Engaging and networking local communities online
Geography might be history, thanks to the Internet. But I am still interested in the local content and news. By local I mean just the 1km radius area. I had a look at this application called Your Neighbours on Facebook. It is being used by some 800 active users. That is all. There is no concerted effort to engage and network local communities online. The challenge in engaging the local community online stems from our lifestyle. Unlike friends and colleagues you do not know the email address of your neighbour to invite him over to your Facebook network, but you still have some appetite for the local community news.
I think local community networks can be as popular as your existing social networking sites. I once asked a local shopkeeper in my locality to start a weekly newsletter writing about the community issues and news updates. I thought at the time that this would be one of the best ways to get the local content. I still think this is the way you do it. I am thinking local citizen journalism. So if I live in Soura in Srinagar, the writeups or videos I upload on the site should be categorized under Soura category.
You either restrict the categorization by locality only or you do that in addition to other categorizations. But local categorization of the content should be mandatory. That sounds really basic. But if I knew a website that contains content about Soura or about the people living there I would be a heavy user of the site. Also, since there are reporters (professional and semi-professional) everywhere in the world now, you could have citizen journalists opt for licensing their uploaded local content by the national media. Once someone gets paid for local citizen journalism, he/she will be proactive in posting local content. So you effectively have a moderator in the locality.
Once you are able to build these multiple local communities, you could add several Facebook style bells and whistles. One application I would certainly appreciate is comparison of goods’ prices among shops in the locality. And so you engage the local shop owners too. And don’t forget our favourite application …. Don’t forget to add VoIP.
