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NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
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Prevention Communities
Supporting organization:
National Crime Prevention Council
URL:
http://www.ncpc.org
City:
Washington
State/Region:
DC
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
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.
Sustainability (financial) model:
NCPC is a 26-year-old organization that receives funding from the U.S. Department of Justice and private donors. We have had a web presence for more than a decade and consider the web to be crucial to our mission. The creation of the Prevention Communities will be part of NCPC’s core work for Fiscal Year (FY) 2008 and become a central feature of NCPC’s overall work and web presence. The cities we work with will be supported and maintained by NCPC’s web team as long as they are deemed effective in preventing crime.
An initial rollout of Prevention Communities to select cities and groups will use existing server capacity. Software development is a one-time cost that will be born in the creation of the service as part of our FY2008 work. If the service proves popular and demand outstrips our server capacity, we will look to scale our hardware resources within our regular operating budget, or look to partner with city governments for money to build capacity. With time and additional resources, software could reduce labor-intensive project components, allowing us to offer the software to a greater number of communities (see Identified Needed Resources).
Potential obstacles:
Creating any widely-open system is difficult; security is always a concern, servers must be performance tuned, and code must be written and tested to ensure high-quality user experience. More difficult is ensuring the system is well-utilized. Teaching users to blog well is difficult and less well understood than software engineering, and fostering collaboration will require direction and intervention from NCPC staff.
Resource Needs:
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.
Key Milestones:
NCPC has several teams that will work concurrently on this project.
Days 1 – 60 (develop technical infrastructure)
Technical Goals
- Extend CMS to allow for group creation
- Create custom content types, permissions, and roles for community users
- Develop semi-automated aggregators for group portals to display relevant content from one group to another
- Create administrative interface to allow NCPC staff to push content to groups
- Test new CMS features to ensure security and reliability
- Test server capacity, perform minor hardware upgrades (RAM, storage space) as necessary
Days 30 – 60 (begin outreach, design)
Outreach goals
- Select cities for program
- Contact community leaders in cities
- Offer pilot
Design goals
- Develop prototype user interface (UI) for community participants
- Develop initial tags on basis of existing NCPC content
- User-test UI
Days 61 – 90 (finalize infrastructure and UI, train sites)
Technical and Design Goals
- User test whole-system (UI, backend)
- Performance-tune servers
Outreach and Training Goals
- Develop training materials, train the trainers
- Finalize groups for initial rollout, create users in system
Day 91
- Launch
Project Summary:
The National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC), the nonprofit organization behind McGruff the Crime Dog®, has mobilized citizens to prevent crime and keep their communities safe for more than 25 years. To further these efforts, 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 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.
Comments
Common Problems -- Common Solutions
Sandra Dickinson
I'm captivated by the connection your project makes between common problems and common solutions. And creating a space for communities to collaboratively discover the PATTERN relationship between problems and solutions.
I think this is totally cool, of course, because my own project, SElearninggames, has the same underlying foundation. I am dedicated to the proposition that - collectively - we know the answers to our common questions. We just don't yet know that we know it. The tools of the social web offer a tremendous opportunity for us to harness our collective intelligence - on a massive scale not possible before.
And you are right on when you identify community participation as a key obstacle. In fact - for those of us who share this vision -- that is one of our own "patterns"! (many other projects have identified this same challenge). Our respective projects can't begin to identify "common" problems and "common" solutions -- unless/until our respective constituencies share their individual problems and solutions. The trick is "getting started."
So -- I bet we could do for each other what we aim to do for our respective constituencies. We can share OUR OWN problems and our own solutions! We can help each other evolve more effective strategies to engage community participation.
I've certainly learned a few things I think are useful, the hard way, from my own experience. I'm going to make a blog post about it in a minute. I'll come back and give you the link to the blog post, so you can join the conversation.
In the meantime, because our projects have such fundamental elements in common, I would appreciate it very much if you would take time to look at SElearninggames proposal and comment. Thank you so much.
Blog conversation
Sandra Dickinson
Here is the link. To blog conversation about our common vision, common problems and common solutions. Please join us.