Knight News Challenge – 2013

We’re pleased to have two proposals in this year’s Knight News Challenge:

Nation of Neighbors (NoN): Improving community welfare through collaborative knowledge
We’d like to use our existing location system to allow wiki style editing of important community resource information. This is probably one of the most requested features on NoN. While we’ll most likely try to implement this with or without support from the Knight Foundation, their support would enable us to build it much more quickly and would result in a better (and open-source) tool.

Nation of Neighbors (NoN): Facilitating Free Decentralized Sharing of Crime and Public Safety Data
There are currently several commercial companies that ‘own’ much of the Country’s crime data. While it’s great that this data is being made available to the public, this data would be more useful if it wasn’t locked away in proprietary databases. Generally, agencies use these commercial companies because of lower overall cost (as opposed to hiring additional staff) and ease of use. We believe that a competitive open source alternative can be created that would allow this data to be more accessible to the public. And would still be available to commercial interests as well. While NoN started out as a crime mapping service, I don’t think that this project would be incorporated into Nation of Neighbors. We would pursue this as a separate project in collaboration other interested developers.

A day in the life of a cop – on Twitter

You can ride along with law enforcement officers from over 200 different agencies tomorrow on Twitter. This should be an exciting chance to see first-hand how various agencies across the world are beginning to use social media. Follow hashtag #poltwt

Twitter list of participating agencies: https://twitter.com/ConnectedCOPS/police-tweet-a-thon-2013/members

No More Daily or Weekly Digests

Starting today, NoN will no longer send daily or weekly digests. This feature was used by less than 5% of our members and conflicted with upcoming changes. Existing digest subscriptions have been converted to instant notifications.

New Text Messaging System

I am pleased to report that we will be rolling out an entirely new text messaging system over the next few days. In addition to receiving local alerts, you will also be able to share information with your community directly from your phone. Stay tuned for more information later this week!

Intermittent Text Messaging Problem

It looks like we’re experiencing a problem with our text messaging system. We’re looking into it and will have it back up and running shortly.

Location Issue Resolved

It came to my attention on Friday that some users were experiencing problems with our location based forms, including updating report locations and adding community groups. It turned out that we needed to update portions of our code that referenced Yahoo’s geocoding APIs. That update is now complete and everything should be working again. Please let me know if you experience any additional problems.

RSS Feeds for Agencies and Community Groups

We’re pleased to announce that community and agency RSS feeds have been added to Nation of Neighbors. In addition to visiting the website for local news and subscribing to email alerts, you can now subscribe to your community news feed with your favorite RSS reader.  You can also incorporate your feed into your community website or Facebook page.

Community feeds include both posts and reports. Agency feeds currently only include reports. All feeds return the most recent 20 items by default.

If you are incorporating a feed into your community website, you can add query parameters to the feed URL to modify the default behavior.  Specifically, you can specify a ‘limit’ parameter to specify how many items to return and the ‘type’ parameter to choose between posts and reports.

A few examples:

Default Feed – last 20 reports and posts combined:
http://www.nationofneighbors.com/community/WV/Watch-Jefferson-County/feed/

Custom Feed – last 50 reports:
http://www.nationofneighbors.com/community/WV/Watch-Jefferson-County/feed/?limit=50&type=reports

Custom Feed – last 5 posts:
http://www.nationofneighbors.com/community/WV/Watch-Jefferson-County/feed/?limit=5&type=posts

National Sheriffs’ Association Neighborhood Watch Awards

The National Sheriffs’ Association is now accepting nominations for the 8th Annual National Neighborhood Watch Awards of Excellence. There are some outstanding Neighborhood Watch programs using Nation of Neighbors. If your local neighborhood Watch program deserves recognition, please follow the link in the announcement and submit a nomination!

The original announcement is below:

The National Sheriffs’ Association in partnership with the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U. S. Department of Justice is pleased to announce that they are accepting nominations for the 8th Annual National Neighborhood Watch Awards of Excellence to be presented during the General Section of the 2011 National Sheriffs’ Association Conference in St. Louis, MO.

All law enforcement agencies, Neighborhood Watch groups, organizations, and/or programs that have made an exceptional contribution to the Neighborhood Watch program in their communities are encouraged to submit nominations to the National Sheriffs’ Association by March 31, 2011.

For complete information on eligibility, criteria, and nomination forms please visit

http://www.usaonwatch.org/about/awards.aspx

Please Participate in Our Survey

You are invited to participate in a short survey about your use of Nation of Neighbors.

The purpose of this research is to understand how people you use Nation of Neighbors to learn and communicate about local crime so that your online experience can be improved.

This research is funded by the National Science Foundation and is being conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park in collaboration with Nation of Neighbors.

http://www.nationofneighbors.com/survey

Nation of Neighbors Partners with University of Maryland

I am pleased to announce that the University of Maryland has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to support Nation of Neighbors by developing a Community Analysis Visualization Environment. The University of Maryland team includes experienced researchers and graduate students in computer science and sociology who will conduct research in cooperation with Nation of Neighbors, which will aide us in determining what contributes to community success and failure.

You can view the abstract and award details here: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0968521

This project will help us focus our efforts on areas that contribute to our success and will also benefit community leaders and local government partners by providing a new tool set, allowing them to refine their own efforts.

We are excited to be working with the University of Maryland team and look forward to the positive impact on our service as well as the contribution to other projects that will benefit from this research. We will be publishing additional information over the next few weeks, including information about how you can be involved.