When the Cantrice Court Homeowners Assn. voted recently to ban skateboarding in their gated Simi Valley community, the skaters' parents turned to the association's fledgling Web site to voice their frustration.
Community parents, who felt the board was overstepping its authority, posted messages on the site calling on their neighbors to help overturn the ban. It worked: These messages and a subsequent door-to-door campaign by parents convinced the association to reverse itself.
Association President Michael Harley said if it weren't for the association's year-old Web site, time-strapped parents living among the community's 98 townhomes probably wouldn't have rallied enough opposition to make themselves heard.
"People are using this thing as a vehicle to incite crowds," Harley quipped. "It's like giving people their own newspaper."
Cantrice Court is one of thousands of homeowners associations and communities that are creating Web sites they hope will entice residents to get involved in their neighborhoods. In the beginning, these sites--most appeared online in the last year--were little more than electronic suggestion boxes and a place to post meeting minutes.
But neighborhood networks are slowly forging a sense of community that many argue has been lost in a time of gated suburbs and double-income families who see little enough of each other--much less their neighbors.
"We're having this long hand-wringing debate about apathy in public life in America," said Andrew Cohill, the director of the Blacksburg Electronic Village in Blacksburg, Va. "It's early, but it looks like it's actually fairly simple to increase involvement in civic affairs if you take time to show people how to get online."
More than 87% of the town's 38,000 residents use Blacksburg's 7-year-old community intranet, at http://www.bev.org, to shop local businesses' Web sites and to find out what's happening in the area. The network highlights the potential for many of today's fledgling neighborhood networks. The majority of the town's residents are hooked into the network through high-speed lines.
Technically, neighborhood networks operate in several ways. Intranets like the one in Blacksburg are computer networks that work like the Internet, but are only available to selected people. Most homeowners associations use password-protected Web sites hosted by one of several Internet firms that also provide software to help these groups create their sites.
