Creating a live-in space for creators

The prototype worked. We got worldwide press, including an article in The Guardian. Our idea of creating a platform for involving the citizens into the process of urban planning started to work towards the very end of the prototype. People in the neighborhood of Persborg started to get together and bring suggestions for the square to the pop-up space. People started to get involved. We got tons of emails of people that want to move in into the Live-in Lab. We are happy so very happy it worked and we are also exhausted. 

We are a very small group of social entrepreneurs trying to do good. We are creative and we love arty things, we know about some things and we want to use them for good. But we can’t move forward without a salary. Well, because we are out of personal savings. But also, because we know we are creating value to the city, because we showed how our idea can be a solution to a problem and because we feel it’s time for our work to be appreciated!

We are now in the process of getting funding. We planned a crowd-funding campaign that will happen sometime soon. We are packaging the prototype into a service and some products. We will be creating tool-kits and sharing everything we learned running Connectors. We are trying to figure out the best way possible to get the resources we need to keep doing what we are doing, stop working for free for big institutions and transform the city and the field of social innovation. 

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Response has been AMAZING so far. People from Malmö, online, here and there asking about it. We are excited. We are testing and adjusting as we go. We will take a short break at the end of April to really get to think what we've been doing here. 

What's next

1. We are having a workshop tomorrow Wednesday 11 6-8pm, Co-Creating the square.  2. We are organizing a workshop & loops all together together with furniture makers from Copenhagen 3. We are gonna be participating in several events sharing the process of the prototype and the results, here in Sweden but also in Germany and a few places. 4. We are connecting with lots of different people from lots of different backgrounds from all over, potential residents for the Live-in Lab, potential founders. 5. We are working hard on the business model and how are going to finance this project in the future. We are seeing that it's working and that has tons of potential, we are dreaming of scaling now. Which takes me to the next section:

THE DREAMS

Want to try out the Pop Up space in several cities, sort like the Guggenheim Lab did, but cooler, from the bottom up and truly grassroots. I feel personally highly influenced by that project. If we managed to make the Connectors Network stronger by connecting with exciting networks, we will be able to easily test out this project here and there, outsourced ourselves and eventually compare amazing international data. 

We want to inspire, we are seeing on how we can scale from Malmö, inspire other groups to test out our methodologies. So in this line, we will be editing our open source & free Tool Kits in (hopefully) a few languages, so people from all over can try them out. 

"It's all happening"

Keep tuned. if you want to get everyday updates of Connectors, follow us on Twitter. And check our website, that is looking super nice. 

This is a link to our latest newsletter. 

Peace, 

J 

World, meet The Pop Up Space. It might not be much to look at. In fact, it’s just an empty room. But first impressions can be deceiving. You see, this is the worlds first crowdsourced living room. Today, it might be an empty room. But next week it might be filled with hundreds of pillows and a pizza oven. And that’s the point. Kind of. In this little experiment, members of the surrounding community drop into the space during opening hours and vote for what they’d like to have in the space. Each week, the votes are collected and one new feature is added to the space.

We opened up last Thursday and it was nice. Lots of friends came over to support the experiment. Some people from Persborg came in and stayed a while. Some people would just stayed outside looking and not coming in. Lots of mix feelings. 

Is this gonna workout? Is everybody ready for co-creation? do we need everybody to re-create the identity of a square? 

This week was also great because we meet with Sebastian from MellanRum. Basically what they do is to match empty spaces in the city with people that want to use those space for something. It sounds fair right? I mean, landlords won't loose money, people like us get to use the space to create value and everybody's happy. 

We are still thinking on different ways on how to make this lab mobile, meaning, we can just move it and install it anywhere we want and also way to engage the community. 1500 flyers doors by door. Hundreds of emails sent. 

What's next:

A video, a crowdfunding campaign?  a breakfast party where we will showcase the results, several events where we'll be talking about what we are doing, more people on the team, the development of the data-game (and YES! we found a programmer!) several talks about crowdsourcing, workshops and hopefully several thousand more pitches, because the more, the merrier. 

It's hard to catch up documenting online! We launched a new website and a new graphical profile. We felt that we needed to integrate for once all the stuff we've been doing though out these last 2 years. I feel that we've been around the same concepts over and over again and it feels good that we finally put it together. Connecting people, using our skills to change things, integrating and experimenting with spaces and design. 

I feel that we got to a point where experimenting became more serious, in a good way tho. We started a crowdsourced living room, playing with human centered design. We discussed so much about what can of change we want to experience and why we are doing all this. We are working full time with a salary that barely cover rent and sometimes really struggling to get the resources we need. People at @stpln have been incredible helpful, really helping on every step, specially when it comes to understand the swedish taxes system. 

We want to open up the residence after the summer. We are opening the space on the 12th (invitation). We'll present the first voting, a big info-graphic explaining Connectors as a whole and a work-in-progress survey about what makes us happy in Persborg and how the resident envision (or not) working with us in the close future. 

Questions at this stage in the prototype:

What's the best way to share what we do? How to make money to support Connectors and run always independent? Should we keep selling the idea of what's coming out of it? Is it what we do really important? How much is 'real commitment' to the project? Can we even be half way committed to our ideas? How critical should be about our collaborators? How can we emphasize even more the idea that social innovation is a political statement in itself? Is it even possible to showcase results in 3 months? What do they really mean by 'social impact'? should we come up with a completely new way of defining our work? There are more people out there doing similar stuff. I meet with people from The Unmonastery for example and learn tons. Should we make a global meeting somewhere cheap and get all this people together and learn from each other?  

Please, share your ideas with us. It's incredible helpful. If you are in Malmö, please join us next Thursday or another time at the new space so you can have a 3D idea of what we are doing. 

1 favor:

We are excited. This is our core team working from the first time ever from the new space. Agus Shuan joined us all the way from Argentina and she will be in charge of every visual. We are gonna be launching a new graphical profile next week, including a new and much more interactive website. We've been working on how the new space it's gonna look like, how the it's gonna be use and how to create a global campaign to tell everyone what and how we are building this crow sourced space for creators. We are developing a game based on everything we know about human centered design. We are scheduling amazing speakers for the salons and we are looking for the best channels to share it all.