About Street Groups Limited

Street Groups Limited is creating an opportunity to put community life back into local neighbourhoods. It depends for success entirely on the density of community support in each street. You can have a conversation with people who never meet each other, anywhere on the Internet, but only in a street or a school or a workplace, is that discussion with people you can regularly see face to face.

It makes a huge difference to the quality of the street if almost all the residents are involved. It's a different conversation, and it creates a strong sense of connection.

Because Street Groups depend on an email connection, those who are a little afraid socially, elderly people perhaps, or people passing through a residence, students in a flat for instance, need not feel they should not join. Your presence affects the quality of the street. The mail in your Inbox may be more interesting than you imagine.

Street Groups is a company developed by myself, John Stephen Veitch. Many years ago, I developed a very successful web site NZDances, where over 700 people from around the world contributed content to the site. More recently he created the Open Future web site, which looks at the values we hold dear and how we might build a future that lives up to those values. In the process I have become one of the most "connected" people on the Internet. I've joined over 30 online social networks, and has very high numbers of "connections" to other people on many. For instance I have over 9000 connections on the business network LinkedIn.

The Internet makes it easy to connect to people across the world. We've never been able to do that before. But the same tool also makes it easy to connect to the people in your street. We used to be connected once, catching the bus and the tram and walking to school or meeting at the corner store. That's all gone. We can have it back, all it takes is the courage to say "YES" and a password.

The chance to co-create the place where you live in a way that realises the values and dreams that you have, is real. Street Groups can be the vehicle to help you do that.

Act on the impulse to do something. The cost to you is tiny, the value to your community of hundreds of "tiny" actions, is to create a river of good will, in the place that matters most. At home.

If you really want to know the messy history of any real innovation, that story, for Street Groups, is here.

The symbol of the atom was one that John Veitch chose in 1981 to represent an idea proposed by Jonas Salk; (Salk Polio Vaccine) that "Relationships are fundamental".

The atom as represented by a nucleus and electrons illustrated is a simplified version of atomic structure. Those who now study particle physics would understand it as even more complex. The current modern understanding of the atom reinforces even more strongly the principle of relationships. An atom has a nucleus that is a set of electrical particles of no size, called quarks, held together by strong and weak forces in a relationship that is more or less stable. Scientists would agree that the standard model of the atom is messy, difficult to understand and incomplete. In this context an atom is almost pure information, or a set of relationships, rather than "stuff". A much longer explanation is here.

My point is, that a Street Group is also a set of relationships, not so much a place.

John Stephen Veitch
Director
Street Groups Limited