Following Carrie’s post on “Five lessons in crowdfunding innovation”, we wanted to share a crowdfunding campaign that is illustrating many of the lessons contained in the post, as well as being close to home. Very close to home in fact, as the campaign is being run by Shoreditch Works, where FutureGov’s offices are based.

Shoreditch Works has a mission to help young companies get started and grow. They are a part of the Shoreditch village and want to create a focal point for that community. They want to open the Shoreditch “Village Hall”.

Here’s their Kickstarter video to explain more behind the campaign:

The space they’re looking to secure is a 1950s warehouse with four floors, which has been sitting empty for months now. If successful, the team are going to build an events space that will comfortably hold 200 people seated. The basement and ground floor will be the epicentre of the village hall, while the top two floors will be shared workspace for startups.

The best part is that they’ll be  giving 20% of slots in their events timetable for free to community groups that don’t have the cash to hire a big events space: “A space where kids can come and code after school, where artists can present their work, where local meetups can take place and where our coworkers can meet and discuss their issues.”

All good stuff, especially in an area where the recent influx of big tech companies means that rent for spaces around Shoreditch is going up – and quickly.

You can find out why others are backing the project over on the Shoreditch Works site - a great way to show how they’re growing a community around their idea.

With two weeks to go, the Shoreditch Works team need just over £10,000 to reach their target of  £25,000. A few of the team here at FutureGov have backed the project, so if you want to help make Shoreditch Town Hall a reality visit their Kickstarter page and back the project.

Best of luck to James, Jonathan, Joshua, Chris and Ana in making the Shoreditch Town Hall happen. We’re sure they’ll be the next Kickstarter success story in just over two week’s time.

This is a guest post from Hannah Nicklin, Research Associate at Hide&Seek.

There is a revolution happening in local government and in health and social care. You might not have noticed yet, because it’s one of the quiet kinds, one of the kinds of revolution that makes useful, reactive change that works.

For the most part, and at the moment on a certain scale, FutureGov is one of the organisations helping to make this revolution – a revolution in the use of digital (and crucially networked) technology. Making this technology smarter, better, more human when used in health and social care – not just as a tool, like a telehealth monitor, or a CT Scanner; but as a means of connecting care providers, of re-connecting communities, of allowing people to personalise and track their health and recovery.

Casserole Club and Patchwork are leading examples of how startups can work alongside care professionals to develop careful, useful solutions to current challenges in local government provision. More and more start ups are getting involved in this area, enough to pique interest in policy making and the wider tech sector.

I have been invited by Google and the Institute for Public Policy Research to research the current field and talk to the businesses, health & social care professionals and users behind these technologies in order to being to draw best practice lessons on which wider (and crucially, more scalable) policy on technology in the public can be drawn.

Which is why I’m writing this post. I’d very much like to invite any of you involved in or using Casserole and Patchwork – on any level – to feedback about how the conception, development, and implementation of projects was for you.

There are two questionnaires, simple online forms which should take no more than 10 minutes of your time.

First, this survey for the organisations and organisers responsible for developing and implementing the project.

And secondly this survey, for the users of the service or project.

If you want to suggest other projects you see as going well in this area, you can let us know about them by leaving a comment on this post.

Thank you for your time. With your help we hope to begin to suggest a best practice that will enable digital and networked technology to revolutionise public services in the same way it has our everyday lives.

If you have any further questions or comments, just email me hannah [at] hideandseek.net

Nesta tweeted about its crowdfunding directory yesterday.  Crowdfunding, where members of the public can donate money to make bright ideas happen, has been around for a while and over time a bunch of specific sites have emerged, the most well-known of which is Kickstarter.

Nesta’s site is an umbrella of umbrellas – a directory to all the crowdfunding platforms that exist out there.  It reminded me that I went to a session at South by Southwest on crowdfunding.  The session was called ‘The Commoditisation of Overnight Entrepreneurship’.  As you can imagine, something more than the title hooked me in.

The truth is, one of the panelists was Amber Case, who I’m a little bit in love with after her SXSW keynote last year on cyborgs (here’s a similar TED talk she did).  That’s one truly awesome lady-geek.

The session mostly focused on Kickstarter, but the observations are true of all crowdfunding platforms.  Here are the five take-away points from the session:

1. Crowdfunding lets you grow with your community and feel closer to them, it brings a different level of connection. The crowd is the sponsor of the project.  Conversely, the pressure of being funded by lots of people means there is pressure to deliver a product.

