The amazingly productive e-democracy hackers at mySociety.org have rolled out their latest deviously simple web service, GroupsNearYou.com. As mySociety’s founder Tom Steinberg explains,
“There’s a proven real world social value to people belonging to very local email lists and other forms of local online community. However there is no eBay or Craiglist or other market dominant player in the local online community world, instead there’s a myriad of google groups, yahoo groups, Facebook & other YASN groups, extremely old school CCed email lists, online forums and so on. As a consequence of not having one big simple place to go to find and join local groups (many of which are not even on the web for Google to find) far fewer people ever find out about and join their local online groups.”
GroupsNearYou can help change that, by making it ridiculously easy to syndicate information about local online communities. You simply type in an address or zip code into the search box, and the site points you to existing lists, or prompts you to add groups you know–or even to start your own.
When you combine this kind of localized information with all the ways that the web has made it ridiculously easy for form groups (see Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody, which I am enjoying immensely, for more on that germinal idea), you will get even greater synergies of local organization and action. GroupsNearYou looks simple, but it could be dangerous.