What is a neighbourhood network?

There are three ways to look at Neighbourhood as a network.

Is it a people-people (social) network? Is it a business-business (commerce) network? Is it a people-business (transaction-driven) non-network?

We at Onemyle have gone through multiple iterations visualising neighbourhood as a network.

One of my favourite slides from our internal discussions is this:

It starts with a hypothesis that a bunch of service providers come together to define a neighbourhood.. It generally starts with a larger radius of say 8-10km and starts shrinking when more self-contained pockets pop up. Self-contained would mean availability of larger set of service providers within that pocket reducing the need to avail of services from the outside. At this point the smaller pocket becomes a neighbourhood/locality by itself.

In our internal discussions around Networks, I have often quoted Prof. Suresh from NSRCEL, IIMB (disclosure: right from my JustBooks incubation days, I have gained a lot from my interactions with him) and pushed our line of thinking around things he says on - "Strength of weak ties", "Bonding" type Vs "Bridging" type etc

So, it is our theory that Neighbourhood is not just a social network.. Then what is it? Will talk about it in the coming posts..

Meanwhile, for people interested below is video where he talks about Social Capital and explains some Network philosophies in that context.. Its a slightly long talk and starts a little slow.. But one ends up gaining some very useful insights by the end..