In a conversation on engagement and building community in local news at Block by Block we started to hash out a formula for engagement in local news.

Abstracting the concept of SeeClickFix one level Jay Rosen, David Cohn the group and myself came up with an algorithm:

1) Find frustration (or another passionate emotion)

2) Make an easy place to document that emotion (Jay suggests a form. SeeClickFix and David Cohn do too!)

3) Make sure to provide a feedback loop to encourage continued and deeper engagement

I had never really thought about abstracting the principles of SeeClickFix that make it a functional platform but it seems that they apply to Spot.us as well as local news organizations that successfully drive participation.

In regards to a positive feedback loop we dove a little deeper and provided examples as:
1) Support from community through comments
2) Resolution to the issue by exposing it publicly
3) Documenting it through Journalism

To follow block by block #bxb2010