Idea of the Week 3

Every week we’re going to be choosing our favourite idea from the ones we’ve received and explaining what we like about it.

Entrepreneurs often talk about the seed of an idea coming from having an ‘itch to scratch’ – that one thing that’s been niggling away at you that you just have to do something about.

Over the last few months at Social Innovation Camp, we’ve been benefiting from a good deal of itchiness. Saul Albert’s thatsmybike.org was the result of finding his beloved red Brompton folding bike, which had been stolen, advertised for ‘quick sale’ on Gumtree. The itch for Mike Amos-Simpson, who sent us an idea for personal development reports, was his frustration with not being able to demonstrate the impressive examples he’d seen of young people learning outside traditional educational environments.

Our favourite idea this week similarly draws its inspiration from a personal itch. Steve Cochrane and Dan Beattie’s Yoroomie is an idea which will appeal to anyone who’s house-sharing experience badly needed a washing-up rota and at least one housemate who paid the Council Tax before the final warning notice.

Yoroomie is a web tool to help manage issues that arise from communal living. Sharing your home with others can be a minefield and – if it goes wrong – a very isolating, stressful experience. This would be a social platform for centrally sharing information between housemates, managing bills, rent, cleaning and so forth.

But there’s another interesting feature of Yoroomie that we’ve been thinking about here at Social Innovation Camp HQ. Steve and Dan suggest it wouldn’t simply focus on building links between individuals, but on connecting homes with one another, thus forming neighbourhoods and communities between house shares through the site.

The decline in community cohesion and rise in anti-social behaviour in the UK’s towns and cities is a big political issue at present. Few residents could say that they knew their neighbours well or indeed at all. Does technology have a role to play in reinvigorating our neighbourhoods and local community lives?

In its early days, online technology was thought to be the beginning of an era of entirely virtual friendships between people who had never met in person. Yet for the average web user, these early predictions haven’t materialized. What the web does appear to be really good at is reinforcing and maintaining weak pre-existing offline linkages between people – Facebook is prime example of this in action. So it seems that whilst the web can strengthen pre-existing communities, it’s not so good at creating new ones where no connection between people is in evidence in the first place.

Returning to the question of community regeneration in our towns and cities, if there’s no offline interaction between neighbours and people living in close proximity to one another to build on, will the web make any difference?

We’d like to hear more from Yoroomie about how their idea might be a step towards not only making us nicer to our housemates, but more friendly with our neighbours as well.

So can you beat the Idea of the Week?

Send us your idea for a web tool to change the world.