Building a Better ANC

Building a Better ANC - Check out this article in today's Washington City Paper's Housing Complex.

Excerpt:

But the most critical way in which ANCs can be made more useful—and I’m
sorry if this sounds trite—is simply to find ways to increase participation.
It’s not like structure is the only reason ANCs tend to be anti-stuff, after
all. There are plenty of anti people in every community, and when they’re the
loudest voices, even the most perfectly designed institution will bend to their
will. You really have no right to complain about an ANC’s activities if you’re
not involved in the first place.

The first step in this process is already underway: Hyperlocal
government was only waiting for the advent of hyperlocal media to become truly
democratic. ANC issues are apparently too small to attract the notice of the
city’s paper of record (the most the Post could muster this time around was a generic
piece that said nothing of use about ANCs except that those running wanted
to “improve their communities”). But neighborhood representative bodies can be
perfectly paired with the burgeoning crop of blogs that have been covering them
in a fair amount of depth. Some of the healthier and better-run ANCs are in
places where blogs like Borderstan, Congress Heights on the Rise, JDLand, The
Hill is Home, Georgetown Metropolitan (and Patch, and the Georgetown Voice)
communicate to the broader public what happened at each meeting. Greater Greater
Washington’s endorsements
this cycle are actually a fairly important leap forward: Never before, that I’m
aware, has such a widely-read news outlet that’s well set up for discussion
devoted some degree of attention to every single race. On top of blogs,
Twitter—most notably in ANC 5C—has been a way for those would can’t make it to
meetings to still tune in to what’s going on in real time.

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