An operating system for neighborhoods

Neighborhoods that solve their own problems.

Pick one sharp pain on your block. Ship a working tool for it in weeks. Use the tool to build trust, capacity, and self-governance. Rotate to the next pain when the first one is handled. That is the whole idea.

01 / Approach

The wedge approach.

Most civic software tries to do everything for everyone. It ends up doing nothing for anyone.

neighborhoodOS goes the other way. We start with one concrete pain in one real neighborhood and ship a working tool for it in weeks, not quarters. When the tool earns trust, we keep it running and pick the next pain.

A pain has to pass four tests.

  1. Concrete. You can describe it in one sentence at a kitchen table.
  2. Costly. People are losing money, time, or dignity to it right now.
  3. Local. The fix works at the block level without waiting on policy.
  4. Swappable. If we build the wrong thing, we can stop and pick something else without tearing out the platform.
The platform stays. The wedge changes. The core of neighborhoodOS is the same across every wedge. What swaps is the specific tool we build on top for the current pain.
02 / Pilot

Home maintenance brigade.

West Waldo, Kansas City, Missouri. Owner-occupied homes only. No rentals. No landlords.

Once a month, a group of neighbors picks one homeowner who cannot afford to fix their own house, and we go fix one thing. Roof patch. Porch rebuild. Storm-door replacement. Gutter haul. Whatever the house actually needs, picked from a list the homeowner helped write.

This is closer to a Habitat for Humanity work day than a tech product. Habitat builds new houses with volunteers and donated materials. We do the same thing, but for the houses that already exist on our blocks, and we do it every month, on the same Saturday, so people can plan around it.

The software does not swing the hammer. People swing the hammer. The software keeps track of who, what, where, when, and what got bought.

Who does what.

People

The brigade

Neighbors with hands. Some are tradespeople, retired or working. Most are not. The retired plumber leads a plumbing day. The carpenter leads a porch day. Everyone else hauls, scrapes, paints, holds the ladder, brings food.

People

The homeowner

Lives in the house. Owns the house. Cannot afford to pay for the fix. Picks the project from a short list scoped to what we can finish in one day. Is on site, makes the call on what gets done, gets thanked at the end.

Software

Logistics

Matches the next house to the next Saturday. Tracks who said they could come and what skill they bring. Builds a supplies list from the project type. Records what got done and what is still on the list for next month.

Software

Memory

Keeps a record of every house we have visited and every fix we have made. So a year from now, we know which roofs we patched, which porches still need a railing, and which neighbors said yes the first time.

What working looks like at 90 days.

If those numbers do not show up at 90 days, we rotate the wedge. The platform stays, the wedge changes. No shame.

03 / Code

Open source. Local first.

All code is open source. MIT licensed. Runs locally on one neighborhood node. No central server.

Repo layout

core/   node entry, shared wiring
connectors/   city data, social signals
ingest/   cron-ready scripts
identity/   trust levels, voting
wedges/   the swappable part
site/   this page

Quick start

git clone
cd neighborhoodos
npm install
cd wedges/home-maintenance
node fetch-all.js
node ingest-all.js

Mirrored on GitHub and Codeberg. Issues welcome. Expect breaking changes weekly until v1.

04 / People

Who is behind it.

One person, in one neighborhood, right now. Simon L. Paige in West Waldo, KCMO. Runs a small web design business and a few other things by day. This is where the rest of the energy goes.

If the pilot works, this becomes a real thing with real governance. Until then, it is a kitchen-table project you can watch and contribute to.

Related, not merged. Commonweave is a sibling project — a framework and open directory for the broader commons-and-cooperatives movement. neighborhoodOS can optionally use the Commonweave directory to answer "who is already working on this near me?" when a wedge calls for it. The two projects are independent.