Chris Holt began  ScaleDown Windsor with the intention of creating a dialogue amongst the locals in Windsor. His project, which appeared two years ago only as a blogspot blog, now attracts over a thousand people daily, has its own radio show and is beginning to slowly creep into the print media spectrum.

“ScaleDown recognizes the hyper-consumer model – always ramping for the bigger, better, faster – it speaks to that,” says Holt. “It’s time to scale down our expectations, scale down our belief that growth is always going to happen, that we can always build our way out of a problem. ScaleDown is a way to focus on what we are doing in our city and doing that really well.”

The scope of Holt’s overall project is “trying to elevate the discussions around civic issues”. This website is “trying to get people talking about things they normally wouldn’t talk about, things that they would tend to leave to the experts”, Holt explains. “We are trying to engage the general public to get more involved. Just elevating the dialogue and showing people how to make direct connections between the experts and the locals”.

Holt explains that they are not experts but at the same time the city planner who is designing the street that we may be using, has a direct implication with the quality of our life. Holt states that his website tries to break down the barriers between that city planner and the average local. Holt believes he accomplishes that on his website because he makes those connections for people. He creates a forum where non-experts and experts can log on and have a dialogue between one another about issues that surround Windsor.

“I happen to know that the city planner listens to our radio show everyday,” Holt states. “We’re actually starting to wield a bit of power, people are really starting to pay attention to what we say and what we do.”

Holt primarily put this website together in order to raise the level of interest in dialogue amongst more people. “We are engaging our readers – they are contacting their city councillors more often; they are writing letters to the editor and starting to realize that they have power as well,” explains Holt. “I am only one guy. But I would have a better influence by talking with a hundred people and getting that hundred people to contact their councillor.” 

Holt continues to explain that ScaleDown is for experts and non-experts to communicate. They also try to let it be known that there are a lot of positive implications by supporting your local businesses. “These are local people that might live in your neighborhood, their kids go to your local schools and they pay local taxes," explains Holt. “They in turn spend the money that you give them on stuff in their community. So this keeps the cycle of money local which is something that we really stress is very important.”

Holt stresses that when we go shopping at big business, the money we spend in those stores not only leaves our community but it leaves the country. “By supporting your local business, the service may not be as good, the selection might not be as good, but in the end it’s saving more jobs and making more jobs in the community. The money is staying here”.

Holt believes that the best way to engage readers and create a dialogue is through blogging because it allows for interaction between people through an open forum. “For example, my radio has call-ins but most people don’t call, so it’s not a dialogue. But with blogs, you have a dialogue.”

“What we write about on the blog is almost secondary to the dialogue that happens in the discussion blog.” Holt explains that the discussions are predominant and “the discussions are the best thing that comes out of the blog.”  

“The main advantage here is dialogue. It’s being able to talk to people, hearing them and actually having a conversation.” Holt says, “I don’t moderate any of my comments, I don’t censor anything. It’s what people say – they say – and people can sway the conversation to where they want to take it. It’s out of my control.”

Holt began this blog because he wanted to get people talking about important issues surrounding Windsor. Holt’s passion for change and discussion drove him into politics. “I ran for the Green Party for God’s sake,” says Holt “I didn’t have any possibility of getting elected but I wanted to get a lot of these [important] issues discussed publicly.”

Holt believes that is what prompted him to begin ScaleDown. “I wanted people to start talking about this stuff. I know these issues have a lot of important connotations to them, so let’s start talking about them,” says Holt. “Even our city planners are saying ‘you’re making planning sexy’”. 

ScaleDown Windsor tries to address more civic issues within a broader context with a strong stress on Windsor’s built environment. Holt believes the broad arena of blogs within the blogging sphere of Windsor promotes and brings more success and popularity to ScaleDown, “there is a good handful of blogs in the city that augment each other and feed off each other.”

Past

“When I initially did this blog it was just a mouthpiece for me. It was a cheap little blogspot blog,” Holt explains, “all of a sudden I was getting all these responses.” Holt then realized that he was talking about things that other people in Windsor were interested in.

He then got another writer to work with him, next Holt’s blogspot blog attracted downtown restauranteur Mark Boscariol. “He loved what we were doing and he kicked in some money. So then we hired a web-developer, a designer, and that’s when it began to blossom.”

“We’ve been attracting the right people that really believe in what we are doing,” explains Holt. “We’re really getting a lot of support from the community and they are really supporting a lot of the things that we do, so it has grown, significantly.”

Holt believes that ScaleDown has helped develop a dialogue of the past because they are constantly documenting things that are happening and the ramifications of those decisions. “We have it archived as saying okay, look, if we do this, this will happen,” says Holt. “Inadvertently that does happen, not because we’re brilliant but because it’s happened everywhere else. Why should we be any different?”

“We are establishing ourselves as experts in this realm because we are not making this stuff up; we are reporting on stuff that happens everywhere else” and ScaleDown is bringing these issues to light, at least a local micro-demographic level. 

Holt explains that ScaleDown is being looked at increasingly more and more as experts and is being called on for that. “I think what we have in our archives is maybe documented history of things that have happened and projections of what will happen and the results of that.”

In this way ScaleDown can draw the predictions for the future.

Present

Holt believes that one of the greatest accomplishments of ScaleDown for today is raising the dialogue among locals in Windsor.

“We’ve got the ear of city councillors, of city administration, and of local experts,” says Holt. “See, there’s a ton of experts and there are the people and there has always been a wall between the two. Planning issues and the built environment is very boring unless you start to connect the dots between your average citizen and the expert. Otherwise, it’s very boring and locals just write it off.”

Holt is trying to break down those barriers and is trying to make planning more interesting. They are trying to use their website to provide a way of communication, between the expert and the citizen, that was lacking before.

Future

“You know if you asked me a year ago what I see happening in 2008, I wouldn’t have been able to predict the successes that we have had,” says Holt. “Most of the time I lowball everything. It’s hard to say what success I will have in 2009, or what effects. I will just keep doing what I’m doing.”

ScaleDown is hoping that in the future it will become even more of an influential aspect then it already is with regard to the political landscape.

“We want to control the next municipal council. We are going to get people elected,” states Holt. “We want to do some serious change in this city so we are going to put forward the issues that are important and really bump up the people that we feel are going to be good for the city.” 

ScaleDown is also in talks with a larger publication in Toronto; they will be working with them at a local level. “I think we’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg with what we do and the amount of readers” Holt says, “thousands of people read our blog everyday. That’s nothing to sneeze at. That’s thousands of people every single day.”

“Just send us money,” Holt jokingly says. “We have dreams of ScaleDown TV. We have TV producers ready to work with us and ready to increase our multimedia aspect. That’s was why I started ScaleDown Radio. Not everybody wants to sit and read a blog so this is just another avenue in order to reach more people.” Holt also has hopes to see ScaleDown in print media as well.

Link Back to ScaleDown Windsor Project Homepage