2. Crowdfunding lets you test your ideas for free rather than having to produce them.  The other side of this coin is that people don’t tend to understand the difficulties of scaling ideas to deliver them – even people who find success on Kickstarter still don’t have enough money to quit their jobs.

3. Big organisations should learn from crowdfunded projects because they don’t allow for consensus. Either the crowd likes the idea or it doesn’t – people vote with their money . It’s a very direct form of feedback. It’s a ‘like’ button attached to your wallet. Whereas big companies often end up designing by committee and the product gets hampered by internal politics.

4. Crowdfunding creates a community around an idea which can also yield contacts to help you move forward and give you confidence. Communities can also create emotional commitment to a product and help spread the word. The new way of building companies is to be very inclusive and the only way to do this is to build in a caring DNA in from the beginning. If you really care about your product it shows.

5. On a cautionary note, it is important to remember that crowdfunding ‘investors’ don’t actually invest. They donate. When you take money from anybody you have a responsibility to communicate because that’s the only way they know what you’re doing – that’s true of crowdfunding as well as more traditional investment.

Nesta has produced a useful database for anyone thinking of using crowd-funding to start up an idea. Over time I hope they’ll develop it a bit so that you can get a better window into examples of what each platform has successfully funded. Take a look at CrowdingIn for yourself.

One crowdfunding platform worth looking at in particular is Spacehive, who spoke at our Camden Challenge event. Their model of match funding is changing and augmenting traditional urban planning systems through crowdfunding, helping communities to get through the bureaucratic issues of developing community spaces in local areas.

Having you tried crowdfunding? Or run your own crowdfunding project? We’d love to hear from people who have done it successfully, or otherwise, in the comments.

There are two challenge questions in the Camden Challenge:

- “How can we use space better in Camden?”

- “What can we do to enable people on low incomes in Camden thrive?”

The event kicked off with Chris Gourlay, talking about his project, Spacehive, and getting people to think about new ways of the community driving projects for using public land and crowdsourcing or raising the money from the public to make these ideas happen.

Next, Catherine Russell, from the Young Foundation, spoke about the report that they have produced for Camden Council about the effects of the cuts on vulnerable people in the borough, to inform those thinking about what creative solutions might work to support these people to improve their situations.

Dominic Campbell followed this up by talking FutureGov’s journey to develop solutions to support those on low incomes to thrive, starting with Benefits Camp, leading to our work with Lewes District Council and now our Wonga for Good product, Popcash.

Carrie Bishop then cranked up the energy in the room and told people about what a hack event is and how it is all about working creatively together over a short period of time (a day or two) to develop an idea into a prototype or proof of concept.

After the break, it was all action as the participants formed into teams of around eight people each and were challenged to come up with twenty ideas in twenty minutes in response to the Camden Challenge questions. The exercise was designed to encourage as much creativity as possible – asking the teams to consider how they would solve this problem if they had no money, if money were no obstacle, if there were no council and if they were Google in the future. No idea was too big or small. The ideas started pouring out and finally each table choose their best ideas to share with everyone else.

Some of the ideas from the day have already started appearing on Simpl Challenges, so please check them out and leave a comment or a “like”. If you would like to submit an idea of your own, the deadline for entries is 23rd June and the challenge is open to anyone who lives or has an interest in the borough of Camden.

You can keep up-to-date with all of the news about the Camden Challenge by following us on Twitter @simplco.

We’re into transparency here at FutureGov, cajoling local public services to be as open as possible with what they’re up to and where their residents’ money is going. But that has to include those of us inventing new kinds of local public services, meaning FutureGov has to walk our talk and be as open with our projects as we can be as well.

Take Casserole Club for instance, where you can “do something great with an extra plate”. The project has recently been featured in esteemed publications such as Waitrose Magazine, The Guardian and Time Out London, which means that we’re getting a lot more cooks signing up to the community on a daily basis. Those registering from within Tower Hamlets and Barnet get the chance to get going with Casserole immediately, those outside those areas are registered and we’ll be in touch as soon as we launch beyond our kick off communities.

But so that we don’t keep you in the dark, we went ahead and analysed signups for Casserole Club by local authority so you can see if there’s interest in Casserole near you.

