i-Neighbors, a service to generalize local social networks.
Form the About page:
I-neighbors was created by a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). These services were designed to encourage neighborhood participation and to help people form local social ties. We believe that the Internet can help people connect to their local communities and to create neighborhoods that are safer, better informed, more trusting, and better equipped to deal with local issues. I-neighbors helps communities build “neighborhood social capital” by providing a place for neighbors to find each other, share information and work together to solve local problems.
The proposed transformation here is similar to the change from one-off hosting of mailing lists to Yahoo Groups — instead of a set of one-off services, a neighborhood can use an existing template to start a whole related set of services — netowrking, photos, local reviews — all at once.
The core intuition is that ‘neighborhood’ is a concept that maps well to such services. Current services that have strong geographic components include Meetup, UrbanBaby and Craigslist — the first two rely on strong affiliational ties, with geography as a filter, rather than vice-versa, and Craigs assumes that cities are units, and that people have different ranges for different functions — I’ll travel all the way across town to interview for a job, but not to go to a garage sale. It will be interesting to see what the ‘neighborhood first/ then other filters’ model produces.
The lessons from UpMyStreet, a similar service in the UK that launched several years ago, are a bit mixed: the UK Postcode system is far more granular than that of the US, allowing them much more refined geo-location, but the place has also become a dumping grounds for racist and anit-immigrant feeling. Bob Putnam (he of Bolwing Alone) is doing some work on neighborhood social capital, and finds that high social capital correlates strongly with ethnic homogeneity — it will also be interesting to see, if i-Neighbors gets enough use, how that dynamic plays out here.
UPDATE: danah posted about i-Neighbors as well, with interesting questions about the relations between race and neighborhood.
1. Steven Clift on August 17, 2004 7:22 PM writes...
I mentioned i-neighbors in a http://dowire.org post today.
Here are some related "geography matters" materials ...
*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://dowire.org ***
*** Headlines from top blogs: http://dowire.org/feeds ***
Also of note ...
1. Will Davies new blog: http://www.potlatch.org.uk
He has moved on to the IPPR
.
2. Software for Skyscrapers - A presentation on technology on local
tech ideas:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4815
3. Invisible villages: Technolocalism and community renewal
By William Davies and James Crabtree:
http://www.renewal.org.uk/issues/2004%20Voulme%2012/Invisible%20Villag
es.htm
4. I-Neighbors - Pre-release from MIT. Something I pick up off my new
DoWire Feeds service via the Many2Many
blog. See: http://www.i-neighbors.org
5. David Wilcox's notes on the launch event:
http://partnerships.typepad.com/civic/2004/07/proxicommunicat.html
6. E-Democracy.Org's "local up" approach to online forums that matter
in "real" local communities: http://www.e-
democracy.org/do/commons.html
Some previously not posted slides (3 MB):
http://www.e-democracy.org/research/issuesforum/issuesforum.ppt
In short, those who care about locality and local community must
create viable ways for people to "come home" online. These options
must compete with online opportunities to encourage you to "go to the
world" or to simply stick within a purely private life among friends
and family online. If most of what people experience is conveniently
provided on an "any time, anywhere" basis, options for "real" local
community involvement on those same terms must be available or local
community will wither in the information age.
Steven Clift
Democracies Online
http://www.dowire.org
From:
http://www.theworkfoundation.com/research/isociety/proxi_main.jsp
Full report:
http://www.theworkfoundation.com/pdf/1843730189.pdf
Proxicommunication:
ICT and the Local Public Realm
New technologies tend to be met with a hail of predictions about
their social ‘impact’. Over the past decade, digital technologies
have often been presented as forces for globalisation and the ‘death
of distance’, yet the vast majority of people’s day-to-day activities
remain fairly local. So does this mean that these technologies do not
have a role to play in such activities? Not at all. This report looks
at new ICTs as local devices, and asks what else they can do, other
than overcome distance.
About the author
William Davies is a researcher on The Work Foundation’s iSociety
project. He is the author of a previous iSociety report, You Don’t
Know Me,But…: Social capital and social software.
Contents
Forward - HTML format
Forward - pdf format (436kb)
Executive Summary - HTML format
Executive Summary - pdf format (423kb)
Chapter 1 - HTML format
Chapter 1 - pdf format (462kb)
Chapter 2 - pdf format (469kb)
Chapter 3 - pdf format (488kb)
Chapter 4 - pdf format (499kb)
Chapter 5 - pdf format (508kb)
Chapter 6 - pdf format (491kb)
Chapter 7 - pdf format (470kb)
Download the full report in pdf format - file size 1.29mb
Order a printed copy £10.00 + p&p
Join my Democracies Online Newswire: http://dowire.org
Permalink to CommentEDem's Election 2004 Links: http://e-democracy.org/us
2. cxz on August 17, 2004 7:26 PM writes...
dsadsa
Permalink to Comment3. das on August 17, 2004 7:30 PM writes...
dsa
Permalink to Comment4. Simon on August 23, 2004 5:12 AM writes...
The discussion you point to on UpMyStreet does not indicate racist and anti-immigrant feeling. Rather it indicates a fear of the poor, especially amongst people who have moved into an area going through rapid gentrification.
The reference to people being on the social and wanting to be like the Krays (East End gangsters from the 1960s) suggests white, English, middle class people fearful of the white, English, underclass they've moved in next door to. So, not a question of ethnicity, but class.
Permalink to Comment