Click and connect

Bright Neighbor uses online barter system to build community

By Eric Bartels

Pamplin Media Group, Dec 11, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

JONATHAN HOUSE / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

Randy White gives a presentation about his Bright Neighbor Web site at Ohm nightclub. The Bright Neighbor site aims to connect people locally for the exchange of goods and services.

Randy White may be a radical, but he can still speak the language of business.

A former corporate software expert, he represents the considerable brainpower behind a new “community relocalization computer application,” boardroom argot if ever it existed.

On the other hand, the new tool, known colloquially as Bright Neighbor, may become a crucial delivery vehicle for the sustainability mandate to reduce, reuse and recycle in Portland.

And that makes White awfully green.

“Out of one side of our mouths, we talk about the need to conserve, but out of the other side we talk about growing the economy,” he says. “They are opposed to one another. We need to find a way to traverse that very fine line.”

What the 32-year-old White proposes with Bright Neighbor, a sort of MySpace for permaculturists, is that communities can be created and strengthened by sharing resources in a systematic way.

If neighbors share a ride, money saved on fuel stays in the pocket of someone other than Big Oil.

If somebody buys or trades for produce grown in a backyard, local dollars don’t enrich a corporate operation in California.

And a worker who’s lost a job gains access to a network of business contacts more familiar than newspaper classifieds and Craigslist can provide.

Bright Neighbor is the conduit for all of it, as an online network that focuses narrowly on sustainable practices, encourages bartering of goods and services, and is closely administered within restricted localities to protect against fraudulent participation, White says.

“Bright Neighbor is helping the community organize in a hyperlocal fashion to help promote proper growth. We need to be doing the right things. To me, the right things center around community, food security, resource sharing, trust.”

Tod Sloan, a professor of counseling psychology at Lewis & Clark College who studies community organizing principles, says Bright Neighbor fills a void.

“I happen to think it’s an important element in what we need to do,” he says. “The need for information sharing really comes up over and over. There are bits and pieces here and there, but none of them are really focused on transforming the way we communicate to one another.”

“We’re going to figure out our business model as we go,” White said at a downtown launch party last month. “It’s going to take time, but this is a community that’s going to make stuff happen.

“Over the past three days, I’ve had over 250 people sign up. They’re coming in droves.”

Plugged in

White, whose brainy energy and sharply drawn features make him resemble a more refined version of the actor Crispin Glover, is not new to activism in his adopted hometown.

He has been a high-profile member of the group Portland Peak Oil for years. He is devoted to the concept of permaculture, a doctrine that advocates for small, self-sustaining communities over the resource-devouring practices of large-scale production.

He says the current economic turmoil is a verdict on America’s voracious consumer appetites.

“What I’m offering is a system of hyperlocal community that offers a real fix if people want one,” he says. “The point is to give people a path they can follow to sustainability. We’re not going to purchase our way out of this. We’re going to have people learn skills that are in balance with the Earth.”

A military brat growing up, White moved to Portland from Alaska eight years ago. He was working as the director of Clear Channel Internet, he says, and “making a lot of money” when tragedy rearranged his priorities.

His older brother, a U.S. Air Force staff sergeant, committed suicide at 32.

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