Building Community
Running into some rock on our latest complex project on 726 Bermuda seemed like a major problem. It meant jack-hammering, day after day, until we could excavate down to the proper level in order to build the house.
And, as you can imagine, the neighbors weren’t happy.
What did we do? Apologized profusely for all of the noise. Then, we started giving the neighborhood regular updates. We also accommodated neighbors by not doing any after-hours or weekend jack-hammering.
It was the regular updates that sparked an idea. Why don’t we share our “Jenkins Homeonwer Home Page” to the neighbors and start a community forum there? Using a technology that we built in-house and already employed, we found that the neighborhood appreciated knowing more about the project and being able to share it with their friends and family who don’t live in the neighborhood. After all, a project this complex and amazing doesn’t happen every day.
Notice that we post updates daily. This really adds to the value of the site. We found that many of our vendors and trade partners are also watching the site for various reasons. It now gets almost as many hits as our blog site every day!
By accident, really, we ended up building community through technology that we already used. It has helped us to be more patient and understanding about how we are affecting the neighbors every day, and it has helped them see the challenges posed by the project and how we are working to be good neighbors in the midst of it all.
