Our Story

Cooltown Studios has been advocating for walkable communities and the revitalization of cities for 10 years, with a significant and growing audience. Now, with the rise of crowdsourcing, it's time for the people who want change to work together and establish an identifiable market for more livable communities right in their own backyard. This is about creating places that prioritize people over cars, local businesses over chains, and sense of place over strip malls. I've established a proof of concept for a crowdsourcing platform to allow people to define the kind of place they'd like their neighborhood and city to be, but I need a bit more investment to pay a third party to complete it where it becomes both an effective and affordable tool for every city and neighborhood that's ready to crowdsource transformative change.

The Impact

The project is an affordable "Small Cities Movement" crowdsourcing web-based tool for small cities and neighborhoods to identify crowds that would support compelling new places to play, shop and live, to let the private and public entities that invest in placemaking know that such places already had existing markets to support them. For instance, if hundreds of people identify the need for a local coffeehouse, and vow to support it, it makes it that much easier for a local entrepreneur to open up such a business. The same goes for a park, a plaza or say, mini-loft housing because all other new housing is too big and expensive. This would be presented as part of the Small Cities Movement smallcitiesmovement.com that is currently being developed. What happens if we don't do this? We'll continue to see more soulless auto-oriented strip malls and office parks, luxury housing we can't afford, and chains replacing our local independents.

What We Need & What You Get

For $5500 we can complete a web-based online community for sharing and developing great ideas to help communities campaign for the kinds of places, whether they're large scale like a pedestrian-only plaza, or smaller scale like a coffeehouse with lots of couches and local live music. The service would be offered on a yearly subscription basis as a hosted solution. You can check out the proof-of-concept platform at gobristolsurvey.com, ourdowntownhilo.com and envisionroanoke.com. We've funded it that far, but we need help. The reward is permanent recognition on the smallcitiesmovement.com website as a contributor when this all started, and an opportunity to use the platform yourself at a lesser investment by supporting it early.

If we reach $10,900 we'll make this an open software project, where nonprofits and government agencies can utilize the source code for free, sharing their improvements with a membership community under a Creative Common license.

The perk for the $500 contribution has a $750 value.

The perk for the $1000 contribution has a $1500 value.

Other Ways You Can Help

Please tweet, post on Facebook and spread the word face-face that we're building a tool for change via the Small Cities Movement right here on Indiegogo!