Wiki

Building blocks

The June 1 conversation kept returning to one question: what are the actual things a person does on Uitwijken.nl? Not the thesis, not the data — the small, closed set of objects people create and touch. This page names that set.

"messages, events, two or three more things and that's kind of it… figuring out what those individual building blocks are will be a very big aspect of the tool."

The discipline is to keep the set small. Like the metro or the trams, the platform has to be obvious and robust to how people actually use it. Every screen — map, themes, inbox — is a lens onto these same blocks. Governance is the foundation under them. The blocks themselves are only four.

The four blocks

Block	What it is	Range
Event	A gathering with a time and place	From a D&D night to a buurtmaaltijd to a block party to Koningsdag
Conversation	A public thread attached to another object	A few replies under an event, a question on a plan
Ask / offer	A request or an offer of practical help, or an invitation to do something together	Groceries for a neighbor, DIY help, "who's up for D&D?"
Survey	A structured question tied to a place, theme, and consequence	A €300k neighborhood-budget prioritization

Each block answers two questions at a glance: who posted it (resident, government, entrepreneur — the role) and what kind of object it is (the block). Roles and blocks are orthogonal; the UI shows both on every item so the vocabulary stays legible.

How they combine

The blocks are not silos. They compose, and that composition is most of the product:

An ask ("who wants to do a vibe-coding night?") grows into an event once a time and place exist.
An event carries a conversation — the thread where coordination happens ("can someone give two neighbors a lift?").
A survey result points to an event or an ask as the next action.
A conversation can hang off any of the others, or off a plain place on the map.

This is the Web 2.0 / Flickr–Twitter–Mastodon playbook applied to civic life: machine tags, thread-orientation, and a handful of primitives that interlock. We are not reinventing it; we are pointing it at a neighborhood.

What a block always has

To stay findable and moderatable, every block is geotagged to a location scale (house → street → buurt → city) and carries one or more themes (see Concepts). That is what lets the same object surface on the map, in a theme, and in the civic inbox without being three different things.

Principles that shape the blocks

These come straight from the conversation and are not negotiable details (see Governance):

Strictly public. No private messages, no closed groups. What is discussed here is public by nature. This is a moderation strategy as much as a values choice.
Verified, but pseudonymous. Signing in proves you are a real resident; you choose the name you appear under.
Voting follows residence. Proving you live somewhere is what grants a vote on that place's surveys.

Open questions