Your Local Community Hub
Our city, Oslo, is made up smaller parts called “bydeler” - local communities. These local communities often have their own local newspapers that you get in the mail. They’re seldom very interesting. We thought about what we would like to know about our local environment, and how we’d like to get that information.
Surprise, surprise: we want everything and we want it online.
Facebook has this thing they call community pages where they collect information about differerent things. They don’t work very well at the moment, but our Community Page is based on the same principle, it just collects information that’s already out there.
E.g if you lived in Briskeby, your community page would include articles from online newspapers that mention “Briskeby” or adresses from there. We’ve found a couple of hyperlocal news sites that work by that principle, including maps and events and such. Ex. everyblock.com and patch.com
But we want Facebook events, Gowalla/Foursquare spots, FB Places checkins, Instagram photos, Tweets by location etc. By using checkins as a base for getting information about shops, cafés, galleries etc, a directory will quickly form and make each community page more alive and friendly.
Through Facebook Connect, and the possibility to add different services you use, the community page could get much more information about the inhabitants and the people who work/hang out there. That way, getting to know a new place, finding out where to shop and where to have fun, would be much easier. When looking for a new home you could check out the community page and see what kind of people live/work/hang out there. If there is a majority of singles or families, if most of its occupants work within finance or arts etc.
It would be natural to include real estate ads as well, so if you know you want to buy an apartment in Sofienberg, you can easily find out what’s for sale there.
This is just the tip of an iceberg. We believe people would like to get more engaged in their local community, and we think all this information we create with location based services could and should be used for something good and useful. Hopefully it can become part of making our communities more interesting, warmer and safer!
What would you like your community page to do?
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