Although crime rates remain relatively low compared to past decades, crime remains a consistent challenge to nearly every community across America. No city was alone in experiencing the spike in violent street crimes we saw last summer. Law enforcement officers and community activists continue to work tirelessly to prevent crime, and for more than 25 years the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) has worked to ensure safety for all Americans by engaging them in crime prevention activities. Continuing in that tradition, we will help neighbors in cities across America share crime prevention resources, and communicate and share knowledge about crime problems and prevention solutions.

To connect communities, NCPC will offer collaboration tools (calendar and event planning, blog and commenting tools, and a tagging system) and web space on NCPC.ORG for selected city communities to

• Exchange information, such as local crime problems and the strategies communities are using to prevent that crime
• Coordinate neighborhood watch, national night out, and other crime prevention activities
• Use NCPC resources, tested strategies, and other tools that make people safer

NCPC will enhance inter-community interaction by highlighting common problems and solutions. We will syndicate community activity and highlight relevant posts from one group to another, relying on RSS aggregation to create customized feeds for groups. We will leverage tagging and trackbacks to help groups discover one another and pool knowledge to prevent crime. In the short term, NCPC will look for patterns in cities’ posts and respond to trends on its blog with strategies and research. This work will be immediately relevant to communities, because it will be directed by the participants’ aggregate output. Over the long term, based on communities’ content and feedback, NCPC staff will test and create new resources to teach communities to more effectively prevent crime.

WHAT WE NEED:

Many of the project goals can be accomplished by modifying existing open source resources, such as our CMS. However, this system also offers an opportunity to use semantic web technologies and machine learning. We would like to tap Yahoo!’s knowledge about artificial intelligence and semantic analysis to offer an intelligent system that proposes tags for content, helps to find related articles among groups, and helps similar groups find one another. We would also like to increase our developer capacity beyond what our current budget allows so that we can more effectively enhance our site’s availability, usability, and information architecture.

Location