Some things from an Evernote notebook called ‘ideas’:

1. Open Need Map A structured wiki for mapping things that are needed by people and organisations at particular places. eg items at a food bank, volunteer tasks for organisations, items required at a refugee camp.

Data would be available via an API so, for example, it would be possible for a third-party e-commerce service to invite you to add something a local charity needs to your basket, or for an employer that gives it’s staff time off to volunteer to add local volunteering opportunities directly to an employee’s pay slip.

1. DIY citizen juries A service where people can pledge to spend 2 days a year responding to a random government consultation. Each consultation is sent to a group of people along and a temporary email group to allow them to discuss the issues and draft their response(s).

2. URL dials A physical dial like the bicycle barometer that does one thing: display the number published at a URL. It would be laser cut from laminated wood so users can write the scale directly on each dial. A generic tool for displaying data in the physical world.

3. Assets of community value A service that makes it easy to both identify and build support for local amenities to be added to the Assets of Community Value register. Open Street Map data would be used to display the percentage of parks/pubs/public spaces etc currently listed. Users could check in to register their support.

4. Distributed local information platform Experiment with using GNU social or pump.io to build a distributed messaging service for posting local information (planning applications, lost cats, parking suspensions). Test if it would be possible for local councils or local interest groups to run their own interoperable instances.

5. Product datastore A datastore of the products that a household owns. Data is entered by scanning receipts, forwarding emails etc. Product recall notices and personal environmental impact reports are generated automatically. (We experimented with this idea at Consumer Focus Labs, but it feels doable now).

6. Total hyperlocal alerts Scrape and buy all the data that the internet has on a 3 square mile area of the UK - everything from planning applications, house sales, edits of the Wikipedia for a local monument, crime etc - and build an alerts service on top of it. Show what would be possible if communities had total, high quality structured information about their communities. (aka Brixton Radar done properly).