Concerned Citizens

During the 2009 San Antonio mayoral campaign I was chatting with Julian Castro before our first virtual town hall about some of the things that might come up during the session. Of course we talked about the normal stuff like using Twitter to help connect with the people, Facebook and having more of the virtual town halls if he were elected. During the conversation he brought up a really cool idea I hadn’t thought about regarding the development of virtual neighborhoods. Just like using neighborhood association meetings as ways to connect and share information in the ‘hood why couldn’t we use social media to create a virtual neighborhood experience, not to replace the NA meetings but to supplement them. It’s actually a pretty cool idea if you think about it.

As I mentioned in a prior blog entry I visited a friend’s neighborhood festival in Austin last weekend. When we were leaving he talked more about how the NA stays connected and mentioned their NA listserv lists where neighbors share information with each other through the 90′s Internet technology. Association announcements are sent through it, neighbors post information about yard sales or other items of interest, and alerts are sent through the listserv. It’s a pretty creative way to use a simple Internet technology.

Fast forward to Web 2.0 and you can see how this could apply with the new technology approaches. Using some of the open source tools such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal you can develop a virtual neighborhood association where people can stay connected through the Internet. These tools should never be used to surplant the good old face to face interaction neighbors have but they can help improve the communication among neighbors.

One great example I have found of this type of initiative is the Rincon Hills Neighborhood Association in San Francisco. It has several tools for providing information to the residents and merchants of Rincon Hill which is located in downtown San Francisco south of Market and east of 2nd along the Bay. Events are listed in a handy calendar and the blog provides updated information on various things in the neighborhood. What it lacks in my mind is a forum for discussion or posting items of interest.

So how can we apply this to San Antonio? To start with San Antonio has a thriving Social Media Club founded by Jennifer Navarrete and Luis Sandoval. This is a great place to start brainstorming this idea with people who understand both social media and community. Pulling together a collection of ideas and possibly working with the city’s Community Initiatives department. If you look at the mission of the department it “commits to provide leadership, develop collaborative strategies, maximize resources, and improve the quality of life within our community. Our goal is to coordinate and foster strategic partnerships with governmental and community-based agencies to leverage resources essential to strengthening families, developing human capital and sustaining a community safety net.” I’ve highlighted the key phrases I think apply to this.

This type of approach could lead to a network of information that flows in many directions, both within the community or neighborhood and between the city, council and the neighborhoods. With the technology advancements associated with Web 2.0 the opportunities are endless. Think of an environment where information about the neighborhood is communicated to the residents through the NA website such a meetings, school activities and merchant events. Expand that to allow the council member or district office to interact directly with the NA through the website. Continue that thought with feeds between the city and the NA about projects or activities planned for the neighborhood such as IMP work, library events, or crime statistics.

This just starts the conversations and helps focus the efforts where needed. If a neighborhood had knowledge of a particular crime activity such as auto vandalism the neighbors could be on the lookout for suspicious activity and alert the police quickly. If there was a problem with stray dogs the neighbors could feed the information to Animal Control and the council member could follow up to make sure action has been taken. You get the idea and I’m sure you have already started to come up with your own scenarios.

After this election I plan to follow up with the next mayor about this approach along with work with anyone interested to develop a prototype NA website that possibly brings all this together. We talked about it during the Castro campaign but time ran out when it came time to put it together. I knew it would be difficult with the busy schedules of others but now we have the time to put this into action. As the prototype evolves I want to solicit feedback from many of you on how it could be improved and then see about leveraging some NAs to pilot the approach. Granted it is potentially a big project but if crowd sourced it can be accomplished.

If you have other ideas for this type of approach or have feedback on its value please drop them in the comments so they can be preserved as we move forward.