Background

Representatives from the City of Sacramento Neighborhood Services (we're gonna call them "City Folk" for brevity) was looking for volunteers to help them create something that would make it easier for neighborhood leaders connect with each other and grow. This sounded ambiguous and fun so I wanted a piece of the action, I was unaware of how much pie I signed up for

Project Goal

In the first meeting with the City Folks the surfaced a number of issues they were hoping we could solve in this project.

Illustrating the is the pains and solutions helped us realize that we were taking on too much at once and needed to focus on the most impactful pain to solve, so we focused on solving Tracking Issues.

We came out with three key goals for our solution:

• Neighborhood Leaders need to report issues to the city. Everyone needs to be able to see those issues.
• We want other Leaders to see common issues across neighborhoods so they can self organize ways to solve those shared issues.
• Issues in our platform should be on a higher level than potholes and downed lights, more like homeless camps and illegal dumping.

Story board of the pain being solved. Also "NeiCon" is a terrible name, I know that now.

Validating the Concept

All the conversation at up to this point has just been with the City Folk, but I felt it was very important to hear the pains from the Neighborhood Leaders themselves.

We attended a number of neighborhood leadership meetings and showcased the concept to refine the design by their feedback.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/11d0dda5-54f5-40ea-a55f-57092db79657/Neighborhood_Connect_Notes_June_20th.pdf

Designing

Once we felt confident with the solution I quickly spun up some designs.