The City of Seattle has created an exciting new web service to help residents find City services within their own neighborhood. Called My Neighborhood, it is located prominently on the seattle.gov homepage.

Announced by Mayor Greg Nickels on March 15, the services shown are the just the beginning of a long series of information that will be featured on this site. Services you’ll find on the site now have a large number of phone numbers or hits on seattle.gov, such as dog off-leash areas. They offer important public safety information, such as police precincts and fire stations, and easily identifiable neighborhood services, such as libraries and children’s play areas.

There are three different ways to enter the site. Click on the map. It’ll take you to a larger map of the city and you can choose an area to explore. Enter your address. You’ll see a one-mile radius around your house. Choose a neighborhood. Then use the zoom bar at the top of the page for a close-up of the area. Once in the map, use the number buttons at the top of the screen to zoom in closer to your site, and use the directional arrows on the side to move north or south, east or west. You can change the address without having to go back out to seattle.gov by using the Find An Address box on the lower right side of the page.

There are multiple features associated with this site. At different zoom levels, you’ll find arterial street names (level 3), side street names (level 4), and when you go to zoom level 6, you’ll get an aerial shot of your address, and it’ll show where the closest fire hydrants are located to your site – important information for your insurance company!

Right now, there are 16 services available on My Neighborhood, with many more to follow in the next several months, including tennis courts, athletic fields, children’s wading pools, motorcycle parking spots and residential parking zones. Two exciting public safety components will be added this spring. The Seattle Fire Department (SFD) is working with DoIT to map out their Real Time 9-1-1 calls. (See their current website here.) And DoIT is also working with the Seattle Police Department (SPD) to show the crime data they currently collect and show on a census tract basis in a more user friendly manner.

The My Neighborhood program staff welcomes your thoughts and comments on items currently being shown, and any suggestions you may have about additional information to include.

On Sunday, March 26, Miller Community Center staff, members of the Miller Community Center Advisory Council and members of Sanctuary Church hosted a grand opening of the Miller Community Center Computer Lab.

Designed to bring computer access to neighbors, the lab will be used by Miller's after-school teen program and made available to other groups and individuals. “We’re excited to be able to have the lab open for the kids,” says Center Coordinator, Charles Humphrey. “It’s a great place for them to explore and learn when they come to the center.”

This lab was made possible through a unique relationship between Miller Community Center and Sanctuary Church. In exchange for meeting space, members of Sanctuary Church updated Miller's computer equipment, installed software, and will be providing lab assistance. “I’m looking forward to helping out and working directly in the community”, says Sanctuary volunteer, Michael Burgett. “We want to provide a positive environment where community members can hang out, have fun and learn about computers.”

Miller Community Center is located in Capitol Hill at 330 19th Avenue E., Seattle. For more information, call (206) 684-4753.

See them online or on cable. For streaming video or the cable schedule go to seattlechannel.org and search for Community Stories.

Connecting Cats and Dogs
April's community story on the Seattle Channel takes a look at cats, dogs and people. Folks with pets often label themselves as either “cat people” or “dog people.” But one thing they can agree on is that animals enrich and enhance our lives, and taking care of them reflects our capacity for good stewardship. Nina Pruneda and Nancy Burke, two volunteers for PAWS Seattle and Seattle Purebred Dog Rescue respectively, have taken it one step further by dedicating their time to homeless cats and dogs and finding them new families. By caring for these critters, Nina and Nancy demonstrate a compassion and respect for living things that can carry out to the community at large.

Seattle was host to the national non-profit technology conference on March 22-24. Sponsored by NTEN, the conference and keynote speeches by Guy Kawasaki of garage.com and Seattle’s Trish Millines Dziko of the Technology Access Foundation TAF. According to Guy, every organization should have a mission statement as well as a mantra. What’s the short phrase you can use to describe the passion of what you do? Trish provided a walk through on how their organization uses technology. This included sections on their web site that enable student alumni and parents to gather, network and participate in developing the organization. Trish also made the decision to move staff from file server architecture to a collaboration tool interface as the business hub for their organization. This enables central file sharing, calendaring, project updates, and posting of issues. See more at NTEN.org, where they are also offering a conference disk with workshop presentations. Locally, the city Community Technology staff have copies of the conference disk. See this month's linkage below for more.

Post these tips in your center and pass them along.

Vendor Offers Software Tests
It can be dangerous to accept offers from vendors to test software on your computer for payment, unless you are very sure of the legitimacy of the vendor. It would be quite easy for them to insert malware onto your computer through their software. They might do so innocently because there was a virus or exploit in their software of which they weren't aware. They might do so intentionally to track your experience or for a more insidious reason, to gain access to your computer. Also, testing software is just inherently dangerous to your computer system, in that you are a guinea pig for any bugs in their application. Doing so on an agency, corporate or government computer system that you don't own is very likely a violation of policy or even ethics laws.

Email scams
A new wave of email scams is hitting many email addresses: requests to help a Nigerian attorney with the $20M estate of your long lost uncle, a new PayPal scheme telling you that your purchase has been approved and your bank will be charged, and Internal Revenue Service messages informing you of mistakes in your favor. Each of these messages offer links where you can "verify" the accuracy of the offer, and links will take you to a server in Bulgaria, Nigeria, or other destination. Within seconds of connecting to those servers, your computer will be loaded up with all sorts of new software, much of which you will probably never know exists. Anything you divulge to the forms on those websites will become the property of identity thieves.

Please be vigilant and cautious about email correspondence. If you're not sure, don't click. Just delete.

Satterberg Foundation - Capacity Building Grants
Deadline: Ongoing
Provides funds to organizations in the Pacific Northwest for capacity building to increase skills, resources and commitment to accomplishing the mission.

Seattle Foundation Community Grantmaking
Deadline: Ongoing
Provides funds to nonprofits performing work that meets the basic needs of its residents; promotes health and wellness; establishes quality education and learning opportunities for all ages; ensures a vibrant and diversified economy; provides broad access to arts and cultural opportunities; fosters strong and connected neighborhoods and communities; and protects and stewards its natural environment.

Charles Stuart Mott Foundation - Pathways out of Poverty
Deadline: Ongoing, Letter of Inquiry
Provides funds to address poverty through community organizing, education and economic opportunity grants.

Radio Shack Street Sentz Community Grants
Deadline: June 15
Provides funds for the prevention of family violence/abuse and/or child abduction.

This month's linkage was gathered from recent NTEN and Innovation Funders Network conferences:

TakingItGlobal is an online community that connects youth to find inspiration, access information, get involved, and take action in their local and global communities.

YouthRadio.org
Promotes young people’s growth through training and media access. The site features a wide range of high quality audio programs produced by youth.

gamesforchange.org
Games for Change is working to build the field of digital games media within the social sector. They share information on games practices and provide a community of practice for npo’s artists, traders and developers. This includes digital social media like The Meatrix and Storewars organic rebellion.

E-primers on free/open source software, e-business, ICT in education, technology for poverty elimination and more from the UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme.

Dotmocracy
Use the dot system effectively to prioritize options among a large number of people. Participants apply dot stickers next to a variety of written proposals to show which ones they prefer. The final result is a graph-like visual representation of the group's collective preferences. This site provides instructions, case studies and template sheets.

Back issues of Brainstorm including techtips and linkage are now available in our online archives. Previous TechTips and Linkage are also available. Click to revisit all previous issues.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to Brainstorm, please email us, and we'll add you to our email notification list, or subtract you per your request. If you have ideas for future stories, please let us know and we'll try to accommodate them. We encourage you to visit the City of Seattle's Community Tech pages, seattle.gov/tech.