Re-Imagining a Town-as-a-Service
The Community of Te Karaka on the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island is starting the next chapter of their remarkable journey.
My relationship with the community of Te Karaka began in July 2015, when I was copied into an email from a colleague. Tu Ake Te Karaka Committee were looking for someone to carry out an economic development feasibility study for their community. It was the committee’s hope that this study would show them the potential opportunities available within their township for creating positive economic development, employment, and population growth. This information would ultimately be used to create a business plan for the township.
The group had already done a plan for the community, and the Council had been working with them on some upgrades to their mainstreet. It was immediately evident that the community has great leadership, and is very well organised. They wanted things to change, and were prepared to use their initiative to make it happen.
Mapping out the user journey
If economic growth is the goal, where does this growth come from, and who is the user? The most immediate ways for money to come into a town is through visitors spending money, or residents exporting goods or services. Longer term options are to attract more business investment, or grow more talent from within the community. There are at least four customer segments right there.
If Te Karaka was a business, and with a resident population of around 500 people it would be a small one by world standards, it would formulate a plan to grow its customer base. To understand how best to do that, you need to understand the user journey for each of the customer segments. So how might you do this in relation to a whole town?
Why write a plan when you can hold an event!
For the last few years I have run some Service Design Jams, Hackathons, and Startup Weekends. What I really like about these events is that they are great for getting people together to do amazing things in a really short space of time. I have already experimented with scaling this type of event to a whole community using the Google Ventures Design Sprint format, and it worked out even better than I had expected. The next iteration I was keen to try was to run a service design event for a whole town: A ‘Place-as-a-Service’.
Step one for holding any successful event is to pull together an awesome team of organizers. Chris Jackson was a fellow Service Jam organizer, and is one of the talented leaders in the world of design and user experience. I’d been keeping an eye out for a project that we might be able to work on together, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. We got together scratched out a plan about how we could run a service design event for a whole town. And the best part was that the Tu Ake Te Karaka Committee were willing to take us on!
Let’s do this!
The project has been given the green light, so we are good to go. We are at the detailed project planning stage, and there is a LOT to be organized. We had initially planned to hold the event in early December 2015, but the decision making process for community funding didn’t leave sufficient preparation time to hold the event so close to the holiday season. Instead, we are looking at fixing a date in mid-February to coincide with the commencement of the school term. That leaves us a mere 10 week lead in to the event, with most people looking to take holidays at some point during that period. Still, nothing like an unreasonable time frame to help create a little excitement!
Documenting our journey
I know how easy it is to get carried away with projects like this, and forget to live in the moment and appreciate the experience it brings at every step along the journey. Everyone this project touches will have their own story to tell when we reach the other side. It is in those stories that the true value of the project lays, so I hope to capture as much of them as I can throughout the life of the project. To document the project from my perspective, I plan to write a weekly event blog, and hopefully create some discipline around how I record my learning. I guess we’ll see how that goes!
I’m sure there are many other people and organizations who would love to follow the community’s progress, and I’m always looking for inspiring humans to join the team. If you you would like to find out how you could get involved, feel free to drop me an email (nick@mashmatix.com), ping me a tweet (@mashmatix #TeKarakaPaaS) or watch this space for further updates.
