Welcome to ShareTown

Jenni Lloyd and Alice Casey at Nesta: “Today, we’re pleased to welcome you to ShareTown. Our fictional town and its cast of characters sets out an unashamedly positive vision of a preferred future in which interactions between citizens and local government are balanced and collaborative, and data and digital platforms are deployed for public benefit rather than private gain.

In this future, government plays a plurality of roles, working closely with local people to understand their needs, how these can best be met and by whom. Provided with new opportunities to connect and collaborate with others, individuals and households are free to navigate, combine and contribute to different services as they see fit….

…the ShareLab team wanted to find a route by which we could explore how people’s needs can be put at the centre of services, using collaborative models for organising and ownership, aided by platform technology. And to do this we decided to be radically optimistic and focus on a preferred future in which those ideas that are currently emerging at the edges have become the norm.

Futures Cone from Nesta’s report ‘Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: A modest defence of futurology’

ShareTown is not intended as a prediction, but a source of inspiration – and provocation. If, as theatre-maker Annette Mees says, the future is fictional and the fictions created about it help us set our direction of travel, then the making of stories about the future we want should be something we can all be involved in – not just the media, politicians, or brands…. (More)”.