Thursday, May 9, 2013

Join Medlock Park's Nextdoor community

Medlock neighbors: there's a new community-building tool available, and we hope you will check it out. Nextdoor is free, and differs from other neighborhood online groups (Yahoo group, Facebook) in that
Only people who actually live in a neighborhood are eligible to join the Nextdoor network for their area and everybody has to use their real identities on the site, which Nextdoor says is essential for keeping the quality of conversations on the site high.
A Nextdoor community called Medlock Park has been established by the MANA neighborhood watch coordinator. Since safety announcements are of interest to neighbors who live near MANA, at their request, our Nextdoor boundary has been extended to include additional streets as follows:

By request, "Medlock Park" Nextdoor boundaries extend slightly beyond MANA boundaries.
For MANA boundaries, see our About page.
To join the Medlock Park Nextdoor community, sign up via https://medlockparkga.nextdoor.com/login/. Nextdoor uses publicly available information to confirm that the person signing up resides at the stated location. If you are a resident and are not able to sign up, contact manawatch@gmail.com for assistance.

Birds-eye View of Nextdoor:

Nextdoor's default
appearance.
What's the point? Nextdoor offers an opportunity for discussions that only include residents of MANA and nearby streets. You can email neighbors who are members, invite neighbors who are not, see the neighborhood resident directory, and start discussions on topics relevant to our community.

I just want to get neighborhood watch alerts: Not interested in neighborhood discussions? No problem! Go to your Settings {under your name, via drop-down menu on the top right margin}, then click on Email, and you will be able to customize what types of alerts arrive to your email or to your text-enabled phone. For example, if you only wish to receive emergency alerts, you can set the "Urgent Alerts (SMS)" item to "immediate updates" and set all other potential notifications to "no email". Otherwise, you can follow discussions via Nextdoor on your web browser, or by enabling email alerts to new discussion items.

Who is reading this stuff? Information you add to Nextdoor is only visible to other Medlock Nextdoor members. You have the option of including additional information in your profile (e.g., pets, hobbies, etc) but this is not required.

Per Nextdoor's policy, neighbors should not share content posted on the Medlock Nextdoor site with non-members.  "Nextdoor's Privacy Policy forbids people from sharing content posted on a Nextdoor website with people who do not yet live in the neighborhood. However, an agent can describe generally how Nextdoor is used in the neighborhood and display the Nextdoor Demo site to illustrate how the website works."

 !  Please refer to Nextdoor's Guidelines and Member Agreement regarding appropriate use of the site and its content.

Organization: See screenshot above. By default, Nextdoor allows users to post comments or start discussions under the following categories: Classified, Crime and Safety, Documents, Free Items, General, Lost & Found, and Recommendations. These posts are visible to all Medlock Nextdoor members. 

Private Groups: Members also may create additional interest groups that can be public [Medlock users can join with a click] or private [must await moderator permission]. The creator of the group is the default moderator and can add additional users (but as noted, for a public group, members can add themselves). Posts to a group appear in the "news feeds" for the above categories (General, Classified, Crime, etc.). In the case of a public group, the comment is visible to everyone, but for a private group, the comment is visible to subscribers only.

Too much! If a neighbor becomes too much for you, you can find them through the neighborhood directory and mute them; their posts will disappear from all discussions you view.

Documents: We can upload documents to share with our neighbors. 

Events: Users can create events and descriptions thereof. Again, such information is only visible to Medlock Nextdoor users.

You may notice the Nearby Neighborhoods link in the above image. This feature is currently disabled as Nextdoor.com works out the details to allow communication between different Nextdoor neighborhoods.

Can I invite my neighbor to join? Yes. Just follow the instructions at https://medlockparkga.nextdoor.com/invitation_email/?is=schp