Inside and Outside Your Village
One of the biggest decisions we faced during the early stages of planning ZipcodeVillage.com was how much access users should have to villages other than their own. We felt strongly that in Version 1.0, we needed to preserve the sanctity and integrity of a village. In other words, the design and technical system should keep posts and interaction happening inside a zip code. Otherwise, the core concept of tying together a zip code and a village would fall apart.
That’s all well and good. But it’s obvious from our first users that posting to a “forum of one” produces ghost towns, rather than villages. So, we’re now going back to the drawing board and thinking about how to make our users’ homepages come to life with links to posts in other villages, and thus allow a national community of people interested in building communities to collaborate with each other–and to build up their own community connections at the same time. We will begin the process of aggregating all kinds of other news and resources about zip codes that are available on the web.
P.S. We’re creating a flyer in pdf form that any user can download and tack up at local hangouts and telephone poles, and ready to drop in mailboxes on your street. Contact us if you would like one of these flyers.