Promoting and marketing community networks is achieved through a variety of methods. The first and most obvious is by word of mouth. Many citizens who participate regularly on a community network are inclined to tell the people they know about the services that are offered. This form of interpersonal communication is not limited to face to face communication. Putting up fliers at local community gathering places, advertising in community newsletters, developing relationships with public radio and television are all just a few examples of how to get the word out about your CN.
Given the explosion of information technology, which has facilitated
the rise of Community Networks, tools such as e-mail make CN references
very convenient and easy to follow up on—especially if the CN has a web
page or other online presence where the prospective member might sign-up.
Websites are also a great way to attract people to the CN who might not
have been for it in the first place. The selection of keywords by which
the site can be found by major search engines can be an enormously successful
way of attracting attention. For instance, a user who enters the name of
a city into a search field should ideally be able to find that particular
city’s CN without too much trouble. To account for the fact that search
engines don’t always work like we would like them to, establishing links
with other organizations within the community can be very important in
getting the word out. World Wide Web hyperlink technology is a perfect
facilitator for networking of this sort. Organizations are often eager
to exchange links, as each site promotes the other site in a symbiotic
capacity.
Why can’t we simply rely on the market to provide the services that
CNs are attempting to do?
We owe a lot to private industry for the design and development of countless information technologies available today. Network computing is no exception, as the rapid increase in Internet usage has been a result of private enterprise. However, the market’s main goal is to make a profit. This is not to say that community networking cannot be for-profit. It is to say that certain community goals may not have a dollar value attached to them, and may never receive the necessary forum to express themselves in an online environment, were it not for CNs. CNs are not obliged to advertise consumer products, they are not obliged to answer to some higher body, they are really not obliged to answer to anything but the people who use it. A CN, quite simply, can be an online forum of the people, by the people, and for the people. Familiar words, but in this day and age such institutions are not as common as they once were. It is a fundamental goal of CNs to reinstill a sense of community that has become threatened in modern times, and to find innovative ways to adapt to lifestyle patterns, rather than be brushed by the wayside in favor of the self-interested pursuits of the free-market.
CONNECTOR