Global Neighborhood Watch[1] is an article by Neal Stephenson that appeared in Wired Magazine in 1998. In it he proposes a specific plan for using information technology to fight crime.He is no longer pursuing the idea. Neal Stephenson Neal Town Stephenson (b. ...
The following is an excerpt from Stephenson's FAQ[2]:
>Neal, I read your piece in WIRED about Global Neighborhood Watch and I think it sucks/I think it's a great idea/I want to get involved in it.
The Global Neighborhood Watch piece is now very very very old. It is a demonstration of one of the chief drawbacks of the Internet, namely, that nothing ages there, and so people who stumble across ancient documents have no way of knowing that they are long out of date*. From time to time, someone will happen upon that article, or it will get mentioned in a newsgroup, and I'll get a flurry of messages about it.
Nothing is happening with Global Neighborhood Watch. Nothing ever did, and in all likelihood, nothing ever will.
-[Unless of course the article is dated, or unless they double-check the information by going to other web pages which deal with the particular subject].
Just as a traditional neighborhoodwatch deputizes people living on the same block to prevent local crime, the globalwatch would turn participants into mobile intelligence gatherers, feeding data from chemical sensors or simply with their own eyes into a sophisticated, governmentrun system that would create hypotheses about what that data means.
GlobalNeighborhoodWatch, while possibly becoming a giant dot collector, would marry the filtering and cognitive power of human beings with the computational power of advanced technology - something the professors call a "socio-computational" approach to intelligence analysis.
With traditional neighborhoodwatches, which have operated for years and contribute to a reduction in crime, citizens have agreed that policing their own neighborhoods, while diminishing personal privacy, offers substantial benefits, he says.
Neighbourhood Watch means that neighbours in a neighbourhood joins and collaborates to prevent crime.
Neighbourhood Watch is run in collaboration with the police, insurance companies, property owners, local crime prevention counsil and the habitants of a community.
Neighbourhood Watch is not a citizen vigilance commitee.
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