No charge. 10 a.m. – noon, Falls Church Community Center, 221 Little Falls Street. 703-248-5020.  The Forum meets every other Friday, same time, same place.

This month marks a year since the Falls Church Times reported on our own Peter Davis and his efforts to bring a new type of community awareness web site to life.  Falls Church Common Place is the brainchild of Pete and his partner Max Novendstern and they unveiled it here in Falls Church to considerable acclaim.  As of this month www.ourcommonplace.com/fallschurch has over 1,100 members who post news about garage sales, civic events, blood drives, book readings, home rentals… on a daily basis.  When we met with Pete a year ago, we told him we’d be impressed if his site got more than 200 registered members, guess we were wrong huh?

When you talk with Pete you can’t help but get the feeling that he deeply cares about connecting families, neighborhoods, and cities.  You can tell it’s in his DNA.  His father was a local activist and Pete is continuing the family tradition by creating a place based networking site.  Before we go any further though we need to be clear, Commonplace (CP) isn’t about social networking on a national or global level, it’s about something more intimate, something we can all understand – Who are the people raking their leaves 2-doors down from me?  CPs goal is to make sure that in this hyper connected world we now live in, we don’t become “neighbor blind”.  Or, to put it more simply, its aim is to be the front porch… the building stoop… the neighbors lawn that we can congregate at.  Once there we can share information about baby sitters, snow shoveling, trust worthy handy men, the need for a new stop sign on the corner of Pine and Lincoln, or info on good deals at local stores.

By now we’re all pretty familiar with how CP works, but for those of you who don’t here is a short explanation from the web site, Social Capital Blog, http://socialcapital.wordpress.com/tag/peter-davis/:

Residents can find out what’s happening locally or post about local happenings, needs (a good roof repair company, or interest in starting a Boomer ultimate frisbee league, for instance).  They can

-Ask to borrow a ladder or power drill
-Publicize a tag sale or block party
-Find out how they can take cooking classes
-Ask who has a used loft bed they can have or buy
-Find people and organizations with shared interests or hobbies around them
-Ask how to fix a pot hole
-Find out where their lost cat wandered off to
-Organize a service project

Users can connect one-to-one or one-to-many (to their neighborhood or to their town).  These one-to-many posts can either be a neighborhood post (e.g., do you have a lawn edger I can borrow, or offering babysitting services, or need someone to help me with my computers.) or a community announcement that notifies the whole town of some upcoming event.  Residents can also be e-mailed a weekly summary of key interesting posts and events.

CP has been written up in several blogs and has been featured on social media industry sites, newspapers have interviewed them, as well as local TV news shows, they’ve had radio interviews, and they’ve promoted themselves to local governments and at community gatherings.  All of the press seems to be working for them, as they move into new cities and set-up shop they begin broadcasting their presence and then they get discovered in the cities and states next door.

Burnsville, Minnesota CommonPlace: http://youtu.be/_PZ3rcJ8fv8

Marquette, Michigan CommonPlace: http://youtu.be/6yD_MCgyFBI

I sat down with Pete at Paneras on Broad Street back in August, he told me about what he and his team had been doing to both build and promote CP.  He told me that currently there were 5 cities that had adopted CP and that they would consider the effort a success when they had 10 cities under their belt.  Well as of November Our Common Place is now in 10 cities and growing:

1. Falls Church, VA
2. Harrisonburg, VA
3. Vienna, VA
4. Warwick, NY
5. Marquette, MI
6. Burnsville, MN
7. Golden Valley, MN
8. Clarkston, GA
9. Owosso, MI
10. Chelmsford, MA

I asked Pete if he was having a good time doing this and he answered with an enthusiastic “Yeah!”  He went on to tell me about the Memorial Day 2011 training retreat they had for CP student organizers.  The meeting was held locally here in Northern Virginia, Pete went on to say “Nine students were flown in from all around the country - Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Tennessee, and of course Falls Church.  Of the nine, two gave up… kinda, we’ll see if they can get their cities up and running, the others were able to get CP going in their cities.”  Pete went on to explain “we consider a city fully adopted and bought into the concept when it has 6 posts per day.”  Falls Church City currently has 2-5 posts per day.  Pete told me that they had a lot of goals for CP in the next year; expansion, new features, expanded support for current markets, but their main goal will be to make our common place THE PLACE BASED community network sometime in 2012.

As we talked about the mechanisms his team was using to get CP to be that place based community network Pete told me some interesting anecdotes.  He related how the Falls Church Garden Club was discovered on CP, a single Moms group was started on it, people connected with yoga clubs through it, and how discussion threads on environmental issues took place in it.  He related a funny story about how someone posted a note on the Falls Church Patch, that note failed to get a response from anyone.  So, two days later, the poster wrote a reply to their own note that stated; “Thanks, but I got a response on Falls Church Commonplace”.

