Swapping Tab-Delimitated Recipes with the Geek Neighbors I know it's cliché to say my neighborhood is different. Everyone likes to think their neighborhood is unlike any other. Not just in the city, but in the state. It's sort of American to think you are unique. I guess it's a way of feeling as if you've arrived where you belong, by convincing yourself you could find nowhere in the world like your neighborhood. But my neighborhood is truly not like any other neighborhood in the world. We live in Home Park, on the edge of Georgia Tech--Geek Factory for the entire Southeast. It's an in-town neighborhood of older homes with an eclectic university feel. We have no tour of homes. Potlucks turn out 12 people. We have no troupe of old ladies that bake casseroles when a neighbor is sick or tragedy strikes. Community meetings are filled with people requesting more social events, however no one steps forward to move ideas to action. Regardless, we have a strong sense of community and we know who we are. How is it that a strong sense of community pride and kinship can come from a community that can't even organize itself for the occasional get-together? The answer, I'm afraid, is in our palm pilots, on our desktops, and contained in our databases. The Geek Factory Georgia Tech, like most college campuses, radiates a powerful influence, which permeates into our community. Tech influences our property values, the neighborhood's businesses and traffic. What most people never realize is the impact the Geek Factory has on our collective social skills. As an institution, Tech cranks out an amazing number of engineers, researchers and technicians, all of which are known (some world-renowned) for their expertise, but never their social skills. As you might imagine, a disproportionate number of them end up living in my neighborhood. I live next door to micro systems engineers, designers of cloverleaf intersections, and experts in the ways of city planning. In fact, until the fear of terrorists arrived on the radar screen, we had our own nuclear reactor in the neighborhood just to train our own neighborhood nuclear physicists A few years back, I crashed a campus party at the Geek Factory, and I quickly found myself involved in a discussion on the theories and merits of the HVAC system. Later in the evening, I came running through the crowd with two strands of toilet paper, mocking a performance dance routine. Judging by the crowd's reaction, however, no one ever guessed I was not a performance dancer. One of the neighborhood association's board members may not recognize a face, but she never forgets an e-mail address. In fact, she knows all three-hundred-plus addresses on our community mailing list. Doesn't matter if she's met them or not, she could tell you all about them--where they live, what they do for a living, their operating system and the last time they upgraded their browser. The e-mail list-serve (a fancy technical term meaning e-mail newsletter, for you non-geeks) is better known for its hard, cold facts, and the unique use of e-mail to curb crime than it's bubbly, cheerleading personality. At one passionate community planning session last year, someone suggested we create a database. Eyes lit up. The room burst into conversation. This database could be the end-all, be-all, people said. We could merge tax records, zoning and variance ordinances, and it would be great. "If we could just get good, clean data," a voice from the back said. I was confused. How does a database move our community forward? How does good, clean data solve our problems? "I don't know for sure," said the voice. "The first step is getting it. Then once we have it, we can figure out what to do with it." Thus, I came to learn data is important in my community. Good, clean data. Who cares what you do with the data, it's just got to be clean. Forget pointing out the Jones's have an overgrown yard. Nobody cares. Without the proper data indicating their yard is overgrown, you have no case in my neighborhood. If you want to burn a bridge, question the validity of the data collected by your neighbor. Publicly accuse them of not being "scientific." While other communities get hot under the collar about cut-through traffic or commercial development, nothing infuriates my neighbors more than bad data. In a quest for more data, my community approached the Atlanta Police Department and asked them to provide crime reports on a floppy disk in a tab-delimitated format so we could merge, purge, chart and sort our own crime statistics. The Police Department said they didn't know how to save to a floppy disk. Our neighborhood sent a technician. Now we have the statistics on a floppy disk, only we have to return the disk when we're done because the Police don't want to part with a 59-cent floppy. Tonight, I came from a meeting where we brainstormed the coming year's program agendas. Bar crawls, potlucks, movies in the park, and a quintet with wine were all ideas that came forward. The ideas were great, but no one was volunteering to implement them into action. No one had any idea where to begin. We adjourned the meeting as the ideas slowed down, just before someone was about to suggest a database of social preferences to be merged and purged with the tax database. Afterwards, a neighbor approached me, asking why my weather monitoring equipment was not uploading data live to a web site. (Okay, I know it's a bit geeky to have weather monitoring equipment, but we're all products of our society.) I explained I was having a problem connecting to my host server. He asked me a few pointed questions, for which I turned to another neighbor who installed the system. After, the two clucked like chickens, they turned to me and said in unison, "You need to check the bios." "What?" I said. "The software in your router." Umm-Kay. In my neighborhood, we don't have a garden club. We don't have a neighborhood festival. Instead, we talk tech-talk. We swap tab-delimitated files rather than recipes. We hop on-line and gather in chat rooms. We give each other e-mail aliases rather than our house keys. So, my neighborhood is just a little different. At least, that's what the data suggests.