Seattle’s OurNeighborhood project will enable the city to collaborate with its citizens using effective social networking technology, and empower neighbors to more easily work with each other. Through OurNeighborhood, the public safety infrastructure of Seattle will be complemented by a powerful network of helpful citizens coordinating with the city to keep streets safe. The project will leverage the rich ecosystem of existing services with APIs to connect to citizens’ existing online identities, communities, and information streams.

Excited by this project? Good. Because we need you to make it happen. It’ll be up to the Code for America Fellows to translate this concept into a reality in 11 short months, which will include everything from researching city services and working with local officials to designing the user experience and coding the application. As a CfA Fellow, this will be your start-up.

If you’re interested in helping with this project, join our corp of volunteers and stay informed about opportunities to get involved.

Your Challenge

• Connect citizens in a sustainable network with government and one another to ensure essential neighborhood priorities are met.
• Design a system that fosters organic peer to peer, group to group, and government to peer or group networks.
• Coordinate with existing online communities to leverage their activity and create symbiotic relationships with your product.
• Survey the existing open source landscape to determine how to re-use, re-mix, and develop the product as efficiently as possible.
• Create and document a product so that is easily reusable by other municipalities.

In tackling this project, you’ll have to answer difficult questions, only some of which we know about now, so we want to open that conversation to everyone. What are the tough issues and questions fellows in Seattle will have to grapple with, what are some other challenges for this project, and what else will we need to figure out?


(Photo: darwinbell on flickr)