London Collaborative and responsible residents
February 26th, 2010 
We took our post-it notes off to the Design Council the other week to meet members of the London Collaborative network.
They’re a group of people primarily from local councils, but also from healthcare services, the police, social housing providers and other public bodies. The London Collaborative aims to facilitate connections and collaboration between senior people involved in delivering, planning and researching public services in London.
We were invited along to help them come up with new ideas that used web-based tools to get local residents creating solutions to local problems themselves.
The event kicked off with London Collaborative members sharing some of the issues they thought their local areas faced. From the fifty-odd they came up with, we chose four where we thought the web might be used to help citizens provide services for themselves in partnership with the state. Then we asked everyone to split into teams around our four ideas and work them up into solutions. Teams had to answer four questions:
1.) What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?
2.) What technology are you going to use to solve it?
3.) How will you sustain your solution?
4.) How will you get people to use your product or service?
They had to give each idea a good name and then pitch their solution to the group.
And here’s what they came up with:
Snow-Go

With London’s cold spell in the forefront of everyone’s minds, how councils grit pavements in ice and snow was a popular theme. The Snow-Go team wanted to make clearing paths and gritting roads into a competition between local residents: you enter by clearing your path, uploading a photo with date and time to a site which ranks you on a leader board against people in your local area and across London. For every road cleared, the council would agree to pay for more grit bins. The Snow-Go site would also feature a UK-wide weather map, snowman competition, grit-bin map and aggregation of Twitter posts with the #snowuk hash-tag as a crowd-sourced early warning system for bad weather. Gumtree and Freecycle would be integrated into the site for purchasing, swapping or sharing of snow-clearing equipment.
Adopt An Older Person

An idea to match up lonely, isolated older people who face barriers to leaving their homes with volunteers who can run errands or keep them company. ‘Adopt an older person’ would use a web platform to make it easy for volunteers to sign up and then bring them together with third sector organisations or care providers who look after older, vulnerable individuals to match them with someone to help in their local area. A skills-swapping element might be introduced whereby volunteers and older participants could teach each other cooking, sewing or how to use a computer.
Safer Crossing

The ‘Safer Crossing’ team were tackling the problem of badly placed pedestrian crossings. They argued that roads are primarily designed around cars and that crowd-sourcing information about the use of roads, pavements and crossings from local citizens would help make urban planning better. Safer Crossing is a site where you can offer suggestions for new pedestrian crossings or map dangerous parts of the road and the information would be fed back to the local council.
Our Space

Our Space matches people who want to hold events with vacant buildings or unused plots of land; it’s a user-generated search engine for physical space. As someone who knows where free space is, a local authority or a building owner, you can plot on a map where the available area is, what it could be used for and under what terms. Your space is mapped on Google Earth for people who are looking for a venue or plot of land to browse. It’s all about unlocking the potential of our local areas and under-used assets.
Not bad for under two hours work! You can see all of the challenges London Collaborative members came up with here and find out more about the network here.