Commonplace has had many new features added to it in the past few months:  a groups feature was added in September to help add clarity to discussions and the directory feature was beefed up in October to allow for easier use, several more enhancements will be coming in late January so stay tuned.

So, ten markets and growing and it all started here in Falls Church.  I think it goes without saying that Pete and his partners have really hit on something.  It’s great that as a city we were able to help it get off the ground and move into other markets.  Pete has a year to go before he graduates form Harvard with a degree in Political Science but we all know what he’ll be doing when that day comes and we couldn’t be prouder of him.

Time: 5 p.m. (Sat., Dec. 31) through 1 a.m. (Sunday, Jan. 1)

Where: 100 block of W. Broad Street (Route 7), Falls Church, VA 22046

What: The block is cordoned off for the annual City of Falls Church Watch Night New Year’s Eve Celebration. For more information, go to www.fallschurchva.gov/watchnight

Richard Marsh with his mother Rena

By FALLS CHURCH TIMES STAFF
November 19, 2011

A memorial service for Richard Marsh will be held this Sunday, November 20th at the George Mason High School Auditorium from 2:00 PM until 5:00 PM.

Richard, age 16, died on Wednesday November 16 in Newport News where he was attending Woodside High School. Until recently Richard was a resident of Falls Church where he was an outstanding athlete on local football, baseball, and basketball teams. He was a beloved friend to many here and his passing has caused an outpouring of emotion from many students, staff, and residents.

Richard’s mother Rena, is a resident of Falls Church and, as GMHS principle Tyrone Byrd said in a letter to parents, “a steadfast advocate for the Falls Church City school system for more than a decade,”

The Memorial will be held in the George Mason High School Auditorium. There will be overflow seating available in the cafeteria with a live feed. Parking will be available on the GMHS campus with additional free parking in the Virginia Tech/Metro parking lot adjacent to the GM campus. The Memorial program will also be broadcast live on FCCTV.

Funeral Services will be held at 10:30 AM on Sunday, November 27 (Thanksgiving weekend) at 15322 Warwick Blvd, Newport News, VA.

In lieu of flowers, contributions are gratefully accepted at:

Hoops for Youth Foundation
10623 Jones Street Suite 101-A
Fairfax, VA 22030

No charge. 10 a.m. – noon, Falls Church Community Center, 221 Little Falls Street. 703-248-5020.  The Forum meets every other Friday, same time, same place.

Moore was president of the Village Preservation and Improvement Society, and board member and volunteer of Friends of Cherry Hill. He served as trustee of Dulin United Methodist Church for many years, church historian, and steward of the Dulin Memorial Garden where was interred privately on November 5, followed by a public memorial service.

Moore lived a life devoted to family, country and art history. Born in 1924 in Racine, Wisconsin, Moore had two distinguished back-to-back careers – 34 years each – and a loving marriage to Nancy Colden Lasher that lasted 58 years.

Merl Moore and his files, 2003

Moore’s military career began in 1943 when he joined ROTC while attending St. Norbert College in Wisconsin. In 1948, Moore was a Distinguished Military Graduate of ROTC, became an officer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He served in three wars: WWII, Korea and Vietnam. Moore retired in 1977 at age 53 and was awarded the Legion of Merit.

The next day, Moore turned his attention full-time to his life-long passion for 19th Century American Art. While he had earned a BA in Art History from the University of Kentucky in 1949, and studied for a Masters from George Washington University in the 1970s, he was now free to build his files of original research about almost every artist of the period. From 1977 to 2011, Moore was a Research Collaborator & Visiting Scholar with SAAM, the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

In 2001, Moore donated his collection – 14 file cabinets totaling 64 drawers – to SAAM’s American Art / Portrait Gallery Library. In 2003, he was honored with a special event “Deep in the Heart of American Art: The Research Collection of Merl Moore… celebrating Moore’s 25 years with SAAM and the gift of his legendary files.”

Moore is survived by all 25 members of his family; his wife, five children, their spouses, 10 grandchildren, one grandson-in-law, and three great-grandchildren.

Got KIDS? Then you’ve got QUESTIONS on how to raise them well in our 24-7 culture. Come join John and Susan Yates as they share practical advice (learned while parenting 5 kids in NOVA) about how to help our kids grow into healthy, character-filled men and women. Spend 3 Sunday evenings at The Falls Church (November 6, 13, and 20 from 5:00-6:30pm) with other parents, just like you, listening, learning and sharing about parenting in today’s world.

*John Yates is the pastor of The Falls Church and he and Susan have lived in Falls Church, VA for 32 years and are the proud grandparents of 21 grandchildren.

Questions or to RSVP, email Brian Klotz at bklotz@thefallschurch.org or call (703) 574-4380.