Here’s a lovely little map to illustrate a bit better where we’re getting community cooks signing up from in London and surrounding areas (right now the area we’re getting most interest in – so those of you not in the South East get registering and show those Southerners your keenness to become Casserole cooks too!)

We’re delighted to see that the majority of users come from our first areas to launch, Reigate and Banstead in Surrey along with our recently launched Tower Hamlets and Barnet areas getting lots of interest too (represented here as Casserole Pots). Islington, Hackney and Lambeth are showing the most interest outside of our current communities, with Essex, Kent, Hampshire and Hertfordshire also generating a lot of interest in getting their cook on.

Outside of London and surrounding counties, here’s how the signups look:

Download the full data set here (.csv file)

It’s fantastic to see people signed up from areas as diverse as Wiltshire and Norfolk, and from as far afield as Devon to Lancashire.

We’ve also had some fantastic organisations that work in this area get in touch, including Age UK and several housing associations. Potential partnerships like these would mean Casserole could reach even more people.

Our approach to rolling out Casserole

You might be wondering why we are only releasing Casserole Club in one area at a time, rather than letting anyone sign up and take part straightaway. Well, it’s great to see such a great reaction from community-minded and digitally-savvy people such as yourselves, but we need to spend time recruiting diners to the community as well so we can make sure you have people to cook for (a crucial lesson from our first proof of concept site in Reigate and Banstead).

This takes longer than you might think, working with local councils, housing associations and community groups to get people signed up. Taking an area-by-local-area approach means we can reach those people that most fancy dinner from the Casserole Club, rather than spread ourselves too thin and disappoint those budding community cooks among you!

In the meantime, we’ll be talking to the fine people in the areas that are generating the most interest from residents to see if we can get Casserole Club going there (if that means you, get in touch now).

We’ll also be publishing project data from other FutureGov projects in weeks ahead, so subscribe to the blog or sign up for our newsletter to be kept up to date with the latest news.

Want to see Casserole Club come to your area? Sign up now (and be sure to tell your friends to as well!).

Today is Food Revolution Day, a global day of action for people to make a stand for good food and essential cooking skills. It’s a chance for people to come together within their homes, schools, workplaces and communities to cook and share their kitchen skills, food knowledge and resources.

Jamie Oliver, who’s Better Food Foundation is behind the campaign, explains it all:

One of the aims of Food Revolution Day is to share cooking skills and food knowledge, and to join forces within communities and get as many people involved as possible – aims that we share at Casserole Club.

Food Revolution Day and it’s aims to share food knowledge coincides nicely with this week’s release of a report on the State of the Sharing Economy. As well as highlighting growth and key trends in this sector, the findings from The People Who Share shows that sharing is becoming an addition to the traditional, non-circular economic system and is here to stay.

Casserole gets a nice mention of the report, so it’s great to see that the project is helping the Sharing Economy spread in the UK and beyond.

If you want to get involved with Food Revolution Day and take part in the Sharing Economy, sign up Casserole Club or come along to our Casserole Lunch in Bethnal Green on Saturday 18 May. More details and a form to sign up here: http://bit.ly/LunchLove

So, don’t forget: Food Revolution Day is today. Get involved and find out more here: http://foodrevolutionday.com

Our food sharing project Casserole Club is looking for a Community Engagement Intern to help promote and support our work in Tower Hamlets and Barnet.

Casserole Club is a community food-sharing initiative encouraging people to” do something great with an extra plate”. The project connects enthusiastic Cooks who don’t mind making an extra portion of dinner occasionally with an older Diner who would appreciate a home-cooked meal.

You can read more about Casserole Club in Waitrose Magazine, The Guardian and Time Out London.

The internship is for 5 half days a week (hours negotiable) for a minimum of eight weeks, and we’d like you to start asap. This position will be paid at London Living Wage.

This will be a fantastic opportunity to learn about community engagement, volunteer recruitment and management, and social media marketing. There will be full training provided for the role and the work will be supervised by our Lead Organiser, but interns are expected to be able to work independently  and use their initiative.

The full role description and application procedure is available to download here (PDF).

To apply, send us your written application and CV to hello(at)casseroleclub(dot)com with the title ‘Community Engagement Internship’.

The application deadline is Thursday 23rd May, so what are you waiting for? Get going!

The team over at Shift Surrey have been blogging about their Election Dashboard, which was developed in-house using an “agile” process (more on that process in the post).

