Welcome to the February postings of the CIT Information Resource!

Social media and the conversation about land in BC
How important are social media to what Tim Pringle calls "the conversation about use and conservation of land amongst various land use practitioners in BC communities?"

That's one of the questions we're going to be asking through an on-line survey in the coming months. What's clear is that more and more of you are using things like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube or VIMEO, and podcasts, as well as blogs to tell the story of your community and the challenges and opportunities related to the land base.

When we started CITinfoResource as a blog-based way of capturing some of the exciting ideas and stories related to Communities in Transition projects we were very new to these new social media. That's changing. Rapidly. Some of us are quite active. Others less so. Some use things like Facebook purely for family and personal purposes. For example, Jen McCaffery, the principle CIT contact at the Real Estate Foundation of BC before taking mat leave, began to share the story of her new baby several months ago. Tim Pringle signed on, first as a curious "listener," and then as a thoughtful commentator on land use related posts on Vancouver Island and elsewhere. Executive Director Karin Kirkpatrick has recently started mini-blogging her experiences on Facebook from her iPhone, making the transition from a driver to a transit user – and micro-blogger – an engaging and educational process to witness.

CITinfoResource has an active presence online. We've updated our URL so it's easy to find: www.CITinfoResource.com. You can also find us easily on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and VIMEO (search "CITinfoResource"). We're slowly building a library of images at Flickr. Please, take a look. Leave a comment. If you like what we're doing, add us to your favourites or become a "fan." We encourage all partner organizations to tag or label CIT-related photographs, videos, and posts with #CITinfoResource so we can help tell your story. Social media is making it easier to tell the story of change. It's also making it easier, as I describe in the closing column, for some local governments and NGOs to communicate with their constituents and to find cost-effective and time-sensitive responses to critical issues and opportunities.

Whether you receive CIT information via email, Twitter link, or Facebook post – or as a photocopy – you are participating in the "conversation about use and conservation of land amongst various land use practitioners in BC communities." If you're online, you'll notice that we're moving towards more "rich" content – audio and video posts instead of simple text-based blogs. Let us know if these formats are useful to you. As we noticed in the comments that flowed from Janine de la Salle and Mark Holland's piece on urban agriculture in November, some topics are hot and worthy of extended comments, and some formats make it very easy to engage people from across the province. We invite you to have your say!

Land use practitioners
The Governors at the Real Estate Foundation of BC have, over time, supported a diversity of perspectives and approaches to land use and conservation in BC. That's a boone to us at CITinfoResource, because we get to highlight very different ways of looking at our common resource. George Penfold, the Regional Innovation Chair (RIC) in Community Economic Development at Selkirk College (Castlegar) is a regular contributor. This month he asks about BC's rural development policy, a comment on a story we've been covering since before the October 2008 Reversing the Tide conference in Prince George. Nicole Vaugeois, RIC in Tourism and Sustainable Rural Development at Vancouver Island University (Nanaimo), writes about her research and community economic development activities.

Our other posts in this theme are audio interviews. Bryn White, Coordinator of the South Okanagan-Similkameen Conservation Partnership, describes this innovative regional approach to the "conversation about use and conservation of land" and how it is building capacity in local organizations, including local government. Kim Fowler is now the Sustainability Coordinator with the City of Victoria, but has worked with other municipalities and with the private sector. She talks about "performance-based" and "regulation-based" approaches to sustainable land use planning and development.

Following up on Resilient Cities, the 2009 Gaining Ground Summit
One of the things that social media allow us to do is to give conferences "long tails" – we interview organizers and participants before, during, and after important gatherings related to land use and sustainability in BC, and these materials are then available indefinitely on the internet. Our current focus is on Resilient Cities, the October 2009 Gaining Ground Summit in Vancouver. We asked a number of participants what their strongest impressions were of this powerful event, and what impact it will have on their home communities. We offer an audio interview with Naomi Devine, Whistler's Sustainability Coordinator and video interviews with Doug Makaroff, a developer involved with the Living Forest Communities initiative, as well as Gaining Ground founder Gene Miller.

Research notes – Green Values Vancouver Island
For several years the Governors of the Foundation have supported Green Values Vancouver Island, an initiative that looks at real estate development and sustainability on Vancouver Island's southeast quarter, which includes parcels of land associated with the E&N Land Grant of the late 1800s. Recently Tim Pringle, as the Foundation's Director of Special Programs, has been involved in a research project on large scale developments in this region. He talks to CITinfoResource about this research and its significance for communities in the region.

Please share these resources
A lot of you are telling us that what we do at CITinfoResource is useful. We encourage you to leave comments on the various posts or on Facebook. We also want to encourage you to reproduce and/or otherwise circulate what we've put together.

Collaboration and sharing of resources are keys to the success of both the Real Estate Foundation of BC and of the many projects and organizations that have received Foundation support over 22+ years. The reproduction of CIT Information Resource articles and materials for non-profit educational purposes is an extension of this approach. In return, we ask that you please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses. You may also want to follow us on Facebook or on Twitter.

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©Real Estate Foundation of BC / 2010. We encourage the reproduction of articles on this website for non-profit educational purposes. Please notify the Foundation and the author of all reproductions, including in-house uses