Blogging from Linux Caffe. Himy (one of Sacha's friends) is interested in creating neighbourhood-level tools for allowing users to both enhance their own communities and share that information with other similar communities.

I'm thinking it would be helpful if there was a taxonomy of neighbourhood types that would allow communities to self-identify (or be professionally identified) in order to create communities of like neighbourhoods. This is probably a project for an academic; a social scientist or the like.

Would likely be a survey, then a sifting and sorting to produce characteristics. You'd organise the sites either by clusters of similar characteristics or have a sorting/searching system to match on characteristics (i.e. you could have the communities that share a particular characteristics sharing their ideas even if they're not exactly similar communities).