Some tools begin as product ideas.
This one began with a question.
I already had the data locally.
That is the real reason nabour exists.
I had been building and harvesting municipality-level data for other work, mainly around Denmark and Sweden in the politics-data line. So the slow part was already behind me. The factor files existed. The normalization logic existed. The cross-border layer already existed in pieces, even if it had not yet been assembled for this exact use.
Then the question became concrete enough to deserve a tool.
If I one day move to Sweden, what actually looks structurally closest to the place I know best?
That is a personal question, but it is not the same thing as a sentimental one.
The point was not to build a diary about leaving.
And it was not to build a machine that pretends to know where I would feel at home.
It was to take one real local reference point and ask a smaller question across a border.
What municipality in Sweden looks most similar on a declared set of factors?
That smaller question shaped the whole tool.
The lazy version would have become a recommendation engine. It would have started talking about lifestyle, belonging, and where someone should live next. That would have made the surface sound larger. It also would have made the answer less honest.
nabour does something narrower on purpose.
It takes one municipality.
It compares it against municipalities in the other country.
It uses a locked factor set.
And it returns structural similarity, not life advice.
That narrowness is not a missing feature.
It is the reason the tool deserves to exist in public at all.
Denmark and Sweden are not fully comparable just because I have data for both. A place is not reducible to seven factors. Structural likeness is not emotional sameness, cultural sameness, or biographical sameness.
But that does not make the smaller question fake.
It makes it worth protecting.
There is a second point underneath the tool itself.
Local infrastructure becomes more valuable when it can answer a new question without forcing the whole intake process to start over. The data had already been harvested for other work. The useful surprise was that it could support something else. A small cross-border matcher was already sitting inside the local layer before the tool itself existed.
That is the part I care about most.
Not that a new app appeared.
Not that another repo now exists.
But that local data, once built carefully enough, starts creating new options.
Even the name ended up following the same logic. I spent too much time trying to find a better one and ended up back at the working title I had started with. That also felt right. The tool did not need a grand name. It needed one small enough to stay honest.
nabour is one of those small things.
It came from a real question.
It came from data that was already there.
And the honest version of the answer turned out to be small.
nabour — open the public tool in TID
— Dennis Hedegreen
