On Monday, four days ago, I created a Facebook event for the Our Ottawa rally against extending the Urban Boundary.  The rally was on Wednesday and was a relative success given the short notice and poor weather.  Thankfully we won and City Council voted down revisiting the urban boundary issue.  But this post is about the power of Facebook to reach out to active community members; let's look at the numbers.

On Monday at 3pm I received an email from a fellow community activist advertising the rally.  My contribution to the rally was to copy and paste the information I received into a Facebook event and invite about 60 of my friends that are local to Ottawa.  My cousins in other cities probably won't make it to Ottawa on such short notice!  Five minutes is all I spent on this. 

Within 48 hours the following occurred:

• 669 people were invited via the social network that began from my initial 60 invites.
• 38 said yes
• 64 said maybe
• 174 said no
• 393 did not answer
• An unknown number of people saw "Soandso is attending Hold The Line - Prevent Urban Sprawl" because they are a friend of one of the 38 people who said yes.

Some random insights about the viral (though small) spread of the rally event news:

• An initial 60 invites turned into a total of 670 invites.  That's 670 emails sent by Facebook to peoples inboxes, from a trusted sourced (their Friend) about an event their Friend thought was important enough for them to know about. Facebook's event system provided a 10-times magnification factor to my first action.  Not bad.
• 41% of invitation recipients responded (yes/no/maybe).  I currently send a Green Party newsletter to GPC and GPO members in Ottawa Centre every month.  I would love to get similiar feedback - but email simply doesn't provide for that type of activity.
• 5.5% of invitation recipients said they would attend.  I can't tell you how many eventually made it out - but if you think in terms of advertisers trying to convert marketing into sales, a 5.5% "sales" rate is pretty good.

One more interesting thing about Facebook's event system is that the event never goes away and I will always be able to reach back and send an email to everyone to was invited.  Creating this one event has created a defacto mailing list of 670 people - who are either interested in community activism (they passed the invitation along) or know someone who is (they received an invitation and the chain stopped there).

Now - the next time an important issue comes up at City Hall it will take only another 5 minutes to:

• Create a Facebook event.
• Invite my own list of people who I think would be interested.
• Send an email to 670 people from the previous event and direct them to join the next one.

About 100 people came to the Our Ottawa rally at City Hall today to voice their opposition to any extension of the urban boundary.  As one of the speakers mentioned, the current extension of 222 hectares was already a compromise between zero and 800 hectares; if Council really wants to revisit the issue it should be to set the extension back to zero.

To me it seems obvious that extending city services further and further into rural Ottawa is bad for all taxpayers (including the new taxpayers that buy the houses), bad for the environment (more long commutes), bad for transit density, and bad for the amount of infrastructure the City has to maintain forever.

There is more than a decades worth of land inside the urban boundary that can be developed into single family homes.  We don't need the extension.  It's obvious.  Hopefully council votes appropriately and mounts a rigourous defence if needed at the Ontario Municipal Board appeals.

Here is an email I just sent to my local councilor regarding the upcoming vote on extending the Urban Boundary.  Please take the time to write a similiar email to your councilor, and if you can, attend the Rally on Wednesday February 24th at City Hall.

Hello Councilor Leadman,

I wanted to write to you today to communicate my hopes that you will vote against extending the Urban Boundary.  While I am aware that some are making the argument that multiple appeals being made at the OMB could be expensive for the City to participate in, I would prefer to spend money defending the long term sustainability and affordability of our city, instead of taking on an enduring cost of maintaining services farther and farther away from the current urban area.

The City must choose it's own course.  Please make the choice for sustainability and affordability.

Lastly - it was nice to meet you at the Iona Winter Carnival.  I didn't realize who you were at first so the opportunity for a proper introduction was missed, but it was nice to know you took the time to come out.

Regards,
Kevin O'Donnell
Kitchissippi Ward Resident

And only 30 minutes later, I've got a response from her office: