![]()
(From Connectors Malmö’s website)
Would you and your community benefit from a crowd sourced living room?
The Pop Up Space is literally just an empty room in the city of Malmö, Sweden where residents of the local communities are able to drop in and vote for what they’d like to see the room become. At the end of the week the votes are counted and one new feature is added to the room.
So, as it states on connectorsmalmo.com “Today, the room might be an empty room. But next week it might be filled with hundreds of pillows and a pizza oven.”
We caught wind of this story from Connectors Malmö’s Co-Director Julieta Talavera, who was a dedicated participant of Idealist’s Connector Initiative last year. Julieta became inspired by the idea of connecting social innovators so that they are able to collaborate and assist each other in bringing change. This inspiration, along with her own intention of bettering the world, sparked something in her that made her leap into action.
According to their site “Connectors Malmö is a community of people from here and there, doing this and that to make our city a better place.”
The Pop Up Space is part one of Connectors Malmö’s first featured project which they hope will lead to a prosperous career of positive change for their community and eventually the world.
Julieta explains “The neighborhood in which we are launching this space has significant social problems including unemployment, low integration and low community morale.”
The team over at Connectors Malmö says that the purpose of this experiment is to create a community-sourced hub that not only allows the diverse local community to work together in its creation but that will also act as a forum for people to think creatively with one another. They hope that once everything gets running this can be a comfortable place for locals to meet with each other, as well as social entrepreneurs from all around the world, to come up with unique solutions for local challenges.
![]()
(From Connectors Malmö’s website)
This is where Connectors Malmö’s second phase comes to play. If everything goes according to plan, Connectors Malmö plans to launch the Residency, or The Live-In Lab, at the end of the Swedish summer this year. The Residency will be a place where six to nine chosen individuals (the Residents) will live and work together. These individuals will be social entrepreneurs who are looking to use their skills in a way to help better both the local community and the world. The Pop Up Space is the common area where these individuals can collaborate both with each other and with the local community. This is why Connectors Malmö has rightfully dubbed it ‘The World’s First Crowd Sourced Living Room’.
This initiative is currently in what the team is calling ‘the pilot period’ and will be until mid-April. During this period, they have a number of backers who are willing to help them test the waters before going forward full-throttle with all of their plans.
Julieta and the team have thrust their vision into action with the launch of The Pop Up Space. If this initiative gains traction, and the idea of communal living rooms begins to spread across the globe, participating communities would be building their own unique proverbial ant hills, where everyone puts their skills and resources together to construct a mutually beneficial utopia.
–
What’s an idea that you have that you would share in your community’s communal living room? Let us know in the comments!
