My wife works for a non-profit organization that is slowly but steadily planning and rebuilding one neighborhood of our city. I love hearing her talk about her work. To grow my knowledge about what she does a bit more, I picked up a copy of Jane Jacobs book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's a classic resource for city planners and a great read for anybody curious about how people living in cities use the space provided for them. The principles in the book apply only to high-density city life, not towns or suburbs.

Among other insights in the book around why a neighborhood thrives, Jacobs points out the importance of certain public figures. They are not the mayor, the neighborhood association members or the district alderman, but the shopkeepers and bartenders. Jacobs calls them the "keepers of public knowledge." The daily life of these people is pretty ordinary. They sell goods and make small talk with people from the neighborhood people buying those goods. But these "knowledge keepers" serve an incredibly important function. They are confidants who carry the public knowledge of the neighborhood and transmit it to everyone else. So Mrs. Smith knows that Mr. Parker's mother died last night and Mr. Moore knows to keep his eye out for a strange looking man who's been wondering around, and so on. It's a seemingly small service, but it keeps the neighborhood unified, in touch and safe.

These keepers of public knowledge are on an immediate, street level serving the function of the news media (or the news media in its most noble and rarest incarnation) does on a global level. When I watched Hotel Rwanda last year I remember feeling what a lot of people felt walking away from that film: the shock of waste and the weight of responsibility. A genocide that didn't need to happen happened. Thousands upon thousands of people could have been saved if only we had known publicly what was really going on. When the keepers of public knowledge are absent or silent, we have an excuse to keep to ourselves.

For me, it reveals the power of sharing stories. Really, that's what the keepers of public knowledge are sharing. Neighborhood stories. Like, "Little Billy was doing terrible in school. Two weeks ago I see him carrying a violin case in here and he says he's taking violin lessons. Yesterday his mom tells me his grades are getting better and she swears it has to do with this violin teacher." In a week, that violin teacher has four new students from the same neighborhood, all through storytelling, not a big advertising budget.

Stories don't have to be true to have an impact. A movie or novel can make a difference in the life of a person the way a documentary can. An article on predatory lending can mobilize people to go after crooked mortgage brokers the way Upton Sinclair's The Jungle changed legislation. We sing Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer because somebody at Montgomery Ward thought the story of a rejected reindeer would make a great advertising campaign. It did and we're still sharing that story each Christmas. But if stories aren't shared there is a breakdown between us, between humans making important connections to one another.

It's the simplest thing. It's so simple it seems too easy. But tiny little stories can really alter the course of a person's life. So share them.

P.S. Be sure to ask yourself whether it's public or private knowledge you're sharing. I don't want to hear that the SpoutBlog promotes people starting rumors.