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Twitter, Technology, Food & Hunger in Portland

Posted to: <Ned> Oregon by Mark Grimes (189), Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:26:48 PST
Edited: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:08:32 PST
Feedback score: 0 +|-
Comments: 15 by 6 members
Viewed: 124 times by 17 members

One of the breakout sessions at last weeks Springboard Innovation's Social Innovation Forum was a brainstorming session about technology and hunger. Of course as people started talking, some of the talk was about Twitter (a microblogging site), though most people had no heard of it yet.

Blanka (who'd not heard of Twitter) mentioned something about farm food on Sauvie Island and then Don S, one of the participants who had not heard of Twitter actually came up with the genesis of a pretty interesting way to use social media (Twitter) to help get unwanted fresh foods from farms (and grocery stores and restaurants) to food pantries and various distribution centers.

First created a Twitter Portland Hunger account.

Then a decentralized and open distribution network could look something like this...

(Request for Pickup) Local farmers, grocery stores, restaurants (aka Provider) would be given a quick demonstration how to user Twitter (ie text messaging on their cell phones) to say they have a pickup of whatever type of food. (what, how much, where, time, notes)
(Pickup Verification) The first person to respond (aka Delivery) to the @portlandhunger request for food pickup will pick and deliver the shipment. It's up to the person doing food pickup to determine which food pantry, church, or food bank they prefer the food be distributed thru. This will hopefully mean people (delivery) closest to the (provider) will be in position to most quickly get the food items to the closest distribution point.
(Pickup Confirmation) Provider will reply to Delivery openly so others following can see the food is being picked up.
(Pickup Authentication) Delivery (and if desired Provider) person confirms pickup of food.
(Food Drop Off) Delivery person provides drop off location once food has been delivered to food pantry, food bank, or church)

So, the farmer/grocery/restaurant participants would have the least technology knowledge or responsibility in this process. The people with the most responsibility would be the Twitter Delivery people who would track the food from pickup to final destination delivery.

It's a 100% open system, no groups, organizations, businesses, or people own it or control it.

It's simple, if you can text message, you can do this.

It's flexible, and it's emergent.

More thoughts and ideas?

By someone (at) hook.org (0), Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:08:25 PST
Comment feedback score: 0 +|-

I have questions,

I like the pattern overall that Mark documented - I'll repeat with questions:

Pickup Request: On the supply side - restaurants get a tutorial on twitter - hopefully each gets a twitter account - and this is how they can publish that they have food. [ should we also have an ordinary phone number they could call? ]
Pickup Verification: The first person to respond gets to go get the food [ the fetcher responds by twitter? or by phone? i guess the restaurant staff have to get the twitter via sms right? ]
Pickup confirmation: Provider publishes that somebody is getting the food. [ hmmm, can we remove this stage? or shift the burden to the fetcher? ]
Pickup authentication: Fetcher and Provider can both confirm the pickup was accomplished.

Food drop off. Fetcher does something with the food ] I actually don't care what happens at this point and onwards myself... I figure it is something to look at later on. ]

I think it's great overall.

Questions:

How to really test this - what is the praxis? How can we do something this week, or within 2 weeks to actually try the idea in the real world?
Maybe a dial in number at some point? Or connect to 211?
Is the total public nature and visibility a good idea? I think so but it will be raised as an issue. There is a grey space of semi-public behavior that we may need to consider. I would advise ignoring such issues for now and stay totally public.
In the second round - folks from the sunshine food pantry (?) suggested a window sticker for restaurants. Are there any other incentives we can create for participants? For example the fetchers (aka delivery people aka runners) how can we create incentive for them?
I really want to actually be able to talk to everybody directly and know who everybody is and try to see if we can't continue this theme in real life at some point? Katherine is interested, I'm interested, Mark is interested - but I don't remember the names of the other people. I have a few folks from the second round to add to this list:

jesswansart@gmail.com jaclynkampmeier@yahoo.com raina.carter@gmail.com wkarmol@nami.org

Also hopefully Katherine can provide the names of those two folks from Sunshine who are also extremely interested in this kind of thing and who've been talking about it quite a bit even before our sessions.

I don't in any way want to own or take credit for any of the creative ideas that we batted around - but I do have some helpful research and I want to throw it into the pot. I have been thinking about this quite a bit, and I think it's the same consensus most everybody arrived at. That basically we can use some of these internet services to help connect people. I am doing research on general riff on the idea - to build a real time craiglist:

http://www.slideshare.net/anselm /citybot-presentation/

http://citybot.org

http://makerlab.org/projects/cit ybot/news

anselm@hook.org

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Twitter, Technology, Food & Hunger in Portland