The inspiration for my Week 06 project initially came from a couple of images that I saw somewhere on the web. There was something about the images that I connected with and I thought that doing something similar¹ in London might connect with someone else. So that’s where the initial idea came from.

When I changed the focus of last week’s project I was thinking about AgendaCamp and all of the great ideas that came from it. I began to think about the various opportunities for improvement that the participants had open discussion about and wondered how these discussion could continue until London hosts it’s own Change Camp, hopefully sometime in the relatively near future². That’s when I had the idea to “crowd source” ideas from the community to keep them thinking about such topics. I was looking for short and concise answers but got input that was of the same caliber as what was at AgendaCamp, which was a fantastic thing.

With the experience of AgendaCamp behind me, and a more community oriented focus I almost had all the inspiration I needed.

One last place where I found inspiration was from the Broken City Lab initiative out of Windsor Ontario. I have been following this initiative for sometimes and I have been blown away by what has been accomplished. The grass roots initiatives that use art & culture as a medium for voicing political and social issues seems to have got the city thinking (or at least a few individuals) and over all I have really enjoyed what has been done so far.

The reason I am citing Broken City Lab as a source of inspiration is because while searching through their archives near the end of last week’s project I found, to my surprise, that they had a similar initiative. They asked the community of Windsor what could be done to save the city and they compiled their responses into a presentation and displayed it. Considering that many people may argue that Windsor needs saving this project seemed very appropriate.

I am sure that neither myself or Broken City Lab are the first to think of such a project but I was happy to see other local cities doing similar things.

With that said I completed the project posting twice as many powers as I had originally wanted as I found I had much more ground to cover than originally thought.

I hope that at the very least the words of the community that I posted can help to inspire if only a single person within the City of London.

1. I need to come up with an original idea one of these days. [↩]
2. If I have anything to do about it. [↩]