NeighborhoodOS: How I believe Cabin's product can best serve and support Stewards

[camlindsay]

Headline

@shirah and I have learned that running a neighborhood is both incredibly rewarding and incredibly labor-intensive.

There are so many inner workings to a thriving neighborhood that few people (including ourselves before this past year) truly ever think about or consider. Thus, no software has been developed to assist us with this niche, but incredibly necessary, work of building healthy, connected, resilient neighborhoods.

I’ve been dreaming-up the platform to help us run the operations of our neighborhood, The Terrific Terrace right off of Piedmont. I’ve been calling it NeighborhoodOS, a social utility designed to instigate and organize local communities around the world.

As I’ve continued thinking about this, I’ve naturally started to believe that Cabin could play an exciting role in changing that.

I put together my thoughts outlining what I imagine this could look like, which is outlined below (you can also read a native Notion doc here)

Neighborhood Accelerator

Catalyzing the next generation of amazing Neighbors

@grin and @jon already have some product ideas moving with how to build software to support the Neighborhood Accelerator. I’m excited for the direction they’re heading.

It’s my belief that this section of the software and operation of the organization should be entirely free. This is an incredible top-of-funnel for Cabin and I believe it should be treated as a marketing expense that is an investment in developing loyal product advocates (Stewards) in communities that will ultimately all adopt the NeighborhoodOS system to run their local activities.

The role of incentivizes deserves further discussion, but I believe key neighborhood-building milestones should be rewarded with USDC to accomplish 3 things:

1. Generate goodwill and loyalty with Neighborhood Stewards (who are essential to the longevity of Cabin)
2. Provide real-world incentives to progress through the entire Neighborhood Accelerator program
3. Requires Neighborhood Stewards to become comfortable with Crypto rails (an essential component to the viability of Neighborhood Treasuries.

Neighborhood Dashboard

Everything you need to support your dream neighborhood

The Neighborhood Dashboard is the technological centerpiece of NeighborhoodOS, providing a central hub for community activities and management. It is designed to simplify and enhance how neighborhoods document, organize, and share critical information.

Core Features:

• Event Calendar: an intuitive, easy-to-use calendar that allows neighbors to document community events, add new activities easily, and synchronize with external tools like Google Calendar. This feature fosters active participation and ensures that residents remain informed about local happenings.
• Mutual Aid: A dedicated section of the dashboard enables neighbors to post requests for help or offers of assistance. Whether it’s borrowing tools, sharing skills, or offering services, this feature promotes mutual aid and strengthens bonds between neighbors.
• Safety: The dashboard integrates tools for both short-term safety and eventually, long-term resilience planning. It serves as an alternative to Citizen and Nextdoor, which stoke a fear-based reaction to neighborhood safety. The dashboard enables neighbors to discuss local safety concerns in a safe and tight-knit way that fosters support and consideration over fear and disconnection.

Here’s a screenshot of the Notion page where I include a more high-res screenshot of what I’ve built for our neighborhood thus-far. It includes info on what each section of the dashboard is for.

Neighborhood Resilience

This is the “deep well” of community that Cabin could eventually build an entire guided experience to facilitate the long-tail of neighborhood building in the era of increasing climate catastrophe.

Over the last 10 months, my amazing partner @shirah and I have learned what it takes to gather resources, train neighbors, organize supplies, and prepare for the looming Hayward Fault “big one” that is bound to strike sometime in the next 4 years.

Not only is Shirah my co-conspirator in neighborhood flourishing, she’s also about to be the Emergency Coordinator for the City of Oakland! She’s been compiling all the lessons, insights, and frameworks she’s learned into in-depth Notion workbooks for personal and community preparedness in Oakland.

It’s an unfortunate reality that natural disasters (man-made and naturally-occuring) are going to become a more everyday concern for a wide swath of humanity, and there’s currently no platform built to help communities become more resilient.

This is a massive problem that I believe Cabin can help address.

Headline
Shirah and I are integrating all we learn into the workbook covered above into templates that will soon be available on Gumroad. If you’re interested in a workbook Shirah doesn’t offer, you can fill-out an interest form to stay in touch!

