Great data available from the Portland, OR police department… crime statistics by neighborhood.
I’ve looked at the crime log for my city (Burlington, VT) and, regrettably, the data isn’t presented in a way that is very useful to the interested homeowner. I assume that the data is collected to help the police do their job, more than to help inform the public.
I would find it valuable to know every time a string of cars are broken into in my neighborhood… dates, locations, details. Same with grafitti, house break-ins, vandalism, etc.
I’m sure the police have this data… it’s just not easy to get to and may be under wraps for other legitimate reasons. Sure would be nice to have the police dept. website presenting all this data with an RSS feed that popped up on my feed reader when we get an uptick in trouble… “eight car break-ins reported in your neighborhood in past two days.”
What I’m left with is our informal neighborhood watch via Front Porch Forum. That is, some people post a note on their FPF neighborhood forum when they get ripped off. This is much better than nothing, but not as comprehensive as I’d like to see.
Some people outside of our pilot area may think that Front Porch Forum provides conventional online message boards for neighborhoods… not so. Here’s an example of a straight-forward web-based threaded message board from a Seattle neighborhood… click here. That’s a different animal.
Adena Schutzberg writes in Directions Magazine about three different efforts to provide neighborhood data for GIS… Maponics, Urban Mapping, Inc., and Zillow. This article touches on several issues for each of these companies…
Steven Clift made an interesting proposal on MediaShift Idea Lab at PBS.org the other day…
Why not declare a night once a year in late January as “National Night On”? (“On” as in “online.”)
Go for it Steven! And he went on to write…
What bugs me about the Internet, even the rise of social networking, most of the investment tends to reinforce existing ties – friends and family – and the tools that build new ties are more about professional networking (LinkedIn) or dating. There is a huge difference between publicizing private life online and creating open and accessible online spaces for local public life. There are a few projects like E-Democracy.Org’s neighborhood forums in Minnesota and England, the Front Porch Forum in Vermont, and the Annenberg School’s i-neighbors, and many independent efforts trying to create larger neighborhood-wide exchange, but nothing that I know of designed to be peer-to-peer two-way is essentially block-level based.
A growing number of “social networking + local online” efforts are in that first group mentioned above… making it easier to keep up with old contacts. This can further exacerbate the very problem that Front Porch Forum and others are designed to address… isolation from the people you live next to. FPF is all about helping neighbors get to know each other and build community within the neighborhood.
Marc Andreessen (go UIUC engineering!) writes today about a group of neighbors in Seattle creating an online social networking using Ning to address concerns over a recent crime wave…
From Bill Gossman and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
“I’ve lived here 11 years and never seen anything like this,” said Bill Gossman, a Magnolia resident who about two weeks ago started a neighborhood Web site [on Ning] that he dubbed sleeplessinmagnolia.ning.com.
The social network, Gossman said, has received 55,000 page views and brought together 550 block-watching neighbors to share information, tips and experiences…
That’s great. It’s an example of the kind of thing that people are doing with Front Porch Forum all across our pilot city of Burlington, VT (30% subscribe already). Crime and neighborhood watch activities are common… as well as lots of other uses.
Ning, in addition to having amazing resources, provides “white label” social networks… that is, build your own. While Front Porch Forum provides the network/forum for 100% of the neighborhoods in its service area… and it’s designed to address the real problems of isolation and individualism by helping nearby neighbors connect.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more