That reminds me a lot of this article by Bill McKibben, which I keep meaning to post to MeFi and then don't.

That's a pretty sweet article. I'm excited about this sort of use of the Internet.

Nice. I've very lightly contributed to RocWiki for Rochester NY since its inception. They made it clear early on that they had borrowed from the DavisWiki, and I just thought "SO COOL". It's a resource I've been fanatical about when talking to people new to town, because it still has this vaguely underground feel to it. Often when I'm visiting another town, especially a small/medium one, I think "They could really use a wiki for their town..."

I was thinking about that article by Bill McKibben and realized that it would be much easier to start such a neighborhood forum now that there are listservs. It should be as easy as distributing fliers to neighbors and posting some content.

Yeah, I loved the story about how online life brought the neighborhood together, but he lost me a litle when he talked about how the guy was planning to turn it into a business and create a replicatable platform for use anywhere. That is a nice idea, but there are so many (free) ways to do it already.