring about more beauty and love, it’s like, that’s, that’s, that’s our task in life. So let’s go and let’s get busy.
And being on automaton in some mega corporation’s middle infrastructure, it’s like, yeah, no, thanks. You know, spending your life convinced that everything’s bad and nothing can change. And I just wish things were different because that would be my chance. You’re right. You actually do.
Mike Sugarman:
I think we all have a responsibility to ourselves and each other to, I don’t know, try to bring about the peace and love that the world desperately needs. Well, that’s a really wild place to end a conversation by the social network. But thank you, Michael. That was really nice.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
I always think about it every day here, really.
Mike Sugarman:
Michael Wood-Lewis Front Porch Forum. I’m here in Burlington, Vermont. And it sounds like people have the right attitude here. So thanks for having me.
Michael Wood-Lewis:
Thank you, Mike, anytime.
