2. Shame
By: Marcelo E. Jiménez Soriano
Tags: Tourisme, City Living, Apps, Shame, Lean Startup

The civic app that will give a voice to citizens, help improve streets and tourism, while helping municipal authorities to focus their efforts in the most needed areas of the cities.

The Shame app

Opportunity

During 2018 I’ve been living in one of the most iconic neighborhoods in Barcelona, ‘el born’, while it is highly touristic, it’s not easy to live in, you can find dog feces and urine anywhere in the street, people just leave their trash in their doorsteps and don’t take them to the proper places, drunk tourists laugh and scream at night, and there are burglars everywhere. But finally, after some time you start getting used to parts of it, and learn to live with it.

Once, walking back home I’ve witnessed a lady just leaving her dog’s poop on the street, and even when lots of neighbors, business owners and tourists have seen the same, nobody said anything. The initial assumption is that people from around here is culturally shy, and avoid having one on one confrontations. I myself wanted to scream ‘shame on you’, but didn’t want to call for attention.

And here is an opportunity, there are many citizens and governments that could benefit a lot from having a voice; de-normalizing the presence of garbage and animal waste; and, to have a precise indicator of the quality of leaving/visiting a place and it’s surroundings.

Description

An app to do exactly that!, an app that will give a voice to confrontation avoiding citizens, and let them point out non-civic behaviors:

The app could scream ‘shame on you’ — for you.

The app could geo-localize pictures of shameful acts.

You could help to improve the service of authorities, waste treatment companies, police and many more.

The MVP

For the first iteration, we taught that it’s really easy to implement a simple website with do-it-yourself flags and stickers.

If you are used to leave your garbage in a place, and believe that it’s not harmful or it does not affect anyone else, just finding a sticker that says “SHAME” on it, will make you know that your acts are indeed affecting your neighbors.

Minimal Viable Product

The first campaign

To make people notice how much of an effect they make, instead of just cleaning a public space, the idea is to replace every single piece of litter with a flag. That, in Barcelona, in summer would make the beaches look like a red carpet made of flags, just take a look and imagine.

Then, it will be necessary to push the idea though social media, and if it’s possible to do it through traditional media.

The app

And for the app, its a simple app that has two buttons for sounds:

Button 1: Scream ‘Shame’

Button 2: Shame bell, a unique sound that will become the universal sound of “shame on you”.

Another button to open the camera to flag something specific and geo-localize a shameful act.

And fourth button, to interact with a map and review the city analytics, by zone, zip code, neighborhood or scrolling through the map.

The advantages:

A voice for common people to whistle blow on bad behaviors.

Better streets: the government can focus in the areas that need more attention.

Better info for tourists: Tourists will be able to plan their route in a city.

Healthy competition between neighborhoods and cities. By having macro indicators of behaviors, and inviting to have a ‘gamified’ experience.

And, using the same logic and tweaking the tools, it is possible to reinforce positive actions, the app could have the “Great job” feature, which will count and geo-localize positive actions.

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About the authors: it is unclear where this ideas come from, please know that anytime I say ‘I’, I mean me and Denisse, with whom I share all the ideas and recognition. She is not only my inspiration, but a keystone of our creative process, watch more about her projects here.

This post will be reviewed soon, but, as explained before, I’ll force myself to write and publish, so please report anything that is not clear, mistakes or questions.

What do you think about this idea?, could it work in your city? (after we defeat Corona virus, of course). Would you use it?, what would be your concerns?, do you think that local governments could be interested?. Please, leave your comments.