Welcome to the 5 Blocks Out blog!

If you’ve been following our writing over the past few years you’ll know we’re avid explorers of Toronto, its many unique neighbourhoods, and the lives of its citizens. That interest has spawned a new project and web site — 5 Blocks Out — which we’ll be writing about here.

We plan to blog about the vision behind 5 Blocks Out, ongoing feature additions and improvements, and stories on how people are using the site in everyday life. We’ll also include musings on interesting things we discover around the city. The majority of our time is now spent on 5 Blocks Out, so we’ll be writing more here and less on the Mukodu Blog.

So, what is 5 Blocks Out? It’s an online community that helps people share local knowledge about their neighbourhoods with other people across the city. It’s local knowledge created by the people, for the people.

Who built it? And why did we bother?  We’re two Roncesvalles locals who want to fill a void in connecting local people with local knowledge.  Upon moving back to Toronto after years living away we found it difficult to keep track of all the change that had gone on in different neighbourhoods, and all the activity going on across this bustling city. We also realized we were surrounded by heaps of interesting people, but with few ways to hear from them. If you’ve ever moved within a city, or between cities, you’ve undoubtedly experienced this exact same pain. Over time we dug up many useful local resources, mostly through well-informed friends who were in the know. But we kept thinking there had to be a better way to share information about what’s great nearby.

If you go to the site you’ll notice membership is currently by invitation only. We have a merry band of members helping us test and improve the site before we open it up broadly. If you’re interested in giving feedback and becoming part of the community using this somewhat raw form of the website we would love to have you on board. We’ll send you an invite if you go to 5blocksout.com and add your email address in the “Sign up” section with a comment on how you heard about us.

The first phase — the stuff that’s up and running now — helps people share knowledge about local places within Toronto. Beyond that we’re dreaming about many other types of neighbourhood resources and information. There’s a huge number of directions we could go in, so we would really appreciate help in prioritizing. What would be most interesting and helpful to you? We’re all ears! Comment on this blog post, email us at blog at 5blocksout.com, or send feedback on the site.

Till next time… toodle-loo.

Katrin Lepik and Oshoma Momoh
Roncesvalles, Toronto — September 23, 2009