Best Ideas

Table of Contents

Social Innovations Award Winners 1995

1. Internet's New Civilization Network
2. A pan-racial electoral system
3. A village for midwives and the retired
4. A protest group who paint d-i-y bike lanes
5. Come to the meeting with three ideas
6. The Bank of New Ideas
7. The Transport Social Inventions Award 1995
8. A nationwide network of discussion cafés
9. Golan Heights Peace Park
10. Jaisalmer in Jeopardy

Children and Education

1. Negakids
2. Childless By Choice
3. Childshare by shareparents
4. Transmitting family noises to babies
5. Engineering company reports for five-year-olds
6. Children not teachers asking the questions
7. The no blame approach to bullying
8. Puerto Rico's vouchers attractive to schools
9. A meeting place for home-educated children
10. Paintbrush Diplomacy
11. Teaching entrepreneurship
12. University of the First Age
13. A video history of Britain
14. A bioregional multimedia template for schools
15. Students using creativity to improve university
16. University credits earned by community service
17. A time tax on undergraduates
18. Software revealing student plagiarism
19. The interactive computer university of the future

Relationships

1. Enhanced marriages, families and neighbourhoods through Internet
2. A ring tattoo to discourage adultery
3. A gender tax to pay for male crime
4. Women to start work earlier
5. Pre-Marriage Percentage Compatibility Rating Test
6. Go camping together before marriage
7. Lonely hearts column tip
8. Wimps and Wumps
9. Boyfriend pays $20 deposit for date
10. Late arriver buys lunch
11. Reputation is more important than fame
12. Small gifts improve creative problem solving
13. Rewards devalue pleasant tasks
14. Random acts of kindness day
15. How to increase co-operation through Tit-for-Tat
16. Family therapy principles for defusing contentious public debates
17. Family Arguing Time

Housing

1. Bypassing estate agents with computerised house selling

New Money Systems & Financial Innovations

1. Regional currencies insulate against speculation
2. Ithaca HOURS - better than dollars
3. Channel Islands model of debt-free money
4. Money is for saving not spending
5. Individuals hedging against changes in earnings or house prices

Taxation

1. Pay tax on your price for your land
2. Allocating taxes to fund research prizes
3. Tax rebates for truthfulness

Work & Unemployment

1. The InterSkills Project
2. The Job Society, discussing the future of work
3. 'Time Money' from fathers to supplement child support
4. Training in leisure and d-i-y skills for unemployment or retirement
5. The Apprentice-Master Alliance - progress report
6. Green job options
7. Ways to find enjoyable work
8. Advantages and disadvantages of four-day week
9. A rating questionnaire for job references
10. Paid day off for errant employees
11. The lowest rated 5% fired every six months
12. No parking space for late-comers

Economics & Business

1. The Unitised Economy
2. Economic crash with appalling consequences
3. Outside directors to be paid only in shares
4. Top salaries taxed on long-term company performance
5. 30% of income must come from new products
6. Wearing a red cap means 'do not disturb'
7. 'Team-building' charitable work
8. Come to each meeting with three ideas
9. A supermarket that seeks out bad news
10. A new investment bank for N. W. Wales
11. Cheap bank drafts for foreign currency

Welfare

1. Green armbands for memory loss
2. Video film of pupils in case lost or kidnapped
3. American volunteers sanitising a Moscow children's hospital
4. Saving Russian children from dying of Cystic Fibrosis
5. Volunteers helping in hospital waiting rooms
6. Paid and volunteer helper group in Southampton
7. Voluntary Agencies Directory
8. Sign language in schools
9. MDMA in the treatment of torture victims
10. Council-paid for sex for man with handicaps
11. Firemen's skin to a tissue culture in case needed
12. Radio tags for hire by mountain climbers
13. A psychotherapy that focuses on morality and obligation
14. Promissory notes for beggars instead of money

Crime & The Law

1. Only fines for criminals
2. Photos wanted on cheques and credit cards
3. Over-25 car window stickers to deter car thieves
4. Electronic tagging in practice
5. More lawyers, less work, more mediation
6. Justice by random arbitration
7. Creative sentencing in California
8. Tonglen meditation in prison
9. Concealing crime victims' addresses
10. Differential needed between robbery and murder
11. Nuremberg trial for cigarette manufacturers

Health & Therapy

1. Health tips and research
2. Twisting mother if baby's shoulders jammed
3. A symbol to identify sweets that are 'kind to teeth'
4. Virtual play for ill children
5. Stress leads to illness in children
6. Twelve warning signs of health
7. Long-term survivors
8. Swaps Against AIDS
9. Healthy Communities Initiatives
10. Repetitive strain injuries
11. Curing check-out scanner stress
12. Blood donations requested from patients' friends
13. Doctors to let patients know if running late
14. Exercising the face
15. MDMA therapy guidelines
16. Using financial rewards to wean addicts
17. Exercise as a substitute drug for addicts
18. Money repaid to the healthy

Neighbourhood

1. Containing plagues by decentralising
2. Valuing people for who they are, not their IQ
3. ╔lites need ties to neighbourhoods
4. The elective village
5. Earning elite supporting whole villages
6. The Neighbourhood Company
7. Medieval-style neighbourhood bands
8. 480 town halls for London
9. New parish councils in urban areas
10. Rules for a local economy
11. What's your Community Quotient?
12. Personal histories of community activity
13. Self-reliance initiatives encyclopedia
14. Community trust-building

