Roving Community Innovation Lab

What is it?

To promote mutual aid and encourage citizens to contribute to their local community, the Roving Community Innovation Lab will set up a pop-up exhibition at different neighbourhoods featuring ideas for ground up initiatives or peer-to-peer projects. Residents can browse these ready-to-run ideas and indicate interest to participate or organise such activities. Those interested will be given a playbook that acts as a 'DIY manual' so that they can self-organise these initiatives. There will be a half-day workshop where a facilitator helps run through the mechanics of each concept, but also an ideation session where residents can propose ideas to address local issues. Strong implementable ideas will then be included in the range of curated solutions that can be shared with other communities as the Lab moves from place to place.

The solutions we have curated are skewed towards those that can already be run by a community without the need of any professionals, philanthropy or permission; and loosely ranked by meaningfulness and potential impact. Example: Peer-to-peer learning groups for youths, Community fund for interest-free loans, Giving circles, Timebanks and Community Support Circles.

See below.

Why do this?

The Roving Lab hopes to encourage people who may not ordinarily think of themselves as a social innovator or people mobiliser to start and lead local initiatives that benefit their own community. We hope to reduce the barriers to action by curating ideas and then sharing them on posters exhibited in a community space where residents can browse and choose initiatives to participate in. They will be guided by a playbook and facilitator to kickstart the initiatives. Solutions include:

2) Collect local resident’s ideas through a Community Ideathon to encourage them to participate in grassroots driven events. Residents will think through and co-create local solutions to address local issues, ultimately surfacing various ideas.

3) Scale to another locality by sharing ideas that previous neighbourhoods came up with, catalyzing the new locality to add on and customise to their own circumstances. These ideas will be collated in an Ideas Bank or Solutions Hub as knowledge commons.

Encourage local residents, grassroots or SSAs to take on the innovation hub and run it on their own in regular intervals without further facilitation required from us.

Suggested General Playbook

Use consent, organise via sociocracy.

Venue and Dates

Jurong

Yishun

Curated Solutions

Neighbourhood Orientation Tours

Dancing in Pitch Darkness / No Lights, No Lycra