Harnessing technology as part of the solution
We must learn to use data technology not just for corporations to create profit, but to meet our most profound personal and social needs.
To be successful a Local Networking app has to keep people returning to it day after day. It must address multiple needs and provide multiple benefits. In this way, users encounter new (socially beneficial) services and opportunities and start to engage with them.
What a Local Network offers:
- The hope that someone will provide employment will, for many people, be misplaced. The only solution is to provide effective tools for people to create their own employment. People need current information on start-up businesses that have been successful elsewhere and can be successful in their own locality. Once a user identifies a local need, free local advertising tools enable them to create a tiny local business with almost no capital. A Local Network enables all of this.
- To re-build a healthy democracy, we desperately need better tools to keep informed, better tools to filter out hate and misinformation, better tools to discuss and better tools to make decisions – locally – together. A Local Network provides all of this.
- Mental Health services can never be funded adequately to provide the level of support everybody needs. The only way to address this huge area is to change the way people access personally relevant information, problem-solving strategies and really local informal support. A Local Network does this.
- Most Local Network functionality helps the user to make connections with other local people. The User’s Private Area helps people to reflect privately on what they want to achieve, problems they want to overcome and opportunities they want to create. Because a Local Network is not commercially based, users know that their data is secure from the prying eyes of commercial companies seeking to exploit them. Our task is to link the user to the existing authoritative information that is most relevant to the needs they themselves identify.
- The pandemic has shown that people still have a deep desire to be part of a healthy, mutually supportive society and are willing to go the extra mile for others. Many more people offered to volunteer than were used. A Local Network provides the mechanism to use ALL of this local social potential.
