Grassroots Citizen Media in Small Rural Communities

This session proposal is based on my experience in a tiny town in middle America.  It is a lake resort with a high per cent of the population over 60 years of age.  I launched an online community /citizen magazine for a string of small towns with a total population of under 5000.  I recruit contributing writers and am slowly growing the non-profit publication for the benefit ot the community. 

Additionally, I have magaged to convince the city that it needs a web presence and am now leading a volunteer effort to develop and maintain a city website including pages/sites for civic and other non-profit orgnizations.

Finally, I am offering workshops to introduce local writers, businesses, and individuals to blogging as a means of communication, networking, business development and just plain fun.  Considering our high population of people who may have computers but do not know how to use them to their benefit, these are evolutionary initiatives. 

I would like to present a session for other people who may be interested in similar initiatives in their own communities providing

 a brief overview of my efforts;

what I have done;

how it began and evolved;

lessons learned, strategies;

and next steps.

I write Onedia in the Ozarks personal blog and the Bull Shoals Beacon community magazine.  I am also developing The City of Bull Shoals website.  I use both Blogger and Wordpress.com and self hosted Wordpress.  I use templates and plugins of others but I make stylistic and technical changes with modest level of coding mastery.

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