Virtual Street Corners brings together two communities who rarely interact with the help of a video connection.

PSFK caught up with gdgt founder Peter Rojas recently, and he discussed what his new gadget site is all about, and what inspired its unique structure.

Brixton, the south London area in the Borough of Lambeth famed for it’s diverse community, has decided to single handedly combat the recession within it’s borders through an ingenious adaptation of money.

The Urban Farm Tour concept builds a network of individuals who are raising their own food in limited space and opens their homes and gardens to the public. The event synthesizes ideas of local food and community with a bit of DIY inspiration and education.

We’ve been following the shared workspace trend globally for a few years now and have been noticing a uptick in the number of co-working spaces in China lately. We’ve been particularly impressed by the efforts of the newly-opened Xindanwei (新单位) in downtown Shanghai, who joins a few other shared workspaces sprinkled throughout the city.

A small but vibrant community is developing around the extreme pogo stick.

Fiat Brazil has launched an online social media initiative to gather ideas from the public for a new concept car called the ‘Mio’ which will be presented at the 2010 Brazil Auto Show. The format is less design focused than say Peugot’s long running contest, Fiat is looking for ideas that make a car personal.
Several rounds of questions will be posed to the Mio community, the first being about features and design. Later, users will be asked for branding and marketing ideas while he engineers review the design submissions. Progress on the project will be posted and the community will [...]

In the true spirit of DIY culture, skillshares operate under the notion that access to education is a right rather than a commodity and that everyone has knowledge to share, making every individual both a student and a teacher. Their mission is to bring people together and create a reciprocal community based on learning, sharing and doing. A quick internet search reveals groups already formed in both Boston and Austin, but nothing in the NYC environs, until now.
Brooklyn Skillshare’s inaugural event will take place October 10th at the Gowanus Studio Space, offering classes on topics that range from kombucha brewing and [...]

Ad Hoc Art
Ad Hoc Art is a friendly community gallery in Bushwick featuring works from the worlds of pop surrealism, low-brow, street art, illustration, comic books, tattoo and print-making. Pieces at Ad Hoc are reasonably priced and often come from artists who are overlooked in the larger NYC art scene. Excellently curated showcases and a genuinely unpretentious staff make gallery openings here unmissable events for local artists and their appreciators.
www.adhocart.org – 49 Bogart St Buzzer 22, Unit 1G, Brooklyn, NY
Ad Hoc Art is featured in our latest book PSFK Snapshot Brooklyn. From the more obscure corners of the borough to [...]

Neighborhood watches are going digital, and as the community comes online, rallying for crime-prevention becomes easier.  The Boston Globe looks at communities around the US that have fully utilized Twitter and blogs to organize.  Telephone chains first moved to email list-servs and basic message boards, but the instant response of more recent forms of communication now allows for quicker police action.  Beyond concerned phone calls, many police departments offer the ability for concerned neighbors to be trained in their legal rights and intervention limits as private citizens.
The National Sheriffs’ Association website now has about 20,000 block watch groups registered, four [...]

In an effort to build on the micro-finance model of giving popularized by Kiva, new non-profit organization Jolkona – a Bengali word meaning “drop of water” – has incorporated elements of social media – community, connectivity and sharing – into their design, a move it hopes will appeal to a younger generation of philanthropists. On the surface, the system is far from new – pick a project and give money (as little as $5) – but where most donations end, with you feeling a temporary wave of good will, Jolkona wants to continue the story and make the process more [...]

PSFK is proud to announce news that we will host a Good Ideas Salon with YouTube next month. On 6th August 2009, PSFK and YouTube will host a Good Ideas Salon in the Bay Area. For the event, Mia Quagliarello (Product Marketing Manager – Community YouTube) will moderate a panel of community experts — Jen Burton (Senior Community Manager, Digg), Heather Champ (Director of Community, Flickr) and Matthew Stinchcomb (VP – Community, Etsy) — to discuss what can be learned from the passionate people who visit these sites, how relationships are fostered at scale, ways to engage with users, and [...]

Seek, an Australian online job search firm, is finding social opportunities in this economic crisis. The company, with the help of The Boston Consulting Group, is using its technology platform to match volunteer do-gooders with non-profit organizations all over the country.

Australia already has a long-established history of corporations participating in community causes but the recent scarcity of jobs, the persistent drought and the tragic bushfires that erupted earlier this year is increasing national demand to reach out. Seek Volunteer – which claims to earn no revenues for its services – seems to have come at just the right time judging [...]

The east and west coast technorati showed up en masse at the recent IAB Social Media Conference in New York’s Roosevelt Hotel. From Facebook to Kraft and the social web’s premier designers, programmers and analysts – this audience was engaged and tweeting about thoughts all day. Best practices were unveiled, branded examples were shared, myths were debunked and most of all- the audience’s fears and hesitations were assuaged by normalizing this emerging yet already highly populated and lucrative space. The underlining call to action was to get your brand out there now to listen, test and to learn. Peep listened, [...]

The NY Times points us to the German suburb of Vauban, a thoughtfully designed community where an astonishing 70% of its 5,500 residents live without owning cars. Completed in 2006, the one square mile neighborhood is comprised of multi-family row houses designed to be more energy-efficient with local businesses interspersed throughout in an attempt to seamlessly integrate the residential and commercial districts. Automobiles are allowed along the town’s main thoroughfare that connects to the train station as well as on certain secondary streets, but those that want to own vehicles are required to purchase garage spaces located at the edge of [...]