In a Q&A with the development team - Chris Spring, Sue Shoesmith and Drew Daruval – the post looks at the background to the project, what the design process was and what the positive points of working this way were:

“It’s nice to get decisions on functionality or style made quickly rather than waiting to arrange meetings for a load of people to debate the merits of one colour over another.  This is achieved by constantly re-evaluating the priorities of each product deliverable and ensuring those deliverables are small enough that quick decisions can be made about their fate or functionality.”

The team are also honest about the things that didn’t go well. This openness is important for them to evolve the process and way of working:

“Bottom line is we were integrating with a newer Surrey County Council micro site branding, developing for multi- form factors, trialling a new way of working and using some quite important data, so there’s bound to be areas that could be tuned to make the next election site even better.”

We’re enormously proud of Development Project #1 from Shift Surrey (a hefty degree of honesty on the FAQ, including team credits and outlining the technology stack, are a personal favourite).

It also took guts to change their way of working with such a tight, immovable deadline. Multi-disciplinary teams are difficult to protect in siloed organisations, so a thank you goes to the teams whose people were borrowed too.

All in all a successful agile testcase like this will hopefully help to take this way of working into bigger and more impactful service areas. We look forward to seeing what the team get up to next.

View the full Q&A here >>
View the Election Dashboard here >>

It’s T-20 days until the food-sharing highlight of the year. On 2nd June, it’s World Food Sharing Day AND The Big Lunch. A foodie serendipity.

To make the countdown even more exciting, and mark the launch of our new Casserole Club, we’ve set a challenge for the good people of Tower Hamlets. In the next 20 days, can you sign up to cook and deliver one meal to an older neighbour?

To take part just go to the Casserole Club website, sign up to Cook and deliver at least one meal this month.

I bet you’re thinking “Just one meal? Even I could do that!” We bet you could too, so sign up to Casserole Club now.

Fancy cooking every day? That’s great, but if you only cook once this month, then that’s perfectly fine as well.

There’s a fantastic prize lined up for one lucky Casserole Cook who takes part which we’ll draw out of a hat, and an even better prize for the person who shares the most meals.

We’ll also be giving a shout-out to everyone who successfully challenged the website on Facebook and Twitter on 2nd June.

Any questions? Just leave a comment below and we’ll get right back to you.

So if you live in Tower Hamlets and want to do great with an extra plate, what are you waiting for? Sign up to Casserole Club and get cooking!

The Camden Challenge has launched today and is now open for entries!

Following Camden Council’s Data Hack Day that took place on Friday, with Google and the Big Innovation Centre, Camden have teamed up with FutureGov to ask people to come up with great ideas in response two important questions:

- “What can we do to enable people on low incomes in Camden thrive?” This is all about making people’s money go further or finding new ways to support them reaching their goals and aspirations

- “How can we use space better in Camden?” Here, we are looking for good ideas to unlock the potential of forgotten corners, empty shops or underused buildings and land to create something meaningful for local people to use.

The Camden Challenge is an open innovation competition where we are looking for people to think differently about solving these problems and to come up with ideas for projects that will genuinely make a difference to local people’s lives.

The Challenge is launching on Simpl Challenges today, where people can submit ideas of their own and browse and comment on ideas that have been submitted by other people.

The first event in the Camden Challenge will be the “How to be a Changemaker” workshop – an afternoon of inspirational talks and idea creation workshops, being held in the Camden City Learning Centre on 16th May (this Thursday!) The event is all about getting people thinking about the challenge questions and sharing different tools and techniques for creating innovative responses to them. If you are interested in coming along, please sign up here.

The deadline for submitting ideas to the challenge will be 23 June 2013. After the deadline has passed, a shortlist of ideas will be selected to take to the Camden Challenge Day, Saturday 6th July.

At the Camden Challenge Day, idea owners will collaborate with teams of designers, developers, service users, residents and professions to work up their ideas and present them to a panel of judges at the end of the day. Sign up here to join in – you don’t have to submit an idea to be part of one of the teams. The winning teams will go on to receive a summer of top notch support to take their projects from being good ideas into viable projects that they will pitch at a Dragon’s Den Day in front of potential funders and supporters in the early autumn.

If you live, work, study or are active in Camden, get involved by coming along to one of our events, submit your best ideas to the Camden Challenge and help make Camden an even better borough.

For all of the latest news follow Simpl Challenges on Twitter @simplco or e-mail Lucy on lucy [at] wearefuturegov [dot] com.