The inherent value, talent and potential for creative genius in our local communities is driving projects and building networks like never before. The following organizations and place-makers understand the importance of a creative environment that nurtures unforeseen relationships and spurs innovative problem solving for a safer street, healthier city, and better world. How might we use the core values driving these change-makers and innovators to build meaningful connections and foster collaboration? What tactics do these organizers employ that we can steal in order to grow our networks? What methods can we develop from these models that will help us connect our stakeholders and identify market based assets in the name of innovation?

Glass House Collective

Here Because We Love It Here

Glass House Collective is...

Entrepreneurial and Beta-minded, we gather diverse teams of talent to help revitalize historic Glass Street in East Chattanooga. We see our work through three lenses, that help us prepare for impact: Creative Placemaking projects and programs that help artists and entrepreneurs capture and shape the flavor of the neighborhood; Feet on the Streets getting people out of their cars and into transforming experiences – through creative public events; New Partnerships Using creativity as a resource for renewal to bring people together – those who have never been here before, as well as those who have lived and worked here for years.

Promotes "complete streets" urban redevelopment by creating demonstration projects to engage the public.

The Better Block project started in April, 2010, when a group of community organizers, neighbors, and property owners gathered together to revitalize a single commercial block in an underused neighborhood corridor. The area was filled with vacant properties, wide streets, and few amenities for people who lived within walking distance. The group brought together all of the resources from the community and converted the block into a walkable, bikeable neighborhood destination for people of all ages complete with bike lanes, cafe seating, trees, plants, pop-up businesses, and lighting. The project was developed to show the city how the block could be revived and improve area safety, health, and economics if ordinances that restricted small business and multi-modal infrastructure were removed. Since that time, Better Block projects have been developed throughout the World with many of the temporary infrastructure improvements and businesses made permanent.

POC21 is an international innovation community, that started as an innovation camp.

The camp brought together 100+ makers, designers, engineers, scientists and geeks. Late summer 2015, we have joined forces in a stunning french castle to prototype the fossil free, zero waste society. Our ultimate goal was to overcome the destructive consumer culture and make open-source, sustainable products the new normal. Over the course of 5 weeks we developed 12 sustainable lifestyle technologies and built an international community of innovators and supporters, that continues to grow.

P2P Food Lab is a collaborative platform to help you produce and share food in your local neighborhood.

The P2P Food Lab project aims to develop new socio-economic models for sustainable food production. As a community we seek solutions that promote the local production, distribution, and composting of food. Our hypothesis is that with the use of today’s information technology and the insights gained from the Free Software & Hardware movements it must be possible to design food production chains that are more ecological, less hierarchical yet as productive as today’s food industry. The project is also a huge Citizen Cyberscience project: it relies on participants to set up their own experiments, gather data and collectively seek the most effective strategies to grow food. The community can use both quantitative data from sensors and free annotations from participants to build this knowledge base.

Casa Jasmina showplace is a real-world testbed for hacks, experiments and innovative IoT and digital fabrication projects.

It's a curated space for public exposure of excellent artifacts and best practices. And it's a guest-house for occasional visitors to Toolbox, Officine Arduino and Fablab Torino.“Casa Jasmina” is a two-year pilot project in the business space of domestic electronic networking, or, “the Internet of Things in the Home.” Our goal is to integrate traditional Italian skills in furniture and interior design with emergent skills in Italian open-source electronics.The project is a showplace inside the large industrial building already shared by Toolbox Co-Working, Fablab Torino and Officine Arduino.
 

We wed natural beekeeping practices with sensor-enhanced beehives to build a body of evidence for any interested party to draw conclusions from.

Every year 33% of all bee colonies fail for mysterious reasons. We need to uncover why. Were building a global and truly open network of concerned citizens who are working together to identify the causes of the issue. Were developing open source sensor kits that can track a number of hive metrics from temperature, humidity, to a host of others. We’ve used digital manufacturing techniques to create a number of CNC routable beehives that are natural and healthy homes for your bees. 

The journeys will serve as a platform for next-gen leadership development, community engagement, honest dialogue, and shared discovery.

We lead crowd-funded transcontinental train journeys for diverse groups of young innovators to explore America’s new frontiers, grow as leaders, and launch projects that benefit and inspire their communities.

Our caravan of vintage rail cars is more than a means of exploring geographies of innovation -- it is an incubator of ideas and symbol of progress powered by millennial aspirations and a world-class coalition of partners. MTP participants come from every corner of the world and use our journeys to advance important, creative projects that directly relate to the defining issues of our time. 

Bringing together a world-class community in Robotics & Autonomous Systems.

Our vision is to bring together an integrated community of entrepreneurs,
innovators, researchers and potential end users to create a vision for the emerging industrial Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) sector in the UK. RAS technologies will have impact on industrial sectors in ways we have not yet fully conceived.Through mapping of value chains and modeling such possible disruptions, SIG activities will analyze and understand the commercial forces at work and the opportunities they bring to place UK industry in a position of international leadership.

Thus equipped, business cases can be developed that justify necessary investments from both the private sector and the Government. The aim is to kick start a pipeline of UK innovation from basic research to products and services that in turn creates jobs and future growth in the UK economy.

We work on city making by bringing together research, community participation, and design.

Urban Transcripts was born of a desire to create a new tool through which to explore the city as a complex phenomenon in a participatory and cross-disciplinary way. It was initiated in 2010 as an annual programme of events such as exhibitions, conferences, and workshops, focused on, and hosted in, a different city every year. Our point of departure was to grasp and effectively communicate the complexity of the city through an “urban transcript” that becomes a basis for opening up city making to participatory and interdisciplinary approaches. In 2013, Urban Transcripts shifted its activity from an annual event to a multitude of projects on the city. In each of our projects creating a transcript out of a complex urban reality is what we see as the first step towards resolving an urban problem and generating successful solutions. The “urban transcript” has remained a central component in our pursuit to ‘read’ cities and propose new ‘writings’ on them.