Mt. Lebanon Accountability Organization Powers Up

The new "Mt. Lebanon Accountability Organization," a grass-roots citizen-led government watchdog organization (!), has a website, a Twitter account, an email mailing list, and a game plan. Take a look at http://wiki.mlao.org/ for more information.

New Citizen-Led Mt. Lebanon Accountability Organization Launches

I am pulling the following note out of the comment thread at this earlier post and am putting it here, so that it gets more publicity. Once in a great while, online and blogosphere conversations actually lead to concrete, offline action that has real world consequences. Will this be one of those cases? Blog-Lebo reader and commenter Tom Moertel writes:

Here's an update for everyone following this story. Today, as planned, a number of residents met at Aldo Coffee to talk about our community and, in particular, what we can do to make it easier for residents to get involved in local government. We actually had more people show up than I had expected. (We eventually claimed 3 tables.) It was a fun bunch, and for about 3 hours we enjoyed great coffee, talked about our ideas, and started to form a plan to do something to improve our community.

During the meeting I explained my proposal to form a non-political citizens' organization that could serve as a community resource. The organization would do the work of clarifying, summarizing, and organizing the information produced by our local government so that residents (and policymakers) would have a one-stop, easy-to-use, reliable resource for understanding important community issues.

Toward that goal, I am setting up a web site to serve as the home for this new resource: the Mt. Lebanon Accountability Organization. (Until the site is ready, I have prepared a short introduction that tries to explain what the MLAO is all about.)

In the end, most attendees thought it was an idea worth pursuing and volunteered their support and assistance, but opinions varied on whether this organization -- or anything, for that matter -- could be an effective vehicle for government reform. In any case, everybody thought it was worth a shot.

If you're reading this and interested in joining us -- all are welcome -- please read the document I linked to above and send me an email (my address is in the document).

Finally, I'd like to thank all the people who took time out of their Saturday afternoon to attend the meeting or drop by: Thanks!

(Note: I am speaking here only for myself, and these comments reflect my impressions of the meeting. If other attendees want to add anything to my summary, please do.)

Cheers,
Tom

My comments: Thanks to Tom and everyone else who turned out on Saturday, and thanks to Aldo Coffee for enduring another impromptu Blog-Lebo related gathering!