The Local Connection Lab

The Chamber of Connection recently interviewed me about the personal story behind Hey There Neighbor: how I could have a full social calendar and still feel disconnected from the people immediately around me, and why that started to look less like an individual problem and more like a design problem.

What I appreciated most about the piece is that it centers the person I keep trying to design for. Not the natural community organizer who will knock on every door or start a block party, but the average person, who would like more local connection if there were an easy, low-pressure way into it.

“I'd really like to connect with people, but I'm not going to knock on a stranger's door. I'm not going to strike up an elevator conversation. Starting a block party honestly seems like my worst nightmare.”

Read the full interview here →

My neighbors and I silently stared at elevator buttons together for years, not knowing that we all wanted to connect. Now I bump into people I know most times I leave home.

It turned out we didn’t have a connection problem. We had a logistics problem.

Your downstairs neighbor is across town at a Finnish Folk Dance concert they found on Eventbrite. You’ve signed up for a “dinner with strangers” app to make friends. Meanwhile, the people we share walls and streets with remain strangers.

There are great people all around us, but the way we live makes it both socially and logistically awkward to connect with the people nearby.

This is why I built “Hey there Neighbor!” — a tool pairing neighbors for 10-minute chats. Here are some forces that keep us apart, and how a tiny 10-minute intervention addresses them:

1. Perceived Social Risk: We consistently underestimate how much people want to connect, so we stay quiet and never correct our misconception.

Solution: We know our neighbors want to talk to us because they’ve signed up for a 10-minute chat!

2. Ambiguous Social Scripts: We don’t know what neighborly connection looks like. 12% don’t know a single neighbor and only 30% know their neighbors beyond a casual level. Is a quick laundry chat actually an ambush with John’s entire life story?

Solution: Everyone is explicitly agreeing to a 10-minute chat and nothing more.

3. Limited Spaces to Interact: We encounter neighbors in elevators, sidewalks, or cars: spaces designed for transit, not connection. So starting a conversation feels like an interruption.

Solution: Once we've met, those same transit spaces facilitate easy, natural moments of connection.

4. No Low-Stakes Entry Point: Even when we want to meet our neighbors, knocking on a stranger’s door feels intrusive. Hosting a block party, or even just dinner, is exhausting. So we do nothing.

Solution: We have an easy way to meet: a 10 minute chat around the corner.

5. The "Solitary Participant" Barrier: Not knowing anyone at an event means no one is expecting you, it’s awkward to introduce yourself, and you might not even like who’s there. So local events struggle to attract attendees.

Solution: When we know even one person, we are more likely to show up and meet others, reinforcing a cycle of participation and local connection.

6. Time-Intensive Norms for Socializing: Because we can now find people and activities anywhere, we do, filling our calendars with plans that require coordination, travel, and real time commitment. So we only make plans when we have hours to spare, which is rarely to never.

Solution: A 10-minute chat fits into the busiest of schedules. Not another “let’s get dinner next month”, but “join me for a walk around the block in 5?”

It turns out many of my neighbors did want to meet each other! We just needed a little logistical help.

Something that seemed almost unattainable, a local community life, is becoming reality. And building it was unexpectedly easy.

If you're curious what this looks like in practice, I've been running it in my neighborhood and would love to help you pilot it in yours.

"Want to take a walk?" - my friend Mari texted. I hadn't talked to a human all day. I did want to take a walk.

But I didn't go.

It was 6pm. Mari was a 45 minute bus ride away. By the time I got there, the sun would be setting. After the walk and an hour and a half of commuting, I wouldn't have time to do laundry.

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I had a full social life. On paper. Dinners, sports leagues, group chats, trips. But I somehow felt simultaneously overscheduled and lonely. Every social interaction required an act of will and a bus ride.

At some point I had an idea so obvious it seemed stupid: what if I just ...met my neighbors?

So I went looking for people who had already met their neighbors.

I met people with extraordinary conviction, organizational skills, geographic commitment, and a full-time unpaid job. They had built their own thriving neighborhood communities by knocking on doors, organizing block parties, and spending years building relationships.

Well. If that's what it takes to meet our neighbors, 99% of us are doomed to an eternity of commuter loneliness.

Few of us volunteer as social leaders at all. Those who do are busy building friend groups, hobby groups, cause-based communities, not neighborhoods. I've never lived near a neighborhood community builder. No one I know has either.

This only reinforced my conviction that we need an easier path to local community. For the average person.

"Surely someone's already built this," I thought. A civic nonprofit? A cool founder type? Nextdoor? But they hadn't.

So I built a thing.

I matched people living nearby for 10-minute chats: an easy way to say hi, without planning or the pressure to commit to something longer. If I made friends, that would be awesome. If I met nice people to wave to at the grocery store, that would be awesome. If I found a vacation pet-sitter for my parrot, that would be awesome too.

So I put a flyer in my building: "Meet your neighbors!"

Not a single person scanned it.

I almost gave up. But something kept nagging at me. Every psychology paper I'd ever read agreed that we don't socialize enough for our own wellbeing. And neighbors seemed like such an obvious solution.

The problem, I realized, was the approach.

"Meet your neighbors" didn't resonate because most people in my neighborhood (transplants, renters, people who'd moved for a job) didn't have a mental model for neighbors as a source of connection. Neighbors are people you avoid in the elevator. Not people you actually know.

So I tried different flyers: "Friends? Neighbors make the best friends, because they're already here." "Cowork? Join our coffee shop coworking group chat."

With these, strangers were making accounts on an unheard-of app from a flyer on the street.

A neighbor down the block from me made an account. Someone at a meetup told him "there is this neighbor meeting app you should try." Someone in a different state made an account because they zoomed in on a friend's Strava photo, saw my flyer, and thought it looked interesting.

I've watched my own neighborhood community grow through this project. Many of us had lived here for years and didn't know anyone around. People have made friends in their own buildings. One neighbor even hired another one. There were great people around the corner all along. We just needed a way to meet.

In the process, I seem to be becoming one of those rare neighborhood community builders I'd gone looking for. Except I got here by accident, through a flyer and some code.

What was missing in my neighborhood was something that makes meeting the people around us normal, routine, unremarkable.

Some of us will meet one neighbor. Some of us will make a friend. Some of us will build a whole community.