Stuffing the butterfly back in the cocoon

The soul of Urbantastic is a belief that we can change the average person’s relationship with their city - to cause them to become more engaged with the places and people around them.  We feel that the documented slide in the indicators of urban social capital (e.g. membership in social organizations, neighbourly interaction) is more than nostalgia - it’s real, it’s reversible, and it’s a worthwhile and conquerable foe.

So far we’ve focused on solving the information gap between events that are currently organized and the public’s knowledge of them.  We felt that this was the most immediate barrier to engagement.  The truth is that most of us don’t know what’s going on in our own city.  But as we progressed in this direction - building a website, filling it with events, promoting it - we found that we had created an excellent solution to the wrong problem.

Put plainly: the moment hit home when we found competition that matched us feature for feature.  It’s humbling, and you curse yourself for not finding them sooner, but it also gives you a glimpse of what your future could have been.  And we’re kind of glad that we didn’t go there.

They secured funding, true; they got out there and gathered events.  And at first the people came.  But then the influx stopped.  In company after company that we looked at we saw the same user growth graph - after an initial burst of enthusiasm the line went dead flat.  At first we thought that this was because their solution didn’t fit the bill.  But then we discovered competition that, frankly, did a pretty good job, and we saw the same familiar picture.

This only cemented, however, a realization that was beginning to dawn on us as we entered hundreds of events into our website and as we talked to people about getting out of the house and engaged in their city: there is something important missing.

The city, the real live one full of people and things to do, has some stiff competition.  Or rather, soft cushiony competition - in the form of couches and computer seats.  Is going out to a class better than mastering an XBox game?  Is going to a play better than interacting with friends on Facebook or watching a movie on your laptop?  After a hard day’s work, the answer is a resounding maybe.

To change people’s lives - to cause them to voluntarily alter their deeply rutted routines - requires something extraordinary.  There was a moment, when we were feverishly entering events into the site, where we were ourselves possessed what we wanted everyone else to have: a deep understanding of what was going on in town.

It was anti-climactic.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s some deeply cool things going on in Vancouver that we’re really glad we know about.  But we knew in our bones that lives were not about to be transformed by sharing this knowledge.

The roots of the engagement problem are not in the event information gap.  They are in a lack of institutions in which to participate.

With this new understanding we are reformulating Urbantastic.  The goal is identical to what we started out with, but the means quite different.  Over the next month, we’ll lay out what those means are, and why we’re betting that they’ll win the hearts and minds of those who are looking for something to do tonight.

Heath