Last week, I was at the SixDe6rees event of OneWorld Netherlands. Siegfried Woldhek spoke about nabuur.com and “being neighbours”. He has been pioneering network-centric nature conservation at WWF around 2001, and went on to start this exciting “global villages” project.

We have online communities, and perhaps online societies already. Siegfried is exploring "neighbours": they are not experts, and not funders, and not necessarily your friends. But when the situation calls for it, the neighbourhood comes together to deal with it. Someone might have a friend who can help, another perhaps can draw upon a colleague with the right expertise. Neighbours are intermediaries, pulling in the right resources to deal with an issue. And then live their own lives again, until another occasion calls for the neighbourhood to come together.

“Nabuur” is the Dutch word for such a neighbour. At nabuur.com, several villages and towns are presenting the top issues they're dealing with, and online neighbours from all over the world help in resolving them. For instance to help provide computer training for young women in Kootapuli in South India, a town hit by the tsunami. Audience participation time at his presentation: two or three people would be able to get 20 computers together, another person is sending sea containers back and forth to India every month. It shows how easy it can actually be. Take a small step, and together see it happen within a few months.

Siegfried realised there is a huge potential of people who want to do something but can't channel that through existing organisations; and many towns and villages where global neighbours are more than welcome to help. Nabuur.com to me still is a unique way to use the internet to connect these. It's not social networking, it's online nabuurschap ("neighbourship").