"neighborhood informatics" - community conversations and information at a very local level

As far as I can tell, "neighborhood informatics" is a new phrase - haven't seen anyone else use it yet.

The idea is that you look for systems (computery and non-computery) that look at how people in a very small geographic area talk to each other, and also at the same time see how large national or international data sources inform the conversation.

A few examples will illustrate.

My block has a mailing list, "a2brooklyn", with about 20 families that covers a stretch no more than a few hundred yards end to end. We talk about everything from plans for block parties to borrowing extension ladders. In the summer time when the weather is better, those conversations more often than not happen on the sidewalks and not in the emails, so the email is not a replacement for the real neighborhood.

There's a new site, westmin.co.uk, for people who live in the borough of Westminster, London. "The idea is for us to come together and chat about local issues, good places to eat and drink, events, the council and virtually any other topic! ...We're independent and brand new - so please help by joining in and spreading the word."

From the national / international data side of things, there's sites like Zillow, which map real estate prices on a house by house basis throughout the USA. You can see all kinds of interesting neighborhood information with that view - zoom in for instance on 8 mile road in Detroit and see how home prices double or triple when you go a few hundred yards north to the next town.

Craig's List is certainly an example of this kind of system, since it organizes at the city level and not at the national level for the most part. You can learn some very interesting things from looking at it - the density of listings of housing is a pretty good proxy for the number of users of the system, and again it's clear where 8 mile road is (lots more listings in Royal Oak than Detroit).

When you study neighborhoods at this level some questions come immediately to mind. Parts of the world show up very quickly and easily through these systems, and there's lots of externally visible and well produced data to be seen with only the most minimal searching on the net. Other parts of the world are invisible, with poor or no data about housing and jobs and no community indicators giving any sense for what that part of the world is like from afar. Some neighborhoods are globalized, and others are isolated.

Food for thought. Randy Stoecker (now at Wisconsin) writes, "Is Community Informatics Good For Communities?", where "community informatics" can very roughly be understood as the process whereby people other than the residents of a place set up information systems on behalf on the residents and then seek to achieve goals that may reflect those of funding agencies but aren't always top on the list of what the people are after. Bill Pitkin from UCLA wrote "Community Informatics: Hope or Hype" back in 2001. So I'm deliberately picking some other words (in the grand tradition of inventing new words when the old ones don't suffice) to describe efforts more about people constructing systems for themselves, or for companies creating systems that can be reused by the people in unexpected ways, and not necessarily about anything deliberately being subsidized for someone else's benefit.

Technorati Tags: informatics, neighborhood, neighborhood-informatics