I don’t read my local newspaper nearly as often as I should.  I think there are two reasons for that.  First, small newspapers don’t publish daily which means that by the time it gets to my front porch, it’s out of date or it’s all feature stories–very little local news.  Second, the big dailies don’t have the bandwidth to focus on what’s happening in and around town at the neighborhood level. They’re forced to focus on broader regions which means the local news isn’t really all that local.

But I do read Chris O’Brien’s column in the San Jose Mercury News.  Chris is the lead business writer and a past recipient of a Knight News Foundation Grant to work on the Newsroom of the Future.  The Knight Foundation focuses on ways of getting information to underserved communities.  We think small neighborhoods fall into that category.

Chris’s article today highlighted the work of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.  The commission was assembled to “recommend both public and private measures that would help American communities better meet their information needs.” Chris cites as a major challenge how people know who to trust?

“For a long time, newspapers and other news outlets served as a filter for much of this information. Publications developed track records and reputations on which people could judge them. Evaluating and deciding which outlets to trust was reasonable given the relatively small number of choices.

But with nearly infinite information streaming at us, deciding whom to trust becomes an overwhelming task.”

But I think there’s a larger issue and that is how do regular people, not just reporters and newspapers, discover this “nearly infinite information.”  And when they do, how do they sort through it to find what’s relevant to them?

These two issues are closely related.  Think about everything you know about what’s going on in your neighborhood.  Do you know everythign?  Probably not.  Do you know the exact same things as your friends and neighbors?  Probably not.  But amongst all of you, there’s a lot of information that you all know.

Now think about who you trust.  Most likely, you trust your good friends, your family, and your neighbors who you’ve lived next door to for a few years.

So imagine that there was a way for everyone in the neighborhood to contribute the information that they knew and a way for your friends and neighbors, who you know and trust, to help you sort through it to find what’s most relevant for you.  All of a sudden, you’ve got your community doing the job that was previously done by a newsroom and you personally know the sources of the information, which makes it trustworthy.

This is the vision that we have at Neighborsville:  Communities working together to share and discover the things that are most important to a neighborhood.  We believe that when neighbors share their knowledge with each other–on local events, local news, the best places to shop and eat, and which local businesses are best for your particular needs–and help each other know what’s most relevant for them, we can create smarter, better informed neighbors.

And that creates stronger neighborhoods.