Why Add ‘Residents’ to Your Residence?

As explained in the ‘Future Vision’ article on the website, we take a broad view on who are ‘residents’ of a residence in our neighborhood, including under that term all full-time residents as well as close friends and relatives who live in the vicinity. As it could take each residence up to an hour to read up on and actually do this, why attempt it in the first place? There are at least 5 reasons.

· After nearly 40 years of existence, entering details on our neighborhood will give us our first capability to generate demographics of who we are: how many children, teens, octogenarians, retired, retired from military service, do we have? With this information we can then focus on services that might be of specific value to sub-groups of the neighborhood. At a minimum we shall have information previously unobtainable.

· We can learn in detail how wonderfully interconnected so many families in RCCE are with one another. Information in phone books or our past Homeowners Directory never links the many families that are related to one another, but our on-line web-site will readily communicate this information to members of our neighborhood, and, through our password protection, only to them.

· In the last few years several young families moving into our neighborhood have requested a list of children their own children’s ages for prospective playmates. We have been unable to honor this request. When our neighborhood takes the time to enter their kids, we shall be able to do so.

· When we have all ‘residents’ entered into our residences we shall have many more connections with which to respond to unexpected situations at a residence. Suppose a neighbor, walker, jogger or cyclist notices an anomalous situation at a residence (the irrigation system is leaking, squirrels have burrowed into yet another roof, or suspicious cars or activity is taking place). Should the heads of that household be hiking the K-2 range on the other side of the world, there will be several other ‘residents’ with whom this discovery could be communicated, investigated and addressed.

· Most importantly, when we get our residents entered, we can develop further software for the website that would allow us to list residences’ and residents’ Bus(inesses), Int(erests), and Pet(s). With these we could begin to get a sense of the richness, diversity and talents of our neighborhood. Common interests could be identified and encouraged, such as one of our lifetime members of a local sports car country club offering near free use of that club to fellow neighborhood residents. Eventually it is hoped that the same spirit of the many volunteers for our neighborhood Homeowners Association over the years would infect other neighbors and that they would offer business discounts, themselves, to their fellow residents. If a community is about connecting, we’d have the foundation for such to more fully take place.