> Maybe it’ll max out at some point,
> maybe not even that long in the future,
> but it hasn’t happened yet.

Clearly. But as you say it /might/ tip sooner than many would imagine.

I met a guy last week who told me that although he did not want to be a curator, he knew exactly the right folks in his town for the job. These, he said, are the kinds of civic activists who have always led the charge.

Until very recently they weren’t leading the charge using online tools. But these are precisely the kinds of folks who are, just in the last 6 months or so, now showing up on Facebook and getting a taste of what computer-and-network-assisted civics could be.

Can that be corrected for? Is there something that is more uniform across communities that can be found online? I’m not sure quite what… restaurant reviews vs. number of restaurants? People have opinions everywhere, they just don’t all write them down. It’s just another crude number, but maybe it can at least identify some of the outliers.

Yeah, I’ll report that too.

> Or you might have events per square mile.
> Or you might look at the distribution of
> events; there might be a culturally dense
> neighborhood, which has advantages for
> that neighborhood but less influence on
> other areas.

All good possibilities, thanks, I’m putting these on the todo list.

Of course there’s the underlying key question: What is an event? Historically we regard public events as fairly heavyweight things: concerts, lectures, major sports events.

I am really hoping to open up a long tail of more lightweight events. The group of 5 to 10 that climbs Monadnock every Sunday. The young mom’s support group. The little league game. There’s a whole universe of this stuff that never serendipitously comes to the attention of many who might be interested, but aren’t already in the know. Unless the individuals or groups transmit their information to an anointed aggregator, like the newspaper. Which, by the way, should be a feed /subscriber/ as well as publisher — i.e., the very sort of flow coordinator that this system demonstrates.

That’s an unnecessarily high activation threshold. I want these folks to publish discoverable feeds. If they did, we’d find out about a long tail of small/specialized/niche events that collectively influence quality of life, and would do to a much greater degree if more readily discoverable.