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@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.
Iāve been dreaming-up the platform to help us run the operations of our neighborhood, The Terrific Terrace right off of Piedmont. Iāve been calling it NeighborhoodOS, a social utility designed to instigate and organize local communities around the world.
As Iāve continued thinking about this, Iāve 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
@grin and @jon already have some product ideas moving with how to build software to support the Neighborhood Accelerator. Iām excited for the direction theyāre heading.
Itās 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:
- Generate goodwill and loyalty with Neighborhood Stewards (who are essential to the longevity of Cabin)
- Provide real-world incentives to progress through the entire Neighborhood Accelerator program
- Requires Neighborhood Stewards to become comfortable with Crypto rails (an essential component to the viability of Neighborhood Treasuries.
Neighborhood Dashboard
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 itās 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.
Hereās a screenshot of the Notion page where I include a more high-res screenshot of what Iāve built for our neighborhood thus-far. It includes info on what each section of the dashboard is for.
Neighborhood Resilience
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 ābig oneā that is bound to strike sometime in the next 4 years.
Not only is Shirah my co-conspirator in neighborhood flourishing, sheās also about to be the Emergency Coordinator for the City of Oakland! Sheās been compiling all the lessons, insights, and frameworks sheās learned into in-depth Notion workbooks for personal and community preparedness in Oakland.
Itās 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 thereās currently no platform built to help communities become more resilient.
This is a massive problem that I believe Cabin can help address.
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Shirah and I are integrating all we learn into the workbook covered above into templates that will soon be available on Gumroad. If youāre interested in a workbook Shirah doesnāt 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 youād be able to market it as a public good that saves 100ās 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, thatād 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
- Any-Sync - local first communication and collaboration
- 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, weāve needed to figure out how to handle money (spoiler: we still havenāt). Opening a traditional bank account sucks, is hella work, can impact credit scores, and is a high responsibility to take-on when weāre 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 doesnāt scale to begin, and I think this would be a perfect place to begin.
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The financial rails component of NeighborOS lays the groundwork for neighborhoods to manage their finances efficiently using CABIN + USDC
Key Features:
- Digital Wallets: Each neighborās 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 Cabinās 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 $13.8ā14.7 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
- Create an emergency-mode to activate in the case of an emergency
- 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 1000ās of neighborhoods in the network society. I could easily see our neighborhood transacting anywhere from $500-2,000/month once weāre 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
Iām 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 Iād be very curious to get your thoughts/responses!
Particularly:
- Does this resonate with you? If so, why? If not, why not?
- Am I missing anything? If so, what?
- If I put together a proposal, would you be interested in taking a look before I post it?