More frequent than alerts are the hundreds of discussions that happen each year on blocks that use rBlock. These now aggregate into the tens of thousands since our beginning.

From the ones that residents have told us about, we’ve come to appreciate that while discussions are wide-ranging in terms of their topics, they almost always exhibit the goodwill that exists among line-of-sight neighbors. Mostly they’re about getting something important done, or involve exchanging useful information, quickly and efficiently. And they seem to almost always succeed in the eyes of their participants.

More importantly, by adding more communication where so much goodwill already exists, residents achieve something far more tangible and valuable than any alert or discussion could possibly provide. They create a norm of trust and reciprocity that any one resident can tap into at the push of a button, and feel really good about.

For this reason, we encourage residents who join rBlock to do “whatever it takes” to get half their block to join them, as we did when we first started rBlock. The other half will follow soon.