I’ve submitted “Social Compost” as a project proposal to Social Innovation Camp.
SI Camp is a grassroots conference, where social entrepreneurs and web developers get together to help each other out. A number of great ideas have been submitted, a few of which will be selected for the event. My idea is to connect local people who produce kitchen scraps with those who produce compost.
I’ve moved home twice in the last 6 months, and both times to a top floor flat with no garden. We get a weekly delivery of fruit and veg (from Pulse) and quickly turn it into a whole heap of peelings. How could we just throw that juicy waste away… to slowly fester in a plastic bag on some landfill site?
And so, we have scoured both of these new neighbourhoods, looking for someone with a compost bin to take our scraps (thank you Toni, Jon and Anna). There must be a better way….
From the Social Compost proposal:
‘Social Compost’ would be a drop-dead simple website, based around an interactive map. There would be an option to add yourself to the map and to offer either kitchen peelings or mature compost. You could use the map to find others who are offering either peelings or compost.
Have you ever been in a situation like mine? What did you do? And how might such a website help you?
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5 Comments
There has been some conversation around the idea – e.g. the original thread on the Brighton New Media mailing list and posts by Rosie Sherry and Leif Kendall.
Well, Social Compost didn’t make it as one of the six projects to be worked on during the SI Camp weekend. However, Madhava and I have been asked to attend the event, to assist others in their projects.
We’ll be focussing on Seth Reynold‘s idea: Stuff Share. This is to be a website where people can list items that they are prepared to lend (such as a drill, or a tent), so that others can search for what they need and borrow it…
Yeah, I’m the same situation right now, but I must admit I’ve tried as hard to find somebody with a compost bin, it just seems like too much effort. It strikes me that what’s needed is just a really generic local message-board system; there’s nothing really special about the message “who wants my veg peelings?”, but what really matters is whether the person who replies is 100m away or 1km away. In other words, penetration (in your local area) is the key. I dare say people would start using it for all sorts of other applications too, like selling furniture, complaining about noisy neighbours, whatever.
What you are describing, Jon, sounds like it would go something like “enter your postcode and make an announcement”. A geo messageboard, where users can search or browser for, say, tagged messages within x kilometres of a location.
That would be useful. To what extent do we have that kind of service already? I guess there are messageboard sites for pre-defined areas and regions, such as Craigslist and Gumtree. And there are focussed announcement for predefined areas, such as Upcoming for events. But that’s not quite the same as “x kilometres from me”.
We can use Twitter, with the location nanoformat and hash tags, to say something with a geo-bound location. So, a generic service such as Twitter could accommodate a messageboard. But is it distracting that Twitter has a million other uses too? Is a dedicated service more useful?
TouchyPeely. The new name for Social Compost: http://dharmafly.com/projects/touchypeely
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