On Being in our own Clouds

I found this very interesting, you may have heard of Word Clouds, you can create them from any amount of written text, the media often uses them on speeches or you can just grab a paragraph out of an email, whatever.

What I did here was copy the full text of the Fire Hall's promotional Questions and Answers and then made a word cloud of the top 50 words they are using. Below is essentially a keyword snapshot providing some insight into what the Fire Dept. prioritizes:

















I then took the text of www.trustchange.com/alternatives to see what a few taxpayers are most concerned about, the contrast between these two Word Clouds is quite revealing. One can get a sense of quite a different focus and concern between the two perspectives.

From what I can surmise from these two Word Clouds; the Fire Department is focused on 'construction of a building' and sees us as the 'public', whereas taxpayers continue to be concerned about 'fire', our 'need' and 'community', 'plans' and 'cost'.  Ideally one could hope the Clouds might reflect similar interests but alas it is more like we may not be on the same page.

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Word Clouds can be created online by copying some text and pasting it into the window at www.wordle.net It can be helpful in verifying that what you are writing is what you intend to come across saying.