Livable Streets Community member Dan Latorre has gone above and beyond the call of duty in his activism this month. After prodding Transportation Alternatives' Brooklyn committee to organize their work through a Livable Streets Group, he set up two online conference sessions to teach other members about the array of tools offered and what they're best suited for. The group's 19 members are now busy using their blog and wiki pages to share meeting minutes and other information, and manage their various initiatives. Now, he and fellow group member Kevin Vincent are spearheading a
brilliant project to deliver bulk orders of bike rack requests to the
DOT.
We asked Dan about how using Livable Streets to manage the group has gone so far.
Streetsblog: Why did you choose Livable Streets to organize your group's efforts?
Dan Latorre: We'd been working through mailing lists and using Facebook to publicize events, but these forms of communication are closed. Even Facebook is private -- you have to join to see everything there. In thinking of streets as the commons -- shared spaces -- we must make the process of working on these problems as open as possible.
SB: Have these tools helped to streamline your group's work?
DL: Absolutely. It's easier for me as a volunteer to be efficient with my limited time when I'm not wasting it writing emails to many different people. The wiki pages allow you to see that a project is making progress and make it far faster and easier to share information with the different people we need to work with.
SB: How else have you and your group benefited from joining the Livable Streets Community?
DL: The Livable Streets Community gives us a home online: a virtual headquarters. Why am I a member? Because of the potential to form alliances with other groups and people; to improve our work by learning from them and vice versa. This gives us a public space online for that to happen. Already a DOT planner in Utah named Deb Henry found us and is keeping track of our work because she's working on similar issues there. If you're a group in Brooklyn with shared interests, we want to know about you -- let's connect!
