The Great Egg SOS: A Neighborly Call for Help
Yesterday afternoon, I decided to prep a lasagna with my two-year-old before my husband and other daughter came home from their outing. We just returned from the grocery store and had everything sorted and delicately arranged on the kitchen counter: The lasagna noodles, two jars of sauce, cut veggies, and cheese.
When I opened the recipe on my phone I realized one grave error: I forgot to buy eggs.
As my two-year-old looked at me quizzically holding the spatula demanding “Me help! Me help!” I went out on a limb and threw an SOS to the group chat that I’d recently jumpstarted in my building for all of our neighbors.
Ok this is the most neighborly request ever but does anyone have a single egg I can use for cooking? :)
I set my phone back on the table and smiled expectedly at my toddler.
And now, we wait.
From Code to Community: A New Benchmark for Network Health
In the tech world, there's a commonly used benchmark for assessing the quality and efficiency of an engineering team: How long does it take to change a single line of code on a website?
Popularized by the lean software and developer operations (DevOps) movement, this question often gets at the overall efficiency of the team and underlying processes to make a simple change.
While this is a technical question and framing, the resulting conclusion is more about people management and operational agility. It touches on questions like:
How much do people on a team understand the processes?
How much autonomy does an individual engineer have?
How many people have access to the codebase?
How quickly can information get disseminated?
How complicated is the approval process?
You might think this is a pretty basic test. But it’s not always as straightforward as it appears. In my 15 years working in tech startups, I’ve been on teams where it takes under an hour to change a single line of code. And I’ve been on teams where it takes months.
As I waited for that elusive egg, it got me thinking: What if we could measure the health of a community like we do an engineering team?
But instead of measuring how long it takes to change a line of code, maybe we could measure how long it takes a neighbor to respond to a simple request for help—like borrowing an egg.
After all, for a neighbor to successfully respond to a request like this, a few things must be true:
What Helps Neighbors (or Networks) Pass "The Egg Test"
Neighbors need to know each other well enough to have each other’s contact information.
Neighbors need to be responsive on whatever communication channel is used to reply quickly.
Neighbors need to feel comfortable reaching out and asking for help.
Neighbors need to be home and available to meet the request.
Neighbors need to feel a shared sense of goodwill to help each other out.
Like the DevOps test for measuring the health of an engineering team, it might be a stretch to evaluate an entire community based on one isolated request for help. But it does prompt us to consider which levers we can toggle in our community to improve the chances of a better response next time.
Measured in Minutes: The Power of People Showing Up
So, how long did it take me to get that egg?
Three minutes.
By the time I finished explaining to my toddler why the lasagna had to wait, my phone buzzed with a message:
I do! 😊 I’ll be right there
In the end, it wasn't just about getting the egg—it was about knowing that we’re building a community of neighborhoods willing to show up.
Just like in tech, where efficiency isn't just about changing a single line of code, the so-called health of any network or community is about trust, connection, and the willingness to help. Suffice it to say, yesterday, my building passed the test.
