Could your imagination be home to an idea that could change the world? In the lead-up to the Ideas Festival in May 2011, the Queensland Government’s has partnered with OpenIDEO to launch an international challenge to explore new ideas for the creation of government policy and community-based projects. The Queensland OpenIDEO Challenge launched on March 24th, asking the global OpenIDEO community and Queenslanders to contribute ideas for projects and initiatives that will help connect food production and consumption. The site is already filling with amazing content from across the world. The Challenge runs online on the OpenIDEO website – a place where creative people design together for the common good. In early May, the Open IDEO team, including Chief Creative Officer Paul Bennett, will select the most inspiring and relevant ideas that have been submitted to the OpenIDEO website. These ideas will be brought to Queensland during the Ideas Festival for an OpenIDEO workshop to refine and build upon the best ideas so that they can be put into action.
The team at OpenIDEO have created a theme that should inspire local creative thinking – “how might we better connect food production and consumption?”. It connects with resonant conversations from the world of food – from sustainability, food miles, rural / urban migration and urban farming to nutrition, obesity and food education. OpenIDEO always searches for themes that are both locally and globally relevant, with multiple areas for possible transformation and innovation across government, industry and community sectors.
The Challenge asks us to consider ways to improve and enhance the relationships and interactions between producers and consumers, rural and urban communities, growers and retailers, retailers and consumers and to consider issues such as energy use, transportation, biodiversity, food security, nutrition, obesity, the health of rural economies and the strength of intergenerational and intercultural knowledge sharing.
As OpenIDEO is a global platform they want to encourage contributions to this challenge from across the world. The issues being explored are not isolated to Queensland, they are nationally, regionally and globally important. As global populations grow, productive land is being converted to accommodate growing urban populations, with this growth comes increased demand for food, placing increasing pressure on rural areas to find greater efficiency to sustain our nutritional needs. Skills migrate from the city to the country. Young people leave rural communities to work in the city. As we have seen in Queensland recently, unpredictable natural disasters can have a massive impact on the availability and supply of food.
The vast majority of the energy used to get food onto our tables goes into processing, packaging, transport and storage. Some food items travel more than 3,000 kilometers to reach our plates. In resource-rich communities like Queensland, creating a closer connection between local food production and consumption can make a dramatic impact on sustainability efforts.
The Queensland OpenIDEO Challenge invites all participants to engage in the process of ‘open innovation’ and to learn by doing, this is an opportunity to step outside our normal thinking process to see the world from the perspective of others and to therefore embrace governance and ideation in new ways.
