Young Somerville Advisory Council
Jul 25th, 2007

Last night I went to the second meeting of the Young Somerville Advisory Council. The meeting last night had two main foci: the City of Somerville's website, and the mayors upcoming 'State of the City' address to the younger residents of Somerville. Two rather interesting topics really. The website is soon to be overhauled (with the new version coming online sometime this Fall) in the hopes of increasing its effectiveness, its traffic, and the sense of community it can build within the city. Personally, however, I think the best improvement that's being made is one that's already gone into effect: changing the URL from www.ci.somerville.ma.us to www.somervillema.gov. I imagine the reasons I think this was a good move are probably fairly self-evident.

As for the 'State of the City' address, there was a lot to discuss. First of all, the mayor wants to know what we, the young denizens of this fair burg want to hear about. Sure he could just talk about the same things that politicians always talk about in speeches, but he knows that we probably don't want to hear that. So he asked for our input (and the input of others we know in the community) on this. The biggest issue by far, I believe, is a public update on the status of the project to extend the Green Line to Union Square. Other that came up were issues of public safety, the local schools, the planned development in Union Square, and may other things. I wish I'd thought of it before we had the meeting, but I've just now created a Squidoo lens for the group with a text plexo so that we can get some sort of organized community participation for picking topics for the address:

There was one other thing of note about the meeting. When I went to the last one I realized that one of the other guys there looks very familiar. So familiar, in fact, that I was pretty sure we had gone to Carleton together. It turns out that this was the case. We actually even played rugby together very briefly. Now he's also living in Somerville, and just down the street no less. Small world.