Sports fans revel in their team being better than someone else's, but in communities, channel the desire to be "better than" productively rather than looking over your shoulder at some other neighborhood. Below are our discussion starters.

We know from psychosocial research that people will form allegiance to their "team" in a meaningless competition within a few short minutes! In experiments, people not only root for their brand new team of strangers, but they also punish the opposing team quite severely, even when they know the results don't matter.

Let's think of your neighborhood or community as your team. We suggest that at your next meeting, channel that energy to make your "team" better than another team into ways to improve your own previous best performance. How about being better than the other neighborhood teams in:

a. Making everyone feel welcome.

b. Identifying conflicts and de-escalating them.

c. Assuring that walking is safe and pleasant.

d. Patronizing your local businesses while challenging them to be better.

e. Planting flowers, or plants that slow down rain water runoff and thus flash flooding.

f. Keeping your starter homes affordable.

g. Involving kids and youth in your events and community organization governance.

h. Figuring out creative ways to maintain a mix of incomes and races or ethnic groups.

i. Enlivening any space, building, or lot that becomes vacant with a mix of temporary fixes and permanent solutions.

j. Preventing crime through zeroing in on the "what," "where," and "why" of actual crime instead of incubating a climate of fear everywhere in all situations.

k. Growing trust among all elements of your community by helping each entity or interest group perform better and act in a civic-minded way.

l. Requiring civility in neighborhood organization affairs and political debates.

m. Caring more about the children in school and youth sports than the adult dust-ups over policies, personalities, and egos.

n. Educating your residents about cause and effect in community development, thus eliminating counter-productive repetitive motion.

You could use this list as a conversation starter at your next committee meeting or neighborhood-wide conversation. Most of us have plenty to work on without putting down another neighborhood in the process.