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Bare Apps is a mobile phone and web system targeted at young persons in the 16-24 age groups and is designed to be inclusive and to engage a local community with its youth.

The problem

Local community and its disengaged youth;

Youth unemployment;

Social exclusion;

Youth economic dependence;

Disenfranchised youth;

Disempowered youth;

The idea

 The idea of Bare Apps is to provide a virtual market place where local 'providers' can post local 'opportunities' for this age group.  Providers can be potential employers, retailers, public instititutions, voluntary organisations and even individuals. For example employers will be providers of job or work opportunities ranging from temporary or permanent job vacancies, internships, apprenticeships, work placement projects or training. Mentoring and support organisations would be providers of opportunities for personal development. Youth groups would provide opportunities for social gatherings, supervised activities and similar events. Retailers would provide opportunities for discounts on shopping, cinema, travel and the like, that would be of interest to young people. Clubs, pubs and such like would advertise maybe a local band and offer special incentives. This would help make Bare Apps appealing to this age group and invite further exploration.

 Bare Apps is a dynamic system. Opportunities come and go and the technology matches local providers and their opportunity to a ready-made local audience and communicates through instant messaging alerts, emails or web and mobile phone interfaces. ‘Need it now’ meets ‘want it now’. 

Bare Apps will encourage small and large organisations to engage with this age group on a simple, cost effective, sustainable and respectful basis. The benefits would be measurable in financial and social terms. New job and work opportunities would arise because of the ease and speed of the technology. 

Bare Apps recognises the need for partnerships and will ensure that in cases where the technology is not available to the disadvantaged then it will build a network of providers, whether government backed or private, willing to supply it for free. This helps to de-stigmatise the user, the provider not being able to discriminate against users of the technology.

What we need

We need funding to develop the idea including technological expertise, learning from the experience of others with ‘know how' about making virtual markets work and also engage local and national partners.  

Bare Apps