mySociety

community swapping website

FROM: Paolo

What NEED does this meet?
Most of us live in a world where our neighbours are strangers.

Most of us have a stack of DVD's/videos/books/computer games/kids toys, getting dusty on our shelves.

My concept is a free website for your local community that helps you meet your real world neighbours, by listings and swapping your dusty read books, exchanging your seen dvds, and trade your played computer games or kids toys.

What is the APPROACH?
Have already developed an advanced swap group engine and website. I want input from you people. The website is of course free:

www.iliketoswap.com

Check it out and please, let me know what you think and which way I should develop it, and promote it.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
Save a fortune on Books/dvds/computer games/kids toys/anything else.

Meet your neighbours! We all know that its good to have friends in your neighbourhood.

What is the COMPETITION?
show me... them?

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
£50k to bring it up to 'broadcast standard' and initiate a PR campagain.

OpenSource Music

FROM: Isaac Norman

What NEED does this meet?
OpenSource music would work and thrive on the same principals as the OpenSource software movement. It would allow users to contribute tunes, riffs, lyrics etc in musical notation and recordings. Other users can modify submissions and vote on which are best. Users can then put together OpenSource songs from the submissions of others which can be downloaded freely.

This provides a service for anyone to help in the creation of music and to offer a legal source of free music. It would offer a forum for interaction between people of different backgrounds, into different music. It would fuel creativity in the young and old.

There's also the possibility of creating groud-breaking music using such a fundamentally new way of creating music.

What is the APPROACH?
The approach would be to create a website that allows submissions in musical notation of varying form and of soundfiles. A database would be used to catogorise music and link different submissions. Users could vote on how good a submission is, what sort of music it's suitable for, what other submissions it would go well with... etc. Users could also put together sumbmissions to form a song and submit these.

The approach uses known methods from past successes like OpenSource software but in a new field.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
This will allow everyone to take part in creating music, regardless of what instrument you can play, if you're old or young and if you have a band. All you need is a tune or lyric and access to the website.

The site will become a community of those interested in music, bringing people with entirely different backgrounds together under a common interest.

What is the COMPETITION?
There have been attempts at creating music using internet conferencing but nothing similar to this (to my knowledge).

The idea will win out because most people have a desire to create music but there are too many barriers. This idea removes most barriers. All you need is an idea.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
The idea requires two things:

1) A scalable web site. Costs will include web design, creation, hosting, bandwidth, etc.. A lot of thought would need to be spent on the database but otherwise the site should be fairly standard.

2) Publicity. The utility of a project like this depends on the number of users. It could still operate with only a small community but would work best if well publicised.

MyStreetParty

FROM: Will Wharfe

What NEED does this meet?
People don't know their neighbours any more. This would provide a way of getting to find out if anyone in your area is interested in organising a street party (doesn't have to be literally in your street). Once you've organised a street party, hopefully you will have got to know people! And, you will have identified yourself as a street party organiser... that way, when someone arrives in the area and wants to find out how to get involved, they can find out who the local street party people are... Street parties are a great non sectarian, non political way of getting people together. Nice focused activity with a tangible result.

What is the APPROACH?
Start small, focused, real ground level. Find people who actually run real street parties at the moment. Work out what the system would need to do to make their job easier. Get them on board. Test the system and refine it. Then roll it out in the areas around the areas where it's been piloted. Leverage connections with multimap, upmystreet, streetmap.co.uk; findaproperty etc So that people can view an area and see the street party areas.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
Makes it easier to make personal connections locally. This creates a form of social infrastructure on which other projects could be built.

What is the COMPETITION?
I don't think there's any competition. But there are lots of location information services (multimap/ upmystreet/ findaproperty) that this could work well with.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
Depends how rapidly you want to roll it out and how many places you want to test it in. Probably around £20K - £40K for the software for the pilot. Probably about the same for the management/people feedback etc.