Neighborhood-community building: Porchfest music festival

Ithaca Porchfest, 2008.  Flickr video by Ari Moore.

The original Porchfest is in Ithaca, New York, which presents music around the city, delivered from various house front porches.

Somerville, Mass. is doing this today for the second year in a row.  It's not a community festival in one location but a "distributed and decentralized" event where 'Somervillians share their love of playing and listening to music.'  It's like an open studio tour, but for music.

-- Somerville Porchfest
-- Map page, which includes band profiles, links, and mp3s

From their website:

On Saturday, May 19th musicians and bands throughout Somerville will celebrate and utilize an underused public venue: The Porch. Acts—ranging from bollywood funk, cosmic americana, killer blues, Moroccan, Balkan, gospel, American space rock and clawhammer banjo—will serenade passersby from porches throughout Somerville. There are three time slots are based on three quadrants of the city; east to Walnut will be 12-2; Walnut to Willow will be 2-4; west of Willow 4-6. It's all on this map. 

I think that this is a great thing to do in a decent sized neighborhood like Capitol Hill, Dupont Circle, Columbia Heights, even Petworth, as a community building and neighborhood development event.