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Local Connections and Garden Doors
By Matthew Berk | September 20, 2007
Since moving to the Seattle neighborhood of Queen Anne last year, my wife and I have been ardent subscribers to the “Queen Anne Moms” mailing list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/QueenAnneMoms/). It’s a fantastic miscellany of questions and perspectives on everything local–including but not exclusive of parenting issues–everything from when to discontinue the binky, to which contractors do great work, to updates on area crime, all right in our in boxes every day. This brings me to our garden door:
- When we moved in, we asked the list for a local locksmith, who could change our lock barrels and work on some of the antique locks we had in the house
- Wanting to leave the garden doors open for better ventilation, we then found a screen door dealer by asking the list
- When the color of the new screen doors didn’t match our exterior, we found a local painter through the list; he’s coming next week to paint them
- Finally, one morning last week, we heard about a break-in near our neighborhood, in which an unlocked door gave the thief access to a purse.
Now we’ve come full circle, and our garden doors are closed and locked once again! Thankfully, it’s fall and cooling off….
Now, this long-winded anecdote brings me to one of the often under emphasized elements of a great local experience online: connecting people who live in the same community and who share many of the same priorities, values, and needs.
Put another way, we could have addressed these same needs through completely different online channels, ranging from the Internet to local TV and radio: Case in point, we could have searched for painters and locksmiths and screen door providers with a service like Open List, and then heard about the local break in by paying attention to locally focused news. For other use cases, and quite often, that’s actually what we do. But in this case, by leveraging the list and our community, we not only solved for our immediate needs, but we connected with people in our neighborhood.
The valuable work of connecting neighbors is not merely the stuff of “social networking”, but is really about folding local data, information and content back on real people, living in the real world. (In fact, I’d argue that the primary axis of interpersonal connection for social networking sites is in fact the online, as opposed to the real, world; that’s another story, though, and all about what I’ve called “digital self fashioning”….)
These connections, which can be fostered not only by email lists, are the basis for what Greg Sterling has recently argued (see “What People Don’t Get About Local“) is really the entire value proposition of the local space: the reach of the online into the fabric of the real, where we spend the great bulk of our time, money, and sentiment.
To succeed, every locally-oriented product needs to learn how to reach out in these ways and to forge connections online that have lasting effects in our offline lives. Baking these qualities into a product is a tough challenge, but then, so is being a great neighbor….
Topics: Community, Local Search |
September 20th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
[…] Berk writes at LocalPoint today about a kind of neighborhood email list that serves him well… I have been ardent […]
September 20th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Excellent post Matthew. You could have been writing about Front Porch Forum. We’re hosting 130 geographically contiguous online neighborhood forums covering the entire metro area of our initial pilot city… 25% signed up already! Helping neighbors connect… it’s tapping a powerful current.