Inspiration

Lorraine, Nicola and I have all been involved in volunteering, learning and skill sharing in our community. The experience is good for us and good for our communities – be they at home, work or school. We want to help others discover, learn and share skills their too and in so doing support circular community. For example, for people in our villages to repair and re-use equipment, to learn to grow their own vegetables, to share local gardening knowledge and even seeds/plants/crops. From a 10 minute catch up over coffee to events in the village hall. Face to face local help, building friendships and giving people confidence to try things themselves.

What it does

Search for skills, register your skills, see what skills meet ups are happening and where.

Crowd sourcing – to capture skills people want to learn and find people with that skill to share.

Meet ups could be as simple as popping round to a neighbour for a 10-minute guide to pea growing.

How we built it

PHP and Javascript web front end

MySQL database

Challenges we ran into

Scope creep – we quickly had to narrow down what we did

Time on first unlockdown sunny weekend!

Childcare commitments

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working demo, working

What we learned

Working in a mixed development team

What's next for Circular Community Skill Share

Registering of people - security and privacy.

Offline version - community notice board – regular paper version to pin to notice board.

Scalability – reaching out beyond the village.

Skill sharing with neighbouring communities.

Analytics – tracking skills people are searching for. Which are most popular, who could help?

Awareness of (say) TV programmes or news stories that may trigger people to look for new skills (The Great British Sewing Bee!)

For people that learnt skills to share them on with others.

Understanding how knowledge and skills are shared over time.

To get local businesses involved in supporting activities (equipment sharing, selling plants)

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