July 22, 2009
By Victor Epstein
The Associated Press
NEWARK, N.J.—Silicon Valley is joining Cory Booker's turnaround efforts in gritty Newark, in a bid to create a "blueprint" for cities seeking to harness the Internet's new social networks to communicate more closely with residents and organize them into shared interest groups. In New Jersey's largest city, long an icon for urban decay, the joint enterprise could make it easier for residents to connect with government services and elected officials, according to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. The 41-year-old Californian is a charter member of the Newark Tech Corps, a new working group of prominent online leaders who have rallied around the young mayor. "It's great when people dedicate their efforts and lives to improving our civic community as Mayor Booker has," Hoffman said. "And it's the responsibility of the rest of us to help." Fast-growing social networking sites, like LinkedIn, allow people to communicate simultaneously within shared-interest groups online. LinkedIn is a career-oriented social Web site where 43 million professionals network, exchange references and post resumes. Hoffman said the Tech Corps will meet quarterly and is now exploring five ideas for Newark. He declined to describe them specifically, but said a typical social networking application might unite residents of a beleaguered neighborhood, where foreclosed homes have been boarded up, in an online community. They could simultaneously exchange information there about problems like unmowed lawns and empty homes being occupied by squatters, allowing city officials monitoring the group to take corrective action without waiting for residents to navigate the off-line bureaucracy. Hoffman said the goal is to provide a "blueprint" for other cities and using Newark as the model makes sense because of its needs. "Global change starts locally," Hoffman said. Newark, a city of 280,000, never recovered from the social unrest that accompanied the civil rights movement and sexual revolution - losing 46 percent of its population from 1950 to 1990. Homicides and shootings have fallen since Booker took the helm in July 2006, but the city is still periodically convulsed by violence. Ten people were wounded by gunfire—three of them fatally—in three separate shootings Monday. The Newark unemployment rate surged to a six-year high of 13.5 percent in May. Other Tech Corps' members include founders and top executives of the online organizations Ning, Ustream, Causes, and Seesmic, which offer technologies that could be used to connect residents more closely with each other and city officials. For example, Ning allows members to create and join social networks, such as the wind energy plan championed by investor T. Boone Pickens. Booker, 40, is already a heavy user of Facebook and Twitter, which he used to condemn Monday's shootings. The child of civil rights activists met Hoffman during a visit to Silicon Valley last month, which also brought him into contact with Twitter founder Biz Stone. Stone said Booker "is looking to take advantage of whatever tools are accessible to him" to help Newark. A first test of the new Tech Corps initiative may involve seeking help for the area's food banks via postings on the mayor's Web pages and the city's social networking sites. Booker reaches a wide national audience: he ranks fifth among all U.S. elected officials carrying the political tag on the Twitter online confessional, with 432,000 followers, according to the Twitterholic Web site. A short posting in the online world can be set up to serve as a gateway to more detailed information, including foodbank donation locations. "It's a very powerful tool," Booker said. "The beauty of social networking is you can elevate the voice of an individual."
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