In the Future: an Emergency Utility for Governments

While this would be much further down the line, a major problem in emergency response situations is documentation. If NeighborhoodOS eventually became a mobile app all communities use in their daily lives, it could become the offline-compatible documentation and file organization systems that communities activate when under emergency and need to establish an Incident Command post to head all recovery efforts.

This could unlock massive government contracts, as you’d be able to market it as a public good that saves 100’s of hours of emergency response time in the case of a natural disaster. Paperwork is a top suck of time for first responders, so if neighbors could navigate a familiar app to document the essential activities of their emergency pod within the neighborhood, that’d be a massive godsend for response efforts.

There are two technologies that would be really interesting to explore into an effort to support emergency response tech that needs to work in environments without

1. Any-Sync - local first communication and collaboration
2. Instant - real-time database with offline and multiplayer support

Neighborhood Treasuries

As Shirah and I have built-out our storage facilities, supplies, and community resources, we’ve needed to figure out how to handle money (spoiler: we still haven’t). Opening a traditional bank account sucks, is hella work, can impact credit scores, and is a high responsibility to take-on when we’re really just trying to buy some fire extinguishers, some new baskets, and new medication for our community.

Crypto is a natural solution to this, and I believe Cabin has a resource that very few mainstream normal communities have: Neighborhood Stewards who have every incentive to learn how to use a wallet and interact w crypto in order to unlock resources and grants for their neighborhood. Stewards could function as the crypto off-ramp to Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App. They receive and send cash between Cabin and then divvy it up amongst the neighbors via manual transfers. You gotta do what doesn’t scale to begin, and I think this would be a perfect place to begin.

Headline

The financial rails component of NeighborOS lays the groundwork for neighborhoods to manage their finances efficiently using CABIN + USDC

Key Features:

• Digital Wallets: Each neighbor’s account can activate a wallet via existing Privy integration. This would serve as their key to access the community treasury that would be navigated natively within CabinOS, simplifying the management of funds for local projects and programs.
• CABIN: Residents and stewards earn tokens through activities like using the Neighborhood Dashboard or participating in the RPG elements of the platform. By aggregating CABIN, community members (and therefore treasuries) can unlock:
  • Additional resources and funding from Public Good grants Cabin gets funding from
  • New opportunities for sponsorship from Cabin brand partners to fund the community treasury
• Transparency: The Cabin dashboard can operate as an easy-to-navigate explorer to the neighborhood ledger that contains all data of from financial transactions are secure, visible, and accountable, fostering trust within the community.
• Staking: Automatic staking to return all yield to treasuries. If Cabin did yield farming with a pool of capital distributed across all neighborhoods in the Cabin the network, that could be a sizable pool to get stable yields on.
  • The high-APY Saving Account for your Neighborhood.

By integrating financial rails, Neighborhood OS enables neighborhoods to build sustainable, self-managed economies that align with Cabin’s broader mission to foster decentralized, resilient communities.

Pricing

This deserves a more long-form and intentional discussion, but I believe the Neighborhood Dashboard should be treated as a public good available to all neighborhoods around the world, for free.

The climate crisis impacts everyone, and with wide-spread adoption of mobile phones around the world, software like the one described in the resiliency hub could legitimately save lives and should be made available to as many people as possible.

