What’s your idea?

My charity needs a collaborative drawing tool, so that volunteer engineers from all over the country can work together to design custom made equipment for children & young people with disabilities. And where the young people can engage with the design process of the equipment being designed for them.

MERU is a registered charity that designs & manufactures custom-made empowering equipment for individual children and young people with disabilities when suitable alternatives can not be found. To do this we have a team of dedicated design engineers, volunteers and students who assess, design and produce the equipment for children in our workshop in Carshalton. – and therein lies the problem.

To volunteer for MERU and help design equipment, you really need to come to MERU and sit round a table.

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

What MERU (and the three other similar charities we work closely with) needs is a way that sketches and drawings can be shared and edited via the internet. MERU is regularly contacted by engineers from all over the country who would like to volunteer their time – but without a method of doing this remotely we are not able to capitalise on their offers.

What’s new about your idea?

I realise this idea is somewhat similar to the previous winner of the Social Innovation Camp in that it seeks to bring the Designers of Equipment together with the people who use that equipment – however, this proposal is to take that idea one step further and actually design the equipment on line.

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

We are at “stage 3” in the development of this idea, having already experimented with having virtual volunteers on a Google Groups and on www.Huddle.net – but whilst these are good for organising meetings they don’t allow the sharing of drawings.

We have also been told about www.conceptshare.com, which allows the editing of images – but it is still not quite what we need.

Ideally we need a package where you can sketch drawings that can then be seen by others who can add to the drawings or make changes. It needs to be free and easy/intuitive to use as we want to encourage young people with disabilities to be able to use it.

So far the best method we have found of engaging with young disabled people is to use Facebook. We have set up “events” for each project we are working on (see http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=41436542253 for an example).

This allows discussion and the easy uploading of drawings – but still doesn’t allow the editing of drawings that we really need to make this project work.

If Social Innovation Camp is able to help push your idea forward, do you have the time or desire to take ownership of it?

MERU would be very happy to push this idea forward if the Social Innovation Camp can find a developer who can code this type of project. The idea would also be very useful for another charity www.remap.org who have volunteer teams across the country who design equipment for people of all ages – but again only via physical meetings, so are not able to call on the skills of other volunteer engineers around the country.

This idea was submitted by Susan Brompton.

Susan is the Chief Executive of MERU. For fun she volunteer’s for another charity the Making Place and run science experiments and activities for kids & families. She thinks that Facebook is the best application on the web.