Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Blog Assignment: Why is worth getting to know your neighbors?



Neighborly relations have been declining since the 50’s. However, during the last years it has been noticed that the number of people that do not know their neighbors has been increasing and this is not good for anyone.

Not knowing the people that live next to you or close to you is something which only breaks up society and benefits crime figures which also have been increasing in most countries.
The main benefits of knowing your neighbor  are that both of you could be more protected by taking care of each other and helping each other with any situation. Another advantage is that you would know what kind of person lives next to you and who is close to your family.
According to Pew survey (2010), 28% of us know none of our neighbors’ names, and this is more evident in young and low income people. There is a perception that tells us that “we shouldn’t be involved with our neighbors”.

In a situation of a lost dog, crime, or someone needing help to do something or basically any type of neighbor situation it is important to have and use the social networks to solve any issue in the community.
At the moment there are existent websites in several parts of the world where people complain about their neighbors or ask for help to find something within the community. This are forums feed by the same community of neighbors where they help each other. These forums are for free access and the data is plugged by each neighbor/member. This websites could also assist a neighbor when looking for help for someone to take care of their pet or painting the house or any other type of neighbor assistance you could imagine.

A way to measure the success of something like this is by measuring the number of members and surveying people who had been assisted by another neighbor/member of the site.

This are only tools to enhance the physical and verbal relation that most people should be doing with their neighbors within their community.

Examples of this type of sites are:
www.fleissigebiene.com in Austria
www.nextdoor.com in the US


Daniel Romero 

1 comment:

Christopher Tunnard said...

I don't see anything about an SNA here (no data, no questions, no outcomes.) If you think in network-analysis terms,this could be the start of a good idea--using SNA not just to identify neighbors but to qualitatively select the ones most "relevant" to you.