Angel discussion - on the 'citybot' branch of ideas
At one of our MakerLab hack sessions we met with Katherine Ball from Springboard Innovation who is putting together a forum on hunger and how to solve it.
Briefly I see 3 goals,
1) One shift that I'm going to try now is to not require users to actually message citybot - but rather to have citybot just look for specific keywords. This shifts the engine from you needing to type in "@citybot blah blah blah" to it having to use the twitter search API to say search for pizza for example.
2) I'd also very much like to think about how to let other people easily create their own groups rather than having to use the citybot room specifically. 3) And I'd like to look at automated match-making, although first I think I want to let ordinary users filter and search and do human match making.
This all comes out of a series of discussions. At one of our MakerLab hack sessions we met with Katherine Ball from Springboard Innovation who is putting together a forum on hunger and how to solve it. See Springboard Forum .
This was a good example of where MakerLab can have real value, and help solve real problems so I see this as a good synergy for many reasons. In this case Katherine points out that there are a lot of restaurants that dump food and as well a lot of gleaners that are happy to pick up food. In a perfect world the dumpers could message or signal the gleaners in some easy way and the gleaners could come fetch the food before it is thrown away.
This does happen with projects like foodnotbombs but I want to do better. I want to connect together more people more of the time in a more energetic and 'loud' way. People should be able to just broadly indicate to their geography about needs or opportunities - rather than always requiring people to have specific end to end connections with other people. Of course I ignore the traditional routes such as advertising, television and radio because they are too slow and they are not 'proactive' - they don't actively go out of their way to message the people who can come pick up the food or whatnot as the case may be.
The challenge of "connecting dumpers with gleaners" could be done with a citybot like approach. The dumpers could sms a message to a phone number and this effectively would be a twitter. Alternatively they could call a hot-line too. Their burden would be very very low, simply to send one message or make one call. The next step is to try to surface this in a visible way, so that gleaners who are nearby can respond - and in my mind twitter is a good way to do this. The location of the need can be twittered geographically ( such as citybot demonstrates already ) and gleaners can listen in and respond, or citybot itself could proactively sms the listeners.
Finally - one question that keeps being raised is one of privacy. There may be cases where restarants do not want to broadly advertise that they have food to throw away. How can this be solved? I'll leave this open for thought although some ideas present themselves - I'd prefer to give the issue and any solutions some time to grow.
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