STARTUP
Connected Living
We designed a collaboration app for neighbor communities inspired by Slack. You can easily check for a community at your address and create one if none exists. All your neighbors will receive personalized physical invitations with a QR code to get onboard. New neighbors can easily find and join the community later. Our communities are organized by address. They can be customized to include multiple buildings with the same entrance, a shared inner yard or co-located in the same street. People can safely use their real name, since it’s only visible to their neighbors, but don’t have to share their phone numbers. A new community starts with predefined channels for common topics, like ‘Borrowing and Lending’, which creates an initial culture of collaboration. Members can create new channels for special topics instead of spamming everybody.
Connected Living's Story
We’ve been to Australia in 2020 to see William’s parents – we’ve seen the worst bushfires, apocalyptic scenery of the skies filled with smoke, and storms with hail stones the size of golf balls, which destroyed the roof and flooded our house. This was our emotional ‘climate awakening’ and we decided that we need to do sth about climate crisis mitigation and adaptation. We realized that the way we live in cities today is isolated, fragile, and wasteful. We asked ourselves what will we do when the climate crisis hits us in Europe? How we will react? Who will we turn to? We are surrounded by people, yet can’t reach them when in need. William moved to a new place with 50 neighbors living at the same address – they created an email list to reach each other. That didn’t work well. Then they tried WhatsApp – also with limited success. It was difficult for him to get help when he was down with COVID because he didn’t know nor could reach his neighbors. This is where we realized that a good communication channel is an important requirement for collaboration, mutual help, and building a resilient community. We took inspiration from Slack to solve this problem.