The concept and idea of the new project "Neighborhood"

As mentioned earlier, after some initial attempts, the focus eventually returned to the "Washington Student Network," a project that had previously performed exceptionally well, both in terms of its social impact and practical effectiveness. However, there were also many aspects worth summarizing. Since a new project is underway, it's essential to build upon past strengths and address weaknesses to achieve even greater success.

Let me first talk about the needs I have in mind. The most important needs for students studying abroad are nothing more than these:

1. Information Needs: This need is easily overlooked, yet it is a very strong one. It's easily overlooked because it's easily satisfied—whether through chat, various media outlets, or the overwhelming amount of information pushed to us. However, sometimes it's precisely this diverse and disorganized nature of the sources that amplifies the need. While public accounts, websites, and apps all offer information services, have we considered our true information needs? In summary, our information needs can be categorized as follows:

• Major news happening in the world.
• Major news happening around you or news that is personally relevant to you.
• Information that interests you.
• Information related to one's own field or industry.

Of these four points, the first two are news-related, and the latter two are vertical news. Except for the first point, which is quite difficult (unless you're a large news organization, it's hard to obtain firsthand information, making rapid response, dissemination, and follow-up reporting impossible), the other three are relatively easier and are what many independent media outlets are currently doing. There are many independent media outlets in the Washington, D.C. area, covering everything from food and entertainment to information and news, but few have achieved significant traction. Newcomers often don't know which to subscribe to or where to find information. Most of the time, they're completely lost. This is a very good entry point. Vertical news is doing very well and is very popular, but it seems Washington, D.C., doesn't have it yet. (Unfortunately, the area is small, and costs can't cover it). I call it: refined local information reading.

Of course, experiential, learning, and organizational information was also omitted, but I won't go into detail about that.

2. Classified information: This need is already adequately met on hellogwu, but being a university community, its limitations are quite obvious. After all, GWU is not MIT; to truly expand to the entire Washington, D.C. area, a larger platform is needed. Fortunately, the API was recently opened, which solved this problem.

3. Communication. This is both a strong and a weak need. It's a strong need because everyone needs social interaction, but a weak need because people are lazy. This is very difficult to address because it requires providing users with a very convenient communication channel, while this communication needs to be cleverly designed into an interesting format. Human social interaction is not as simple as people talking to each other; getting people to express their inner thoughts is very difficult.

4. Information Expansion and Distribution: I have a house to rent, I have something to sell, I want to find people to travel with. This information needs to be disseminated. Posting it on a single platform is actually a reluctant compromise. Finding ways to push information to specific groups with specific needs to achieve a win-win situation is a very big challenge. In this regard, some bold attempts are worthwhile.

Based on the above demand theory, I decided to abandon the previous cumbersome "Washington Student Network" and create a new platform. While retaining all the previous advantageous products and user data, the platform will focus on light media, supplemented by functional classified information, to explore communication models and expand the push of new products: Washington Neighborhood (indc.im).

Washington Neighborhood will adopt a website + mobile app model. The website will primarily handle content presentation, while the app will focus on user interaction. It's like putting new medicine in old bottles; it's uncertain whether this approach will still be effective.