the oshkosh 100
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Oshkosh has a population these days of close to 67,000, all of whom contribute--to one degree or another--to making the community what it is.
But among those 67,000, there is a much smaller group of people who exercise far more influence on our day-to-day lives. These are the people who make the big decisions about spending public money as well as much more subtle decisions about what to put on menus at bars and restaurants around town. They are people who shape the image of Oshkosh and its institutions in the mass media as well as people who work behind the scenes to ensure that the things we take for granted can be, well, taken for granted. These are the people who might be called the Oshkosh Influential, and to find them we went looking across the community, from City Hall to the Main Street bar scene, from major employers to entrepreneurial start-ups, from places of worship to the criminal courts, and from classroom buildings to playing fields, field houses and fishing piers. As a class, we looked at roughly 500 names, names that were taken from public documents, names that were recommended to us on social media and via email, and names that we knew either from writing stories about them or simply encountering them as we lived our lives. Although we spent a semester developing this list, we are not prepared to say that it is the only list that could be created or that it is the definitive list. It is simply our list, which we present here for the purposes of illumination and discussion. |
Our criteria.
To determine who should be part of the Oshkosh 100 list, we first had to define what it meant to be influential. This is the concept that guided our decisions: A person shows influence by: 1. Making decisions that affect residents’ future
2. Expressing opinions that form others’ opinions 3. Setting an example that others follow A person has greater influence to the extent that: 1. More people are affected 2. Influence is shown in more spheres of activity (politics, media, sports, etc.) 3. The nature of the effect is greater (type of job vs. type of recreation) |