Second thoughts

Week note 2 Discovery Fund

Finding my feet around the various online tools and exploring the resources on the project Learning Hub helped straighten out some of my thinking but I still fell behind on quite a few tasks. It made me realise quite how accustomed I have become to corporate systems which while far from perfect, do tend to be quite well integrated. I felt the need to stick things together and explored Notion as means to do that.

The problem statement

Even the most basic components of our project seem like Matryoshka dolls — writing a problem definition depends on how far down the scale you decide to look. While at the highest level we are interested in making good food and a good food culture available to children regardless of their means, our focus for the technology is around how we can replace
the systems provided by commercial catering suppliers with affordable and flexible systems which will help us to access locally sourced food.

So I am going to concentrate on one user group to begin with — local food growers and suppliers. Without them we don’t have a service. Later I will think about internal service users — managers and catering staff.

Perhaps this means turning the problem statement around…

Who? Local suppliers…
What? cannot easily sell to community caterers
And so? the mutual benefits of local supply arrangements cannot be realised.
This means? Schools miss out on the opportunity to source good quality low carbon food at affordable prices and suppliers miss out on dependable sales with low transport costs.

Using a knowledge board to brainstorm some ideas has been useful. I know I have a tendency to jump to solutions and to make assumptions about how the world works (or should work) and this process provides a chance to spot those problems.

There’s a real problem with a community like the community tech Discord channel — and its a good problem. So many amazing projects and talented people!