9/04/2015

Recapping a meeting in tweets

This one's experimental. Heck, they all are, really. If you go back into the deep archives of this blog, you'll see that I often used it ten years ago to try things out and to say where I was with my experimenting with podcasting and the Internet. This was before Facebook and Twitter, and in general I was probably a bit more candid than I am on those platforms. Even this blog, until my 42nd birthday, was not very active anymore because I was afraid I would say something I didn't want everyone in my community to know. 

Community. 

I define that broadly, and I think most people do now. I think that Facebook in particular has given us all the chance to explore our own reality through the all of the previous communities we have been in. My friends on Facebook come from growing up in Lynchburg to my time in New Hampshire to my family across the world, but I'm mostly connected to the people I know in Charlottesville. 

Twitter, though, I use to be a journalist, mostly. I'm not as personal and I really dig into the details of how my community is put together, past and present with an eye to the future. 

So, on that note, let me try embedding some of the tweets from today's roundtable of former Mayors and Vice Mayors of the City of Charlottesville. 





At this point, I'd like to apologize to Nancy O'Brien for not tweeting her cvillepedia entry.
Huja began the meeting by asking those who were present to mention two issues they faced when they were Mayor or Vice Mayor.




Let me break in here for a second to say that Daugherty had a lot more to say. They all did. These are just tweets that were recorded in the moment. I'm going to post the audio at some point, and I encourage anyone who's read this far to just listen. Anything I ever write is just an account of what happened. It's my version of what happened, and I don't ever want to pretend that I have the final say on anything.

It's the same thing as when I was a radio reporter. You take soundbites and hope you get it right. Hope you got something that distilled what happened in that moment. You can so easily get it wrong.

I took a risk live-tweeting this, because there's so much that can go wrong. You will note a lot of punctuation errors in the above. I'm just trying to get the information out there quickly, and I want to be as thorough as possible while staying in 140 characters.

Anyway, back to the people from today.


The Buck Mountain reservoir never happened. During an environmental check, the Jamesriver Spineymussel was discovered and the project was cancelled and another search for a larger community water supply would play out at the end of the 2000's. But, that's for another day.




Alvin Edwards arrived late, so he didn't get a link to his cvillepedia entry.

Holly Edwards then began to explain why she wanted to convene this meeting. I didn't capture this as well as I could have, so I recommend you listen to the recording.






















O'Brien also made the point here that they didn't have emails or cellphones back then. Again, listen to the audio if you've taken the time to get this far into this account.







I'm going to end the account here, because I want to go back and listen to what the elected officials said. You can follow me to see what I said, or otherwise look at the timeline. But I want to write a fuller account of this when I can go back and hear the audio.

I want to do more of these. I'm not going to publicize this page. I'm thinking of creating a new blog that just archives my tweets on a daily basis. I can maybe send that out as a newsletter or something. I think I write some interesting things and I want to build a bigger audience for it. I want to reach more people and get more people interested in their local community.


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