How it all started...
While surfing the net a few months ago, I came across an article
that made me very sad;
"75% of adults aren't Friends with any of their Neighbors".
Where is the time when neighbourhood kids played together, when
barbecues were organized with neighbourhood fathers, when dinners
were organized with the next-door neighbour?
WHERE HAS THE COMMUNITY SPIRIT GONE ?
Still, part of the study gave me hope; it seems that even if they
are not close friends, people trust their neighbor, and many don't
hesitate to ask for favors and help each other out; feeding the cat,
watering the cactus, watching the house while they are in
Pennsatucky, lending THE screwdriver needed to make the IKEA bed, or
graciously offering the missing egg to make the perfect pancakes.
We think that the community spirit has not disappeared. It is
waiting for digitalization, to resurface for its hour of glory.
After all, "go away only to come back better" (actually
sounds better in
French).
It's time to show pride in your neighbourhood, plead allegiance to
your street, show solidarity with your block. After all, we are
all in the same boat zone.
The concept
Our application will allow all the inhabitants of a neighbourhood to
be "connected", in a new way.
At first, our database will only contain (as shown in the next
picture) :
- Which house one lives in :
Number and Street name
- Name : First and Last Name
- Gender: Female or Male
- Age Category:
Child, Teenager, Young Adult, Adult or Senior
- If one wants to meet its neighbours :
Yes or No
- If one is willing to share (food, tools, etc.) :
Yes or No
How it works
Let’s take an example with a little city in Norway - they don't
have too many problems with RGPD and personal data protection
(you can literally find the salary of all 4 million inhabitants
online).
We choose
Tolga,
1553 inhabitants, and especially its residential area around
Sjukhusmoen - 3 streets, 19 Houses, 28 people.
We will use our database created on Firebase, with Tolga's 28 inhabitants (see picture in Part 2). We export the data to JSON, and then include the code to link the database to our project.
Then we create the conditions for JavaScript to be able to retrieve the information we are looking for. Let's see who are the children in the neighbourhood whose parents have agreed to let them meet the other children.
With NeighbourCare, you will know who and where the young adults
are in your neighbourhood, who are the other inhabitants of your
street, if there are other teenagers in the area, if there are
other children in the neighbourhood, which ones are willing to
lend them a tool, or which ones would like to have dinner, etc.
The application can be used by town halls, small villages or
large capitals, neighbourhood associations, but also by student
campuses.
By then developing and specifying the database, we will be able to
know if one household has pets or certain objects like a tractor,
if someone has a certain job or knows how to do specific things
like sewing, etc.