I believe Cabin should focus on 3 different avenues to build a real business

• Enterprise-pricing for Municipalities looking to foster community ties while preparing for natural disasters
  • Create an emergency-mode to activate in the case of an emergency
    • Resilient and prepared communities need much less help and attention than unprepared ones, meaning governments could save millions by establishing NeighborhoodOS ahead of time to help educate and prepare their communities.
    • For the Loma Prieta Earthquake, total damage estimate for the entire affected region ranged from $5.6 to $6 billion (equivalent to $13.8–14.7 billion today).
  • Cabin could build-out dashboards to help governments service their communities and understand their needs via direct communication during non-emergency times as well
• Treasury Transactions for the on-ramping and off-ramping of treasury funds
  • The real money in a business like this is to be made in facilitating the daily transactions of 1000’s of neighborhoods in the network society. I could easily see our neighborhood transacting anywhere from $500-2,000/month once we’re fully up-and-running with community events and drills, and I imagine this model could scale incredibly well while integrating NAP insights directly into the product to facilitate neighborhood funding
  • Public Good Funding
    • As a reputable brand in the web3 space, Cabin could submit applications to public good funding that could directly disperse funding to neighborhoods around the world that qualify. These funds would be reaching many unattainable communites that web3 protocols are eager to onboard, so any initiatives that can prove to onboard more normie communities will be of high value.
    • Cabin would build-out the rails to get the funding to Stewards, and then Stewards would serve as the off-ramp to convert the crypto into local currencies to compensate and reimburse neighborhood-building activities.
• Sponsored Pricing
  • Enable neighborhood orgs, HOAs, or other community organizations to purchase Enterprise-grade licenses to support their neighborhood and get deeper insights into the health of their community

Final Thoughts

I’m incredibly excited by this idea and have been in discussion with Jon about potentially incubating a version of the Neighborhood Dashboard via a DAO proposal. So I’d be very curious to get your thoughts/responses!

Particularly:

1. Does this resonate with you? If so, why? If not, why not?
2. Am I missing anything? If so, what?
3. If I put together a proposal, would you be interested in taking a look before I post it?

[Dahveed]

This is so well thought-out - love the staking component for treasuries. Missed you two!

[eileen]

Hey Cam! Yes! I am very excited about neighborhood treasuries. We also ran into this problem of where to put money at Elkenmist. This is a big part of my excitement about Hats protocol integration, as Hats is developing a way to use their protocol to token gate access to and ownership of multisigs. I think creating onramps to this type of thing is a great long-term goal for Cabin, but I have been struggling to articulate this vision. I had in mind something very close to what you describe: one or a few members of each community being an intermediary to a crypto safe which holds non-fiat resources for the community.

It’s not true that there is no software to assist building neighborhoods. But there is not an easy to use one that has market capture. I recently got on a Hylo call - Hylo has built an open source platform based on bioreigonal / local coordination over the last years. They are currently going through a redesign of their interface. Pretty sure they would be interested in collaborating, not competing. They are crypto-adjacent. (Used to be crypto maybe? not sure the story).

I was inspired by your presentation on natural disaster preparedness. I think having the info you have curated more easily accessible for folks would be great. I’ve been harping on the idea of an info treasury / wiki. Access to high quality information is the most important thing these days. Especially in case of disaster.

[grin]

@camlindsay thanks for writing this up. I love the idea of every neighborhood having their own online home like this. Also very cool that you’re already building this for your own needs in your community. That’s the best way to build!

How are you thinking about sequencing this work? I’m just starting to feel like my own neighborhood is ready for something like this, but I’m unsure what order I’d build this out. I’m also worried that I’d need to create enough value upfront to get people using it regularly. Otherwise they’ll peek in once and not come back. I’d really want their first experience to be an “aha moment” for them.

What’s nice in your case is that you’ve identified a compelling need around emergency preparedness that I think will drive these decisions for you. I’d love to hear what an MVP of this looks like for your neighborhood (or maybe a live demo of what you’ve built so far?). Also happy to jam on this with you!

[camlindsay]

Thanks for the responses @Dahveed @eileen and @grin! Lots of good stuff brought up, let me address each bit:

EILEEN
Love that both you and Dahveed resonate with the treasury idea! Shirah and I have found it to be pretty annoying and feel like a much simpler, lightweight financial option for neighborhoods would be amazing + provide real incentive for neighbors to onboard.

Re: Hylo, that’s a great point! I hadn’t seen/heard of them before, but based on the description, that sounds very interesting. Seems specific for the bioregional / regen components, but would be curious to hear more about your experience using it to see what works and what’s missing ◡̈

I also love hearing you’d had the idea of being an on-ramp as well! It’s promising signal that 2 active community members thought of this, and bodes well for getting other Stewards onboard and excited about it.

