Various entrepreneurial gurus (Marc Andreessen, Paul ) point, when asked for the most important ingredient for a start-up, to the market. That is, it doesn’t matter how clever your technology is, or your marketing, or how brilliant your team is if there is no demand for what you provide. If you’re working in a market that does have a healthy amount of demand for what you deliver… success is more likely. The existing market is the most fundamental driver of all. So goes one view.
Front Porch Forum is in the business of helping people get to know their neighbors… and to enhance the sense of community within neighborhoods. Ample evidence points to a growing desire from people who want just that (which I’ll save for another post).
And here’s a new documentary from England on the subject…
My Street
After 14 years of living on the same road Sue knew practically none of her neighbours. Intrigued by what stories might lie on her own doorstep, she began knocking on the 116 doors on her street and meeting some of the 300 people who are her neighbours.What she found were remarkable stories, from millionaires living next door to people on benefits, to convicted drug smugglers and classical composers. Sue meets party animals and recluses, the very young and the very old, hears stories of success and tragedy and sees how illness and loneliness, hope and happiness have left their mark on the lives of her neighbours.
More from Kevin Harris about this.
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…
Andy Sack, founding CEO of now-shuttered Judy’s Book, offers this advice for folks looking to get traction in the “local reviews and word of mouth referrals business”…
i) GET TO CRITICAL MASS
- Do this by limiting geography — stay in one geography for 3 years. Yes, 3 years. Do not expand geography for the first 36 months. Every successful online local business has been in one geography for 3 years.
- Do this by limiting the number of categories or professions you’re trying to get word of mouth on. Do not try and do the entire yellow pages. Choose at most five categories. I might suggest: restaurants, dentists, doctors, auto mechanics, and real estate.
- Do this by aggressive customer acquisition. Whatever your strategy for customer acquisition, get aggressive about. Do not sit in an ivory tower and expect to get to critical mass.
- Aggregate content from other places on the web so you can avoid the empty database problem
- Spend as little money as possible
ii) Go back to step i
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.
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