Shaped By Us - We are community-crowd-sourcing ideas that could tackle our future challenges. (check out our film).

The problem

Recent research ‘Understanding Cornwall’ has identified some stubborn issues and intractable problems - from the affordability of housing to the challenges of tackling climate change in a rural place. 

The public, private and voluntary sectors in consultation with local communities have set out a vision for the next 20 years called  ‘Future Cornwall’. http://www.futurecornwall.org.uk

To deliver this vision we have agreed five shared priorities and have pooled our resources to focus on them - the first priority is to improve the resilience and self sufficiency of communities.

The idea

Our goal is to tap into citizens’ natural creativity, re-kindling communities’ desire to be part of creating lasting change and improving their locality by getting involved in making change happen.  Our idea is to bring communities together to identify hundreds of areas where the council and public sector group can work with local people to create radical new approaches to local problems and future challenges.

From this start, working with our partners Cisco IBSG, Volunteer Cornwall and Cornwall School of Social Entrepreneurs, we are putting in place new funding models, mentoring and support, to bring the most promising ideas into reality.

Through creative approaches, new technology platforms and innovative funding we expect to create a series of new enterprises that will revolutionise local services and increase community resilience by 2020.

Our question is; ‘How can we support and enable citizens to participate in identifying and solving some of our region’s most intractable problems?’ Or put another way, ‘How can we increase the capacity of Cornwall’s public sector ten-fold with no extra budget?’

We believe the answer will be through collaboration and local ingenuity. To achieve this everyone will need creative skills, both within and beyond the council, across the public sector and amongst local communities. We think enabling citizens to work collaboratively with professionals to solve their issues will be a powerful enabler of change.

We are aiming to strengthen and develop an active, networked and collaborative community of founders, investors, academics and businesses focused on local challenges.  With this idea we hope to find new ways that local government can support resilient, inclusive, entrepreneurial communities. 

What we need

Share your challenge:  Our website www.shapedbyus.org is in beta so if you are interested let us know and well send you log in details. 

Give your time or expertise in our 'Wisdom Bank':  Become a mentor, community ‘activist’ or ‘resourceur’ in the local community and help us make the idea happen  - Our plan is to generate hundreds of new ideas, crowd-sourcing the broader community for support - if this sounds like your thing get in touch.

Join us:  on twitter @shapecornwall

Be a partner:  Its not too late to join us - We are open to building more partners or to finding other councils that would like to use the same approach... we even have a protoype version that could be used nationally if there is interest from other councils (whether on the creative councils programme or not).

Help us improve the 'Shaped.By.Us':  We are looking for advice and support on innovative ways to build investment and grow businesses that can solve some of the challenges, developing our crowd funding and open data platforms.  This could be technical or strategic ideas.

Find out more:  You can follow us on our blog: http://bigdesignchallenge.blogspot.com/

Tags

Creative Councils, social enterprise, distributed capitalism, inclusive design, co-design, innovation, SROI, crowd funding, open government, open data, design

Cornwall Council

Comments