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Lee Chubb was ticked off.

As a year-round, 15-year resident of Ketchum, Idaho – the city associated with the tony Sun Valley ski resort, Chubb has watched a lot of efforts to over-develop the area in a way that would not only take away the small-town feel that he loved, but would end up hurting the city financially. But this was a whole different scale: Three enormous hotel developments -- including one on an area slated to be open space “in perpetuity” –- supported by a report from a supposedly independent analyst citing the city’s dire future without the developments.

Chubb had been fighting what he calls the “uncontrolled growth” crowd for most of his time in Ketchum, but this was different. Just a month later, he wasn’t just the maverick NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) no-growth advocate as his opponents tried to paint him, but the head of Sustainable Ketchum, a well-organized action committee with a website and mailing list that informed its members on the developers’ plans, media coverage, and opportunities for action.

Chubb’s experience – which has resulted in large crowds at local planning and zoning meetings, meetings with the developers, and editorial cartoons in the local paper – is an example of the sort of situation described by Clay Shirky in his recent book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which describes how activists are using Internet applications such as Flickr, MoveOn, and Twitter to find each other, keep each other informed, and plan their next actions

“[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming,” Shirky says in the book, which describes how individuals, working collectively use these technologies and applications to challenge institutional groups ranging from Northwest Airlines, East Germany, the government of Belarus, and the Catholic Church.

And what happened with Ketchum? Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used to say that “All politics is local politics.” One can also say that “all local politics is land use.” After setting up the Sustainable Ketchum website and running an ad in the paper to promote it, Chubb was able to determine via IP tracing that it appeared that visitors to the site included not only the developers, but also GCA Strategies -- "America's top public affairs firm when it comes to overcoming NIMBY opposition to and mobilizing community support for real estate proposals." Using the website and a mailing list, he helped mobilize residents to attend a series of meetings for public comment, and set up an online petition system. Ketchum Planning and Zoning has not yet made a decision on the project.

“I've met and become friends with some amazing people in the course of this,” Chubb said. “It completes the circle because it reaffirms how special this place is and how important the fight to preserve it is.”

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