I think this is great and is a good beginning.

We are excited to put these tools into action and look forward to support Main Street as they pave the way for our communities to participate.

I wish the proprietary philosophy of the project was more community based though. First being windows based and second the moderation strategy.

I think we can put our collective heads together and resolve those issues through this work.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the moderation part of this endeavor, however, I am a bit concerned that when an administrator is at the helm, there is the potential that content may be judged and seen as not appropriate, and therefore not put out to the public. For example, imagine if the welfare rights/peoples’s bailout group was using placestories around the foreclosure of Rosemary’s home. They would be posting some hard-hitting testimonials aimed at HUD, the Mayor of Minneapolis, the Media and anyone who is getting in their way.

The way this system is set up, I can only Imagine that the administrator would be getting all sorts of calls from what I can Imagine what this group would do if they were in control of their own placestories community.

After all, isn’t that freedom the web 2.0 intention?

I found one area that seemed subtle, but did seem to hint to the fact that placestories is a bit counter to the web 2.0 philosophy.

Look at the placestories FAQ, you see that it is not really considered a web 2.0 system because of the central control of whoever administers the community.

See:
http://mater.placestories.com/frequently_asked_questions#14

We can fix that though, once we have full access, we can have a team that moderated and works with a shared power model that understands framing, messaging and strategies. We will be sure there is accountability and communications back to the community from the team of moderators.

The other short coming is that they don’t make the software open source, perhaps then we could also export stories and put them other places besides the placestories.com site. That would make it closer to a web 2.0 project also.

All-in-all, we like what we see, we are exited to work with it and hope the access and use of this tool will fit our time-lines this fall.

Good Job to all the Headwaters Grantees for putting their stories out there, we hope to see more soon,

Duke