GRIN

Re: already building for my needs

That’s the power of this AI era! I get really excited by this idea of non-technical Cabin community members/stewards creating the products that help serve their community and be able to get retroactive funding for their efforts and potentially integrate with Cabin’s main platform (if that’s something they’re interested in).

I’ve been calling it Community R&D and it’s something I think will become more widespread across web3 and other communities around the world, and am excited to experiment with here.

Re sequencing:
Before getting into exact sequencing, I think it’d be helpful to review a few core goals of this potential project:

• Deliver a product laser-focused on the 1 niche most likely to adopt the Dashboard: the leader/instigator of a lively neighborhood that already has a Google group/email list
• Build a functional MVP that has the essentials for a healthy neighborhood (Calendar, Offers/Needs, Safety)
• Ensure it’s easy for 70+ year olds to use

I’ve built an interface that I believe accomplishes all these goals, but this proposal would be to compensate the effort that got the product here and fund for 2 more months of building to achieve PMF.

The sequencing would be split up into two sections, but

Pre-Proposal

1. Backend - Format data architecture, create database, connect backend to frontend
2. Deploy - Take it off localhost, debug any remaining errors caused by deployment
3. Initial Beta Testers - Spread the word, onboard initial 2-5 neighbors, get feedback, establish 2-3 weekly events to list in the
4. Proposal - Post draft of Proposal, get feedback and edit, put to a vote

Post-Proposal

1. Improve Product - Organize feedback, improve design, address most urgent product holes & bugs
2. Neighbor Research - Onboard next 10-15 neighbors, conduct user research, identify core neighbor needs, integrate learnings
3. Email Automation - Setup automatic notifications for new posts + system to compile the activity in the dashboard into weekly summaries to send to all enrolled neighborhoods

Re: stickiness/retention
The plan here is to have me and Shirah use this platform for all our neighborhood organizing, so instead of Partiful or Luma links, we’ll share a Calendar link to an invite in the Dashboard. In addition to Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, we’ll post our needs/offers to the dashboard.

We’ll locate the neighbors who are most active in the Google Group and make sure they’re aware of the project and onboarded. Then we’ll go to the 15 people who filled-out our survey for neighborhood resilience.

Your question is a good one though and that’s ultimately the question of every platform: what gets people back? Nextdoor is great signal that people want this, and the negative public sentiment about Nextdoor is also great signal that people aren’t satisfied with what’s out there.

My hope is that this can fill-in that gap and be the bedrock for many things to be built upon!

[savkruger]

Hey Cam,
Want to acknowledge that I haven’t responded to this yet! I’ve got some time scheduled over the weekend to review it!

[savkruger]

Hi Cam,

Thanks for all your work on this! Apologies for the delay—it’s been a wild few weeks. Yay that you have a working prototype in Oakland!

1. Love that you’re planning on beta testing. I’m super curious to hear how it goes. If you’d like me to make a few introductions to other neighborhood stewards + folks in the hyper-local tooling space I’m happy to.
2. Public goods funding to onboard folks into crypto makes sense and I think there’s a good case to be made. Also I know Kevin Owocki is especially interested in hyper-localism so applying to a future gitcoin grants round could be promising. Fees for transactions makes sense too.
3. Love the offline + local data storage thinking here!

It’s clear you’ve put a lot of thought into this. I love that you’re solving a problem you and Shirah have experienced firsthand. Excited to see this unfold—let me know how I can support!

[Matai]

Love this idea @camlindsay! And am a huge fan of the work you and Shirah have been doing in Oakland.

Would defininitely want to help trial and build out this tool with our community in Ojai, and would love to see Cabin DAO invest in a mutual aid focused and non-extractive software solution like this, ideally following an open source model to maximize the potential for collaboration.

Look forward to seeing your proposal, and what opportunities for collaboration manifest with what @nickinparadise outlined here: My draft ideas for a Neighborhood OS and beyond.

Happy to support however possible

[jon]

I got the chance to see @camlindsay’s prototype for NeighborhoodOS recently and was excited by what he’s been cooking here.

Looking forward to continuing to see this project develop!