Last week a new platform launched that invites New Yorkers to do what they do best: suggest ways to improve their home. Called Change by Us NYC, the website crowdsources ideas to make New York City a better place. City officials hope that the social media platform will serve as "a place for New Yorkers to put their ideas into action by creating projects and building teams to make our city a better place to live."
The basic idea is that engaged citizens will sign on to support the best ideas, offering volunteer time, money, or other skills and resources, and that these projects will come to life in the real, physical city.
Interestingly, the city launched the site with the call for ideas to make the city "greener."
As David Bragdon, director of the city's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, told the New York Times' Green blog:
“Change by Us NYC enables New Yorkers across the city to become stewards of their own local communities and team up with the city government and other neighbors to make good things happen."
As I read Bragdon's quote, and then browsed around the site, I couldn't shake the sense that I'd seen something very similar before. And then it struck me: ioby.
Short for "In Our Backyard," ioby (pronounced eye-OH-bee) is a web platform that does, well, as far as I can tell pretty much the same thing that Change by Us NYC is doing. Their official slogan is that ioby "brings environmental projects to life, block by block." Here's a really short video that describes the project better than I can:
The nonprofit ioby site has also been around for a lot longer, and, after a cursory comparison, looks like it has a lot more legitimate projects than the city government's new creation. Granted, Change by Us NYC just launched, and there's not much activity outside of the "Share Ideas" section, which is pretty overrun with well-intentioned but seemingly impossible-to-implement suggestions like this:
But even if New Yorkers better understood the real potential of the platform, I don't see it offering anything that isn't already possible on the tried-and-true ioby site, which already encourages city-dwellers to: "1 pick a project; 2 nurture it (with dough); 3 follow the results; 4 get your hands dirty and inspire others; and, 5 prepare for great things."
Over the past two years, 73 community-improvement projects have been funded through ioby. There have been four new urban farms created, at least 14 beach or river clean up projects, over 20 recycling programs launched. Here's a map of all of the projects. What's more, the platform has an impressive 73 percent success rate for projects achieving their funding goals.
It's hard to criticize New York City officials for creating an ambitious, technologically advanced, and social media-savvy platform to engage citizens to improve their communities. And it seems likely that the marketing and publicity that the city can give Change by US NYC will be a heck of a lot greater than what's possible for the relatively poor non-profit ioby. But I'm still rooting for the small-but-proven site, which has been cultivating an active community for awhile now. I hope they figure out a way to work together.
