In order to build local you have to grow local
I have been thinking increasingly about local and hyperlocal initiatives and communites recently – which is something I think we as a society needs to hold on to, in these days of connectedness. So this post is about offline communities – kind of like my own offline initiative for online people called IRL.
I’ll be the first to admit that don’t know the people who lives around me, yet I know so much more about people I meet online and IRL with common interest. This frightens me a bit. I have some idea about who these people are, but the communication in our local area is pretty much non-existent (I don’t really do a lot to participate in it, either). However I think everyone around my hood has a good connection with the small supermarket that more often than good is, is actually supplying us with a pretty big ammount of groceries that would be less expensive everywhere else. But my supermarket is a party, meaning that he celebrates birthday and he has a small ammount of some really cool products – products that are quite unusual for a danish small supermarket. I think he really saw real soon that around here there is no community between people. He started to make speciel events, postings of what is happening in the local gym hall and school and basically become a centerpoint for the community.
You are kind of scared of them because they seem to know everything. At the same point, they are becoming an invaluable piece in everybody’s life around here because instead of just building local – the are actually making the local community grow as well. It makes me happy =)
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