Front Porch Forum
Front Porch Forum is a social network founded in 2000 and based in Burlington, Vermont. It is a Vermont public benefit corporation. Users interact with the site either through a web page, mobile application, or via email. Posts to the site are aggregated and curated by staff, and distributed as email digests.
Front Porch Forum's purpose is to strengthen Vermont communities, which is reflected in its deliberate choice not to expand across the United States. The site contains over 200 separate forums, each corresponding to a town, combination of towns, or district of a city as well as a few parts of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York. As of 2020 the site had nearly 200,000 members and a staff of twenty. Fifty percent of FPF users post to the site in a given year. The site also maintains a community directory of local businesses.
Registered users are required to give their street address or official position, for participating public officials, in order to post to the site. This is aimed to help prevent outsiders in local conversations and to contain the spread of misinformation. The company makes its revenue through advertisements and featured community directory listings from local companies, subscriptions from politicians or local governmental officials, and a yearly fundraiser.
Front Porch Forum originated as a Burlington-centric local email list called the Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum. Michael and Valerie Wood-Lewis were new to the area, parenting a son with cerebral palsy, and wanted to meet more of their neighbors. They began by distributing flyers in their local area encouraging people to join and received a positive response. Michael Wood-Lewis hired engineer Rob Maurizi to design and relaunch list using its own homegrown software in 2006, with Wood-Lewis being the daily digest of posts. Following the aftermath of Tropic Storm Irene on August 29, 2011, which left over 60 houses flooded and nearly $700 million of damage, residents of Moretown Vermont used FPF to organize aid, cleanup efforts, and updates on developments of the cleanup.
Originally towns or regions would pay a small fee to have an FPF instance set up for their town. In 2011 an initiative from the Vermont Council on Rural Development received a federal grant to expand internet access to rural parts of the state, and they offered FPF as part of a package to towns that applied for assistance. After Hurricane Irene VCRD received a second grant to "increase the resiliency of at-risk towns" which allowed FPF to increase their coverage to the entire state of Vermont. The site is free for users.