The site slogan, "United We Know," sums up the mission of Community Radar® well. Because CommunityRadar.com lets each of us leverage the news gathering and sharing power of all of us, it makes the intimidating task of staying informed of civic matters easier.

Whether you are a leader of a civic association, a small business owner, or an interested citizen or resident of a community, this service provides you with a way to both contribute and to benefit from others' contributions.

From years working in condo and civic associations, we learned that the 2 most common organizational problems are:

1. The availability of volunteer resources.
2. Inconsistent communication or lack of information sharing.

This is where the Community Radar® Process makes a difference by taking the efforts of one civic-minded person and amplifying the benefit to many more individuals. The volunteer who before wrote up minutes of a community meeting or summarized in a newsletter or email the local, hot issue for a few can now reach 1000s of other members of the community with no additional effort.

As a community-based endeavor, this initiative relies on the participation of contributors. Whether by writing original material or by posting links to other sources, contributors from the community will make this a successful service. Besides the good old feeling of helping others, contributors can benefit in the following ways:

1. Personalization and Empowerment - Your view of Community Radar® information is configurable by you. By specifying a zip code and a mileage radius, you receive only the information relevant to your area of interest. This personalization applies to online articles, events, a personalized email headline service, and a civic Alert notification service!

2. Reputation - Your contributions are all tracked to you by the site and therefore your entries create a personal web log, or blog, of your writings and posted links. In this way, you can use CommunityRadar.com as your public blog. Using this platform, you can establish credibility in your community or for your small business by displaying your "bona fides" with a Community Radar® "badge." For example:

Kim Gokce
Contributor

Contributors can display this badge on their own web pages or in the footer of their email. Either way, your Community Radar® blog can be a positive reflection on you in the eyes of your community.

3. Distribution - Your contributions are automatically distributed into communities and groups in your locale via PortalHood.com and other civic-oriented web sites. PortalHood™ is a community information service and membership management site. Subscribers at these and other community sites recieve headlines from Community Radar® contributions automatically based on proximity. This mechanism gets your contributions and your name in front of influential members of your greater community.

4. Syndication - If you are already running a community web site or blogging about civic affairs, you can request that your publications be automatically submitted for inclusion in our site. Whether you submissions are automatic or manual, your contributions are automatically made available for re-use by you or anyone else as RSS or syndicated headlines service. This feature allows you to re-use your contributions in any number of other web sites. It also allows users of "news reader" software to receive automatic updates of your publications. For example, see my RSS feed here:

Subscribe to my RSS feed

Given the mission of this site, we reserve ultimate editorial oversight and will remove any content not consistent with the mission of service to local communities and individual civic awareness.

For a one-page overview of the Community Radar® process, view this overview diagram.

Here is a downloadable presentation you can use to share the Community Radar® process with your peers.

Thank you for stopping by!


P.S. If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback, drop us a note at "members at communityradar dot com" ... we'd love to hear from you!