Idea Lab

'Neighbor Connect' Space Heats Up as HuffPost Buys Localocracy

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Congratulations to Conor White-Sullivan and the team at Localocracy, which became a recent acquisition of the Huffington Post, as reported by Kara Swisher on WSJ's AllThingsD. Arianna Huffington said, "[Conor and team are] pioneers in using the web to empower citizens to improve their towns, and their unique vision and talents will enable us to deepen our users' engagement with our sites." This is further evidence of the "neighbor connect" online space heating up. In the past year, I'm aware of at least two dozen significant startups focused on facilitating conversation among people who live near each other. Some, like...

• October 14, 2011
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How Social Networking Can Help Neighbors During Disasters

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can social-networking sites be used by neighbors to help each other during disasters, as well as with more pedestrian issues the rest of the time? NPR recently covered political scientist Daniel Aldrich's work looking at how neighbors help each other during disasters. From NPR: Aldrich's findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive ... a disaster. Government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a...

• July 13, 2011
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Design Decision for Local Online News: What's the Secret Sauce?

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

An awful situation for any parent ... my wife suddenly needed to drive four hours to Boston Children's Hospital to shepherd our son through a medical emergency. He was already in Boston, but Valerie couldn't get out of the driveway. A freak blizzard had drifted four feet of snow across it. If she didn't get on the road soon, the childcare lined up for our younger kids would fall apart. I was out of state and no help at all. What to do? One simple posting to Front Porch Forum and a dozen neighbors materialized. Wielding snow blowers and shovels,...

• May 5, 2011
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Neighborhood Sites Can Awaken Community Involvement

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

"When I was first on my own I used to bemoan that my fellow renters could hardly be bothered to return a wave but someone kept stealing my newspaper...," wrote author Laura Grace Weldon in a recent blog post, What Makes A Street Into A Neighborhood?. "Then we moved to a little house. It was silly how hard it was to meet the neighbors. They'd wave but that's about it." Along the same lines, Sarah Byrnes wrote in YES! Magazine that "In the past, neighbors knew each other and engaged more naturally in mutual aid, sharing common resources and helping...

• January 3, 2011
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Front Porch Forum: Connecting Strangers in the Neighborhood

by Michael Wood-Lewis
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mention the Internet, and most people think of the World Wide Web, of reaching out across the globe for news, long-lost friends, or low-price bargains. But in dozens of Vermont towns, residents are using the web to connect with their back-fence neighbors. In an era where national and global information is broadly available online, it seems that few of us know our neighbors and what's going on down the street. My name is Michael Wood-Lewis, and my wife, Valerie, and I saw an opportunity four years ago and created Front Porch Forum (FPF) to serve our home region in northwest...

• August 6, 2010
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