Environment & Ecology

1. Why future generations matter
2. If you were a multi-millionaire wanting to help future generations ...
3. The Sacred Cow Syndrome and Gaia principles
4. Ecopsychology
5. Equanimity needed to face accelerating changes
6. A vision of future evolution
7. 12.5m Earth globe with interior computer projections
8. A memorial for extinct species
9. 20 million optimum population for Britain
10. A Flu from Hell to reduce human numbers
11. Mass extinctions threatened by gamma rays
12. The Natural Step's progress
13. Local Agenda 21 as a way to influence councils
14. Getting funds from large firms by 'swing-purchasing'
15. Lifestyles of frugal beauty
16. Balancing the carbon budget
17. Negawatts, feebates and food-miles
18. Beckerman in Wonderland
19. A teenager's world-changing letters
20. Community-Supported Agriculture
21. Forest gardens, network marketing and learning poetry
22. Owners to donate land for community gardens
23. Permaculture as a social invention
24. A community forest garden in Islington
25. Permaculture farm and campsite - progress report
26. Cornish eco-hamlet
27. £30m Earth Centre in Yorkshire
28. Growing hemp for clothes
29. Thyme - a grass lawn alternative
30. A £25 home-made compost toilet
31. Squatters select waste collector
32. No garbage _ no garbage bill
33. Picking up other people's litter on the tube
34. Lottery rewards for good deeds
35. Microwaving waste less polluting than incineration
36. Making town maps showing Green initiatives
37. Re-creating our cities
38. An environmentally concerned hotel
39. Recyclable telephone directories
40. Hawks keep pigeons out of town
41. Pheremone spray for dogs' mess
42. Less stress for chickens in red light
43. The emotional lives of animals
44. Weather changes will increase depression
45. Stickers of earth from space

Quality of Life

1. Hillman's Musings:
2. The need for new indicators of personal conduct
3. A Green Gauge of environmental damage

Science, Technology & Energy

1. Negative research findings database
2. Scientists are beyond the control of dictators
3. A moratorium on releasing genetically-engineered organisms
4. Free speech leads to technological progress
5. One country to specialise in supporting inventors
6. Inventing your own constellations
7. A fractal universe
8. A decade of energy turbulence
9. Motors running for months without electricity
10. Solar Enterprise Zone (SEZ)
11. A London forest for heat and electricity
12. The world's only water-powered Aga
13. Wheat-burning stove
14. Technology in 25 years' time
15. Dismantling skyscrapers and automobiles
16. Energy-generating treadmills for dogs

Transport

1. Providing for cycling and walking cheaper than more public transport
2. Pavement cycling illegal but lifesaving
3. Protesters painting d-i-y bike lanes
4. Roads, bridges and airports underground
5. Pneumatic transport network for the UK
6. Sustrans' 5,000 miles of cycle paths
7. Bill to reduce traffic by 5% by 2005
8. Negamiles non-car commuting allowance
9. Car-free tax allowance
10. Travelbucks - rewards for the car-free
11. Firms meeting Clean Air requirements through telecommuting
12. Daytime car lights for safety
13. Volunteers driving at 30mph to slow down speedsters
14. Where to board the tube for quickest exits
15. Fastest plane boarding by window seats first
16. Plane seat belts throughout flights
17. Deaf people could live near airport
18. More pauses needed in travel announcements
19. Vertical stripes in buses reduce falls
20. Post boxes with roadside openings

Communications

1. The Global Ideas Bank
2. Using Internet as a resource for social innovation
3. Internet's New Civilization Network
4. Intelnet and the Bank of New Ideas
5. World Wide Web's inventor
6. International non-verbal languages with links in English
7. ShareText, the ShareWare book or article
8. Main libraries entitled to a digital copy of every book
9. Any book teleprinted on demand to local shop
10. Information stamps for the poor
11. Reader-friendlier books
12. Ubiquitous computing
13. Getting paid for reading e-mail
14. A way to prevent telesales calls
15. Getting your magazine distributed by a newspaper
16. Getting specialist shelfspace from a bookshop
17. Hippies slouching towards Bethlehem?
18. Planetary Connections newspaper
19. Discuss action plans earlier in conferences

Art, Leisure & Lifestyle

1. An audience discussion period after films
2. Reading groups
3. A network of discussion cafés
4. Legalised ticket touting
5. A restaurant with à la carte videos
6. Haiku for group discussion
7. International Parliament of Writers
8. Micro-libraries at railway stations
9. The reenchantment project
10. The Gyrotron - a human-sized gyroscope
11. Decalynx, an associative mind game
12. Package tourists less damaging than independent travellers
13. Sites for travellers - cheaper than persecution
14. Dental floss as sewing thread
15. Hair removal by laser
16. Snowboarding will make skiing obsolete

International

1. Strong neighbourhoods as the best defence against terrorism
2. Russia and Armageddon
3. The right to secede and to privatise
4. Return of the European city-states
5. The Swiss Example
6. The Brussels two-council model for Jerusalem
7. Golan Heights Peace Park
8. An pan-racial electoral system
9. Stakeholder democracy for Australia
10. Countries to seek bankruptcy protection
11. Sprouted food in famine areas to save on fuel
12. Trickle Up programme
13. Asian carpets without child labour
14. One traveller's initiative to save Jaisalmer
15. Strategic Questions for cleaning up the Ganges
16. Curitiba and its visionary mayor
17. Orangi slum transformed by street committees and small loans
18. Grameen-model village banking in Costa Rica
19. Grameen Banks for women in the States

War & Peace

1. Nuclear weapons in court
2. Cruise missiles cheaper than cars
3. Will robotic killers recognise surrender flags?
4. Reversible khaki for desert or woodland
5. Women as warlike and brutal as men

Politics

1. Administratium, the heaviest element
2. MPs renamed 'Public Servants'
3. Complainers encouraged by council to become street leaders
4. Voter Juries, Vetoes and Feedback
5. Civic and family duties stressed by Communitarians
6. A Council of the Islands of Britain and