What’s your idea?

It’s called Flaming Desks. It’s a service that lets businesses use their spare desks as a way of meeting like-minded talent – by offering them for free to people who need a desk for a day. Obviously this is good for people who move around a lot and need desks. We’re also working totally out in the open, collaborating via a little blog. All explained with nice sketches here. (Oh yeah, and it’s got a sexy full screen map interface that our designer’s pretty proud of.)

What is the social need or challenge your idea could address?

Flaming Desks will be like lots of little Social Innovation Camps! All over the world, people who’d love to collaborate on innovative projects are getting together in the virtual space – but we know, like you, that to really get things going, you need to meet people. What better way than matching empty desks owned by some of those people, to the others who need them? There’s a green angle too; empty desks are a waste of resource. If we can avoid the odd unnecessary skyscraper by filling them up – brilliant.

What’s really new about your idea?

We’re not trying to make money out of desks, we’re using a physical resource as a social networking tool! And, we’ve worked out in the open ever since we had the idea, so the idea has lived the way it’s users do. The community has even fed back on how the logo should look!

What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place?

Lager. Well, specifically an offer of a desk from one person to another over a beer. See here.

From 1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea was in?

We’d say a “3”. Got a very very rough Beta up, and have done lots of thinking on the blog at http://www.flamingdesks.com

What can we do for you?

Our order of preference would be: cash, mentor, geek. (White October are all geeks, so we’re covered there!) What we need the money for is publicity. This is something Nonsense are good at, but unfortunately it also takes cash to get the name out there – especially in the USA.

Idea submitted by Rob Mosley and Dave Fletcher

Rob is MD and owner of Nonsense, a creative digital ad agency, and Dave Fletcher, MD and owner of White October, a web development company. They came up with Flaming Desks together and have got our respective companies working together on the project ever since (see above). Nonsense have branded and done digital PR, White October have built a Beta-ish site.