Stop complaining. Start collaborating.

Change the world from your inner-city apartment.

With Facebook boasting up to 1.2 billion active users each month and up to 60% of Internet users owning Youtube and Twitter accounts (GWI Social), it’s safe to say that most people are engaging in some kind of global conversation. Whether it’s just Skyping between friends from New Delhi to Stockholm, or favouriting a retweet @stephenfry has posted, we are all some how interconnected and engaging with one another.

This is something we’ve known for a while though. And a lot of research has gone into determining the duration and scale at which people are using social media sites to converse. But what is most interesting about our large-scale chitchat is the extent to which we can collaborate with one another to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Rather than spending time on social media complaining about politics and governments, we should be more proactive with our connections. What if it wasn’t just about persuading our leaders and those who we consider experts to do something? What if it was just a matter of us all collaborating together through a global conversation to tackle the big issues ourselves?

Britta Riley did this from her fifth-floor apartment in Brooklyn, New York City. She wanted to know how we could solve the colossal problem of the global food shortage and it concerned her that this was being left up to the experts.

“It is precisely when we hand over the responsibilities to specialists that we cause the kinds of messes we see with the food system,” Riley explains in her TED talk.

Billions of tonnes of food are wasted every year, which consequently contributes to the copious amount of greenhouse gas emissions being produced. Our resources are declining severely as food demands are growing. Never has our planet been in a more vulnerable state, and yet our political leaders seem to be very slowly chipping away at this problem.

But how does a lone city-dweller even begin to solve the global food-shortage issue, particularly when 2 billion of the world’s population live in cities, and are unable to grow their own food?

Rather than focusing on what she didn’t know, Riley concentrated on what she did, and set out to explore ways urban communities could grow more of their own produce from home — a solution that if accomplished, could have a hugely positive impact on our environment.

Having earned a master’s in Professional Studies in Environmental Tech, Riley was aware that NASA used hydroponics to grow plants in outer space. Along with her knowledge and with help of friends, windowfarming sprouted to life.

A windowfarm is an indoor garden whereby people can grow food all year round with no dirt. These vertical, hydroponic platforms pump a liquid soil solution to each plant’s root system, which are all suspended in clay pallets.

However Riley didn’t get to this solution entirely by herself. Even the first version that she and fifteen co-developers built had a number of things wrong with it: it was leaky and loud, and its carbon footprint alone was too high for the project to truly succeed. So rather than developing a product, Riley created a social media site where her team published all their designs with explanations for how it all worked. They even went as far as pointing out all the mistakes they had made, and all the things that had gone wrong with the project.

Big corporations may refer to this as R&D, but Riley calls it R&D.I.Y — research and develop it yourself. The response they received was far-reaching. Together, people from all corners of the globe participated in the same conversation, a rapid versioning process bringing everyone closer to a solution to a great world problem. In 2011 the online community was 18,000 strong.

Today, it has more than 40,000 contributors and is growing every day. This open-sourced collaborative project has developed so much that individuals are now able to grow strawberries inside for nine months of the year and they have even managed to reduce their carbon footprint in half just by changing the pumping system from water pumps to air pumps. All this may have taken them several years to achieve if they had tried to do it on their own.

And that’s the point of this blog post. It’s not about owning the idea, it’s not about making money off a product; it’s about coming up with a solution that will radically improve all of our lives. Suddenly social entrepreneurship has become a community experience and it makes you think, what other world problems could we start to solve?

Riley and her windowfarms are an example of just how special online social networking can be. We’ve talked about our fears of being too attached to our smartphones, and we’ve discussed how detrimental our online social connectedness can be — but we haven’t talked anywhere near enough about how we could completely revolutionise the ways in which we are using these relationships. We should be sharing, collaborating and fixing the messes that we have all contributed to. Rather than waiting for politicians and governments to come up with solutions, we ought to rediscover the value of united development and as Riley explains, “ditch the word consumer and get behind the people that are doing something”.

It’s brilliant that Facebook has 1.2 billion active users each month, and it’s even better that 60% of Internet users have Youtube and Twitter accounts. Think of all the millions of diverse, intelligent, creative and innovative people in the world that we can now communicate with. Don’t shy away, and don’t be afraid. Stay connected. Continue to interact. Just change the conversations that you’re already having and heal the world.