Skills Swap and Barter Market

The Travelling Pantry
Last Wednesday a couple of ARK regulars, including me, attended the Travelling Pantry, a project development workshop run by Tessy Britton, developed as part of the Social Spaces project, and hosted in Cardiff by RSA Cymru. Rather than looking at what a community's problems are and then trying to solve them, Tessy's approach to developing community projects is about working out what assets and resources a community has and then developing projects based on these assets. These asset-based projects can then help to address the problems that the community are experiencing by bringing people together, which is the first big step to community problem-solving.

To pass on what we had discovered I gave a presentation (see the slideshow below) to people who came to thinkARK on Wednesday night, about the asset-based projects that Tessy had mentioned. One of them was Trade School, a Brooklyn-based initiative in which people offered to teach classes to students who bartered with teachers for class time. Classes taught included Foundations in Ghost Hunting, Portrait Photography and Making Websites with WordPress.



thinkARK Skills Swap Beta
Inspired by the example of Trade School, on Wedensday the 8th of December thinkARK Wednesday Club are going to be running a prototype 'Skills Swap and Barter Market' in CAI. So if there is a skill you want to learn or a service that you need come along and offer your skills and abilities in exchange. If you think there is a class you can teach, find some interested students and barter for your knowledge. If there is something to need doing, swap it for something you can do in return.

This will be a 'test' to find out what works and what doesn't, but should be a lot of fun.

Also, thanks to Kevin Hong of CS Studio for inviting us to the Travelling Pantry workshop.

Snow ARK

Well i am determined to make it to wednesdays ARK meeting tonight in the CAI, although i am going to head in early and leave early just to make sure i don't get stuck in town. So if anyone wants to join me before the usual 7pm meet up i will there from 5pm probably with a lovely hot chocolate in my hands to warm me up!

ARK Academy

With all the christmas festivities there were a few less of us last night at Cardiff Arts Institute, but the Happy Spaces experiment was a great success. The object workshop worked really well with a bit of visual note taking. I will post a few images on a flickr account in the next few days but for now. Heres two of my favourites.

Academy - 16/12 - What's your happy space?

Next week we are going to be launching the Academy series. The event is all about expanding the sixth project of Happy Spaces. We are hoping as many people as possible come along to help get some concepts for the project.

We need you to bring along an object that you feel represents your happy space or comes from that space. We will be asking people to talk about their happy spaces and what makes it happy.

We will also be filling everyone in on what has happened with ARK since the launch, and the projects that came from it.

Results:
Extracting the values from these spaces to try and see what values need to be introduced into a project to make public private semi-private spaces 'happy'.

If you can't make it but feel someone may enjoy the event please pass this information on. We will be at CAI from 7pm next Wednesday so see you there.