Online forum shares community expertise

By Eric Banford
 
The Get Your GreenBack campaign in Ithaca has launched a community forum where Tompkins County residents can ask questions online regarding the following categories: Fuel-Efficient Vehicles, Net-Zero Homes, Home Gardening and Hunting & Fishing. Local experts have been recruited for each category of the forum to field questions and mediate discussions.
 
Get Your GreenBack Tompkins is a community-initiated and community-supported campaign that works collaboratively to help people and organizations take key steps in the areas of food, transportation, waste and building energy that simultaneously reduce our community’s carbon emissions, save money and create a socially just local economy.
 
“This forum is very specific to Tompkins County,” says Hollis Malkowski, a student at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) who has been building the forum while interning with Get Your GreenBack. “The forum is for people to ask questions about different energy saving steps that are specific to the area. It’s not for general questions like which electric car is better, it’s more for asking what’s it like driving an electric car in the winter in Tompkins County.”
 
Other examples could be questions about the soil composition in the area, where to hunt or fish, and gardening in this climate, Malkowski says. “The people answering the questions are local business people, professors, people from Solar Tompkins and others from our community,” he says. “We’re still looking for more experts, but we’re on track to support all of the forum topics.”
 
Current experts for the forums include Robert Howarth and Art Weaver on electric vehicles, the Tompkins County Growline for home gardening, Guillermo Metz and Gay Nicholson on energy efficiency and solar energy, and Matt Johnston on renewable energy and high efficiency heating. Experts/moderators are still needed in the following areas: hunting, fishing, hybrid vehicles and plug-in vehicles.
 
Once you create a profile within the forum, you can reply to existing questions or create new threads on a topic you want to ask about. You may subscribe to any of the threads to be notified when new topics or responses are posted, and can manage your notification preferences as the forum evolves.
 
“The role of the experts is not to necessarily answer every question but also to mediate the discussions,” says Malkowski. “Our long-term goal is to develop a community where it’s not always the expert answering the question but community members helping each other out. The expert will see the questions and make any corrections, and they can also proved additional resources when needed.”
 
Get Your GreenBack evolved from efforts to help people think about the next steps that they could take to reduce their carbon emissions and energy use while saving money at the same time, says Karim Beers, the campaign’s coordinator. “As we’ve been doing this work and talking with other communities, one thing that’s clear is rather than telling people what to do, we want to find out where they are and what their priorities are, and then how we can help them. That might seem obvious, but it’s a significant insight,” he says.
 
The online forum evolved from that thought. “It’s a space where someone is able to explain their situation and see if someone can help them,” says Beers. “They can get crowd-source feedback, as well as local experts who can answer with some authority. It’s a pilot, so we’re not sure it’s going to work, but we want to try it out.”
 
Beers notes that there are many forums that address general questions, but he couldn’t find any that were locally focused. “Our hope is that the local focus will have greater value. For hunting and fishing there are clear topics that are local. That’s true of local food issues as well. Info on local contractors in some of the other categories will be helpful, so we’ll see if we can get enough critical mass of participation that makes the forums have some life,” he says.
 
One goal of the online forums is to eliminate barriers that may prevent making different green energy decisions, says Malkowski. “You can look something up online, but it’s hard to find answers specific to Tompkins County. For example, people think they need four-wheel or all-wheel drive in Ithaca, but that’s not necessarily the case. You could be saving thousands of dollars in gas money, so where do you make that tradeoff?” he asks.
 
As a student living off-campus, Malkowski is motivated to save money, which melded nicely into this internship and the development of the forum. “I’m telling people that if you do these green steps you’ll save a significant amount of money in the long run. And you don’t have to change your habits that much,” he says.
To visit and join the forum, go to forum.getyourgreenback.org.