Connecting in ways old and new
Edward Cone
News & Record
6-5-05
Jinni Hoggard stood by a hundred pounds of smoking pork outside the Flat Iron tavern in downtown Greensboro, looking mahvelous in chemo-chic short hair and a tank top. A blues band played as kids did cartwheels on the grass in front of them. Almost a thousand people -- friends, neighbors and strangers -- showed up last Sunday at an event known as HoggFest, a benefit to pay some of the bills from Jinni's treatment for breast cancer.
On one level, it was a community effort as elemental as an Amish barn-raising, made possible by the time and sweat of volunteers. But HoggFest also had the distinction of being organized in large part on the Internet. In that sense it is an example of the way the Web enhances the human habit of networking and a portent of the way we'll be doing in the future the things we've always done.
Jinni Hoggard would have drawn a crowd without the Web. She and her husband, David, are active and well-liked, busy parents of three kids, involved in their neighborhood association and at Aycock Middle School. Jinni works for Preservation Greensboro, and David, who owns a home-renovation company called Double Hung Windows, ran for City Council in 2003. The Hoggards collect friends. But the Internet broadened their reach and reduced friction in the organizing process, allowing HoggFest to raise more money (almost $9,200) and attract a wider audience than it might otherwise have done.
The sci-fi view of the future used to be something out of the Jetsons: We'll fly downtown in our levitating cars and eat barbecue served by a robot in a maid's uniform. Real life is turning out to be more mundane and more wonderful. We're still drinking beer and mopping sauce and handing out suckers to the kids. It's just that signing up to bring the baked beans or work the food line is easier now that we can do it on a simple online database called a wiki, and publicity is a snap when organizers can publish on their own weblogs.
David Hoggard began writing about Jinni's cancer at his Hogg's Blog Web site shortly after she was diagnosed last year. Jinni soon began contributing first-person accounts of her illness and treatment to the blog and later to this newspaper. (She's headed into a second round of chemotherapy and expects to recover.) When the medical bills began to outpace their health insurance, David blogged that, too.
(It is ludicrous that the Hoggards, a hard-working and productive family in a rich nation, should be so financially pressed by illness. You want proof our system is broken, they're it.)
Neighbors and friends, including some bloggers who had never met the Hoggards in the physical world, began planning a fund-raiser. The Hoggards were reluctant at first but agreed to go ahead with HoggFest on the condition that similar events be held in the future for other families in crisis. Roch Smith Jr. made his community Web site, Greensboro 101, the hub for organization. Bloggers promoted the event, which helped get articles about HoggFest into local papers (including this one), and then showed up to work alongside other volunteers on Sunday.
The success of the event is a reminder that the human networks and electronic networks are similar, and that the latter exist to extend and empower the former. People talk about a "gift economy" on the Web, in which people contribute to open-source software projects and edit the Wikipedia encyclopedia and link to each others' blogs for free, confident that they will realize some value in the process. Online and off, HoggFest was all about the gift economy.
HoggFest showed how well the Web can work when it is an organic part of a traditional organization. One failing of the Howard Dean presidential campaign was that its vaunted Internet effort failed to mesh with existing political groups: The county politicos in Iowa, for example, weren't always on the same page as the Web volunteers who flooded the state. But HoggFest (which obviously operated on a much smaller scale and in a less adversarial situation than a presidential primary) meshed the technology with the team in a useful way that should be instructive to other groups seeking to integrate the Web into their operations.
The Hoggard fundraiser was the second big event in Greensboro to be organized in some part by a blogging network. The first was a local weblog conference held at the Weatherspoon Museum last summer, which was created on the Internet in less than three weeks. Now blogs and wikis are playing a key role in setting up another conference, this one with national scale and a focus on diversity and creativity on the Web, to be held in October at N.C. A&T.
In the end, the technology was a background element to HoggFest. That's the point. This is not a story about the Web or even a story about finding better ways to do the things we want and need to do. The real story is about a family facing their challenges head-on, backed by love and support of their community. The Web just makes that story a little happier.
Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.
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