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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

There have been a few requests for tech support over the past couple of days involving new members who can’t join their own local community group. We’re working on a fix to prevent this – in the meantime, here’s a quick fix.

• Go to ‘Your Saved Locations’

• Verify that the marker on the map is placed correctly. Even though your address is correct, the signup form may have been submitted before our geocoder returned your exact location.

• If the map marker is incorrect, edit the location and either retype your street address, waiting for the geocoder to update the marker before saving – or – drag the marker to your correct location and save.

• Return to your ‘Home’ screen – you should now be eligible to join your own community.

If this problem has affected you, thanks for your patience while we work on a permanent solution.

Nation of Neighbors currently accepts two primary types of user created content – ‘reports’ and ‘posts’.  Reports, created only with the report page, are intended to be timely user-submitted reports of crime or suspicious activity tied to a specific geographic location.  Posts, created from your home page or community page, are intended to be about everything else related to your community.  There is a reason things were set up that way.  However, in practice, it often leads to confusion.  My current plan is to integrate the two content types, preserving the features of both.  The only exception is anonymity.  We don’t currently associate user information with reports.  We do with other content.  My proposal is to add a ‘post anonymously’ option to all content.  The user information would be saved in the database so that we can send the poster replies (a major shortcoming with our current system – we currently don’t know who to send replies to).  However, user information would not be displayed.  I’ve exchanged emails with some of you already regarding this change and the response thus far has been positive.  If I haven’t already spoken with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the proposed change.

Buddy Bar Door Jammers

I am pleased to announce our first sponsor – the Buddy Bar Door Jammer. The Buddy Bar is simply the best door jamming device available – next to parking a Caterpillar D9 in your house.

Deciding to accept advertising was an agonizing decision. Unfortunately, Nation of Neighbors costs money to run and our current level of sponsoring members, though extremely helpful, does not yet cover our costs. While I believe that Nation of Neighbors offers a very attractive local advertising platform, I really dislike web advertising. There are so many over-the-top too good to be true in your face ads on the web that I tend to immediately write off anything I see advertised online. So rather than simply put pay per impression ads all over every page on our site hoping that people click them, we’re going to try something a little different – business sponsorship. My pledge to you is this: we will only advertise products or services that we would use ourselves, that are relevant to our users, that represent a good value and, to the extend possible, are offered by local US based businesses.

The Buddy Bar fits those requirements perfectly. It’s a simple door jamming device that slips under the doorknob on any door and prevents the door from being forcibly opened. It’s manufactured and sold by a small family run business in Idaho and, while you can buy a cheaper door jammer, you can’t buy a better one. Considering that most home break-ins are the result of a door being kicked in, the Buddy Bar is the perfect solution – protecting you and your family from home invasion. The Buddy Bar Door Jammer is also a great solution for shared homes, apartments and dorm rooms.

You can learn more about the Buddy Bar here. If you purchase a Buddy Bar, be sure to enter coupon code ‘NoN’ – you’ll receive a small discount and a portion of your purchase will benefit Nation of Neighbors.  Limited (hopefully non-intrusive) ads will begin running next week.  As we explore this new avenue for offsetting our costs, we’d appreciate your input.