Cynthia Lockley Barcroft School and Civic League

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Community Services for Adelphi, Maryland

by Cynthia A. Lockley

a woman for all seasons

Washington Post Article

by Michael Shear. Metro, page 1, Sunday, May 7, 1995

Copyright 1995, The Washington Post

Neighbors on the 'Net • Computers give Communities a High-Speed Link •
Sidebar: An On-Line Neighborhood

Neighbors on the `Net

Computers give Communities a High-Speed Link

Barcroft icon
Barcroft community house

The news spread quickly after Virginia officials voted to recommend national historic status for the 100-year-old community center in Arlington's Barcroft neighborhood.

Within hours, Barcroft School and Civic League President Scott Allard posted an announcement on the neighborhood's Internet site, next to information about an upcoming ice cream social and a listing of the e-mail addresses for two dozen residents. By the time the printed newsletter hits the streets, the news is more than a month old,' said Allard, a 37-year-old computer consultant. 'We felt that we wanted to get the news out in real time."

It's a high-tech experiment to bring Barcroft's old-fashioned neighborhood newsletter into the 21st century via computers. modems and the point-and-click graphics of the Internet's World Wide Web. Allard calls it "the next logical step in terms of communicating with the neighborhood."

On the Barcroft Neighborhood Home Page, residents can read a Plan for renovating the 1900-era community house, make a suggestion about the annual Fourth of July parade or browse through vacation pictures taken by other homeowners. Someday, Barcrofters may conduct meetings, elect board members and even trade gossip from the comfort of their dens and living rooms.

The colorful home page doesn't have the circulation of the printed version of "The Barcroft News," which is distributed to 800 houses and 400 apartments. But Allard is hopeful.

"Right now, I'd guess that maybe 5 percent of the people in the neighborhood have a graphical web browser," he said of the software needed to access the Barcroft Internet site. "It 's only the computer nerds."

But in Barcroft and other communities throughout the country, that is changing quickly as commercial on-line services scramble to provide access to the Web. According to officials at the Internet Society in Reston, the number of people on-line worldwide has grown by about 10 million just since the year began, to about 50 million.

In the last three months, at least a dozen neighborhood associations nationwide--from Portland, Ore., to Austin to Adelphi--have established a presence on the Internet, which long has been dominated by academic, military and governmental institutions. Experts say it's only a matter of time before hundreds more follow suit.

"It is absolutely a given that we are going to see more communities take advantage of this," said Brent Herrington, the developer of an on-line subscription service for the Community Associations Institute in Alexandria. "The process of building a home page is so simple, and there is an explosion of interest. It's inevitable."

Howard Rheingoid, author of a new book called "The Virtual Community," said the hectic pace of life can isolate people, even in very small communities. He called the home pages a perfect "community building tool."

"It's not a substitute for face-to-face communication, but how many people have time to go to a town hall meeting after working all day?" he asked. "Just because [the Web] reaches the world doesn't mean it can't reach your neighborhood."

For decades, neighborhood groups have put out newsletters for residents that range in size and scope from single-page agendas to comprehensive mini-newspapers.

The newsletters, however, often are time-consuming to assemble, expensive to publish and even more costly to mail. And since most come out only monthly or even quarterly, they are out of date almost from the moment of publication.

Cynthia Lockley, editor of "Around the Block," a newsletter for the Cool Springs Terrace Civic Association in Adelphi, put her four-page publication on the Internet in mid-March. Visitors to the on-line home page can download the names and phone numbers of block captains or read reports of neighborhood crime.

She wants to do away with the paper newsletter entirely someday, as well as the chore of walking block to block to stuff newsletters m more than 250 mailboxes. 'With the Web page, that whole distribution chain is eliminated , said Lockley, 47, who works for a computer company. "I figured this would be handy, rather than reproducing the newsletter every month."

But until more people in the community have the equipment and on- line service to connect to the Web, the Cool Springs Terrace newsletter still will be printed. In the month since Lockley started the computer page, she has received only a few comments about it-all from out-of-state people who happened upon it while surfing the 'Net.

"It is so new, and people have just been stumbling across it," Lockley said. The issue of access is one thing that concerns leaders of the Ballston-Virginia Square Civic Association. Even so, the executive committee plans to launch a Web page within a month.

Rohan Samaraweera, a lawyer who is the association's past president, said the group hopes to use its Internet site to better organize neighbors during zoning disputes, which are common in the still-developing community that extends from Ballston Metro stop to the Virginia Square Metro stop south of Interstate 66. Until now, the association printed 2,500 copies of a 20-page newsletter to get out the word.

"What we are always grappling with is getting a greater degree of involvement and communication from our membership," said Samaraweera, 43.

But another reason for the Internet's increasing popularity among neighborhood groups is cost-- it's cheap. A full-time connection can cost an association as little as $35 a month, and the equipment needed to build a home page--a basic computer with a $50 modem--can be bought for less than $1,000. And unlike businesses, which pay professionals to design and operate Internet sites, most civic groups' home pages are run by volunteers who pay for their own Internet service.

There's a real irony in this new use of the Internet, which usually is promoted as a way of bringing people in disparate geographic areas closer together. From his post at the Community Associations Institute, Herrington believes home pages will serve to bring neighborhoods closer together.

"Real life in the '90s can be fairly insulting. Our families and jobs and personal issues in us from our neighbors," he said. "Two streets over can be as far away as the other side of the continent."

Sidebar: An On-Line Neighborhood

The Barcroft neighborhood in Arlington has established its own home page, offering any community member with a computer various services and information. A look at part of the home page and its features:

The Item at right (illustration shows the Barcroft Home Page) is the opening part of the home page. It begins with a brief history and general description of the neighborhood, including the number of houses. It also gives a viewer other information to find within the home page, including upcoming events, a press release on a park cleanup and e-mail addresses of residents. (Illustration shows the Barcroft Home Page)