“Medical research has found there is a direct link between good health and living with a sense of community. People with strong social ties tend to have lower healthcare costs, recover faster from illness, and live longer.”
Airbnb For Workspaces Allows Mobile Creatives To Connect & Collaborate
“This goes beyond renting a desk, it’s all about creating and engaging a community of like-minded professionals, I like to think of it as a physical professional network. It creates this serendipitous opportunity for other people who want to connect and join a community, not just a desk.”
(via good)
FavorTree - New App Uses Gamification For Social Good - Forbes
A new mobile app called FavorTree is harnessing the competitive energy that makes online games like FarmVille successful and using it to fortify real-life communities.
FavorTree, which opened for pre-registration today, rewards users for sharing goods and services with their neighbors. Each time users do favors for their neighbors — like lending textbooks, giving rides to the airport, or helping with chores — their virtual “trees” gain fruit.
In this video I interview Liz Strauss, founder and business strategist at SOBCon.
Liz shares why businesses need a community to exist today and what you need to know to successfully build one to develop your business.
Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.
Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:
Citizen Planet Hunters Help Scientists Locate Distant Worlds
Citizen science, first with protein folding video games, and now the search for distant planets:
“This Planet Hunters project, with 400,000 users worldwide, supplements the work of scientists from the Kepler project, who are looking at light patterns of 150,000 stars for tell-tale signs of far away rocky worlds crossing in their path.
The data from the Kepler Mission were released to the public in December, 2010, and the two exoplanets were flagged within the next month. The astronomers described the two new planet potentials—the first to be found by the public—in a new study that describes how crowd sourcing data from the Kepler Mission is valuable tool in the hunt for exoplanets. (Anyone who contributed to the project and chose to have their name released is publically acknowledged here).”
(via Fast Company)
(via jtotheizzoe)
CitySourced, a new app for Android, iPhone and Blackberry, helps you stay up to date on what’s going on in your area and helps get the word out on issues. For example, if you see a street light is out, you can take a picture of it and submit it. If you see graffiti, you can swipe a quick drive-by (careful!) picture and report it. Once an issue is reported, the app posts the problem, alerts City Hall, and puts a notice out on Twitter. www.androidphonesblog.com CitySourced for Android keeps you informed on issues in your city
Tools to help Communities help Themselves! SeeClickFix: Report non-emergency issues, receive alerts in your neighborhood
“They are often used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. Social media can help foster communities but social media can be limited to allowing a conversation around content…which is *not* community.”
“Right now the market seems to get social media but we still have a long way to go in helping companies understand the value, requirements, and needs of communities.”
Thinking Visually
