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Citizen Infrastructure

The Outer Sunset: a neighborhood builds its own tech

When Josh Nesbit realised his kids would likely grow up on the same San Francisco block for the next thirty years, he wanted his neighbours to know him and look out for his kids — and he wanted to do the same for theirs. After fifteen years building software for community health workers around the world, he had, by his own account, helped people knock on doors hundreds of millions of times “before I knocked on my neighbour’s door once.”

So he started small. He and his daughter made a flyer inviting the block to coffee and donuts in their driveway, and tucked it into every nook and cranny on the street. Handwritten thank-you notes came back the next day; people, it turned out, were “waiting for an invitation.” That gathering became the seed for a string of small, homemade tools — a working example of relational tech.

What the neighbourhood built

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  • Cozy Corner (cozycorner.place) — a little hub “just for our street.” Its very first service was free street-cleaning reminders: tell it which side of the street you’re on, and it texts you before the sweeper comes so you stop getting parking tickets. It grew into a block-party planner where neighbours sign up for roles. It even uses deliberate “good friction” — a “neighbour coupon” can only be redeemed through Josh, so a real introduction happens.
  • outersunset.today — a community dashboard pulling together what’s happening within about twenty blocks. Text a flyer or poster to it and it adds the event; a newsletter goes out on Mondays. (The most-loved feature: a “pizza ticker” showing the local bakery’s daily toppings, so families know whether their kid will eat dinner.)
  • A neighbourhood field guide — a past/present/future walking guide built with a local history archive, artists, and historians. Its best result, Josh says, wasn’t the app — it was the bridging connections the process of building it created.

Why it’s a story worth knowing

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None of these are big platforms; each is a small tool that met a real, local need and, in doing so, gave neighbours a reason to turn toward each other. One of them — a tool-sharing app — spread to hundreds of other neighbourhoods (see Community Supplies). It’s a vivid, ordinary picture of what relational tech and locality-to-locality spreading look like in practice, built through the Relational Technology Project.

Sources

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