The Resilient City Project

The lovely Geraldine kindly sent me this link

It's a blog post about an idea for a tool that helps local communities share resources and reduce expenses using geolocation, interactive mapping and visualisation.

It also mentions other interesting sites like:

https://thesuperfluid.com/ Superfluid makes collaboration in social networks fair by enabling members to trade favors using a virtual currency

http://ushahidi.com/ Ushahidi is a non-profit tech company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualisation and interactive mapping

and discusses the possibility of using this software for organising community based initiatives.

It's worth a look - I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts.

Learning by experience

Following on from the last post I have been thinking about we discussed last night regarding the project pitch idea for the new website and how we tap into what we have learnt so far. I've tried to sum up the initial stage in its most simple form in the diagram below:

Essentially initial idea process for ARKADE worked a bit like this:

1. Laura had an idea
2. We all liked the idea
3. We decided to invite other people to 'get involved' and pitch further ideas
4. Everyone discussed and voted on their favourite ideas
5. We asked everyone to sign up and volunteer time or resources
6. We set a date
7. We had lots of meetings with lots of different people to evolve the idea and problem solve as we went along

OK so it wasn't quite that straight forward but what was apparent that if its a good idea with integrity people want to get involved. What was amazing was the number of people turning up every week - voting with their feet if you like and the amount of time and resources people gave. So I guess I feel the website should have a similar process, something informal, inspirational and above all else fun!

Now the serious bit......so we have a democratic and organic process and we want to evolve it to create opportunities for other people to pitch projects. ARK may potentially invest money and will have a staked interest so how do we manage this pitching process without shutting down creativity? What processes and criteria do we need to put in place?

If anyone has any examples of similar projects we can learn from please let us know.

Innovative Funding

As you know the last few months we have been busy working on the empty shop project - ARKADE which has basically been created by huge amount of good old fashioned community spirit. The community that has been created as a result of this project is an unusual one and every week I am amazed at the amount of different people who have come along to our Wednesday club just to help out and get involved, donating their time, ideas, projects and anything else they can offer - its quite fantastic.

But like any project there are still things that cost money from light bulbs to insurance and although they are only small amounts ARK LAB's next project will be some retrospective fund-raising (once we have had a break that is). So once again will be calling on people to come along to our Wednesday club with ideas to help fund raise, so get your thinking caps on! In the meantime take a look at this amazing kickstarter site where you can pitch a project and people can pledge money to support it. I particularly liked the ARTfarm project as it looks like something ARK LAB would get involved in.

Recent Press for ARK

Over the last few weeks we have had a number of pieces of press relating to ARK's recent projects including the empty shop project and the ongoing work with the creative network project. Thank you to Andrew from Hoffi for putting the above video together of my interview at 6am!! with BBC Radio Wales. Below are a few other pieces that have been written about us. It's great to get the coverage as without it we definitely wouldn't have had the interest in people getting involved without it. So thank you for all the support.

Media Wales

http://yourcardiff.walesonline.co.uk/2010/05/20/empty-arcade-shops-to-get-creative-streak/

http://yourcardiff.walesonline.co.uk/2010/05/11/making-use-of-cardiffs-empty-shops/

http://yourcardiff.walesonline.co.uk/2010/05/11/thinkark-cardiff-empty-shops/

CAI

http://cardiffartsinstitute.org/2010/05/zeitgeist/wednesday-club-with-ark/

Guardian Cardiff

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cardiff/2010/may/10/cardiff-creative-network

socialARK

PHEW! This week was a quiet week for ARK with time to relax and chat with new ARKee Noel, or as i later called him Leon (as Laura pointed out my mind must be working backwards!) I think this just summed up how we all felt after some pretty intense workshops the last few wednesdays to get the National Assembly railway consultation project finished. Thanks to all who participated and a special big thanks to Simon for pulling it all together, a few late nights I think! The report looks fantastic with some really interesting ideas that challenge what accessibilty means. Hopefully the assembly finds it thought provoking. Simon will be posting the report soon so we would be interested to hear what you think?

It's great to meet new people who just drop-in to find out what we are all about and hopefully Noel will be back along with everyone else a week wednesday (21st) as next wednesday we are off to TEDx Cardiff so maybe we will see you there?

Tim Brown talks about Design Thinking

The subject of "Design Thinking" regularly crops up at the weekly ARK meet-ups so I thought this little video from TED talks raises some interesting ideas in a more open, collaborative and participatory approach. Tim Brown believes this approach could have a bigger impact than designers working alone and suggests the first step "is to start asking the right questions". what do you think?