I-Corps: Growshare.net - An Urban Revitalization Civic Service

Temple University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Abandoned properties in cities attract illicit occupants that negatively contribute to the community safety and growth. These urban blights decrease property values and contribute to the growth of criminal activities. Government agencies have tried many years to curb the rate of abandoned properties. They are met with mixed results. The proposed technology is an auction-based platform for tangible and intangible resources. The particular focus is intangible resources, such as volunteerism, after-school hours, technical know-hows, legal advisers, Open Source contributions, and public data sources. The intended target is for solving urban vacant lot problem in large cities by mobilizing otherwise "invisible resources" with fair compensation they deserve. In other words, The proposed mobile/web service should enable this relatively untapped resource pool to surface solving larger economic problems. Similar model has been tested by now the Ecommerce giant Alibaba in China who succeeded in the small business B2B market where there are serious lacks in credit, trust and logistics infrastructures. This I-Corps team proposes to tackle the urban vacant lot problems using an Open Resource Market (ORM) approach by trading tangible and intangible resources via an auction engine in the form of a non-profit organization. The key idea is to direct and accelerate resource developments in multiple forms towards social harmony and prosperity. Unlike existing online trading portals, such as Ebay, Ubid, and others, this team proposes to include volunteered times and efforts, market promotions to traditional service or goods exchanges. A special feature of the proposed project is the fusion of public data with private resources. The proposed work will integrate government Open Data sources with crime data sources, geo spatial data sources, and economic data analytics to stimulate open resource exposure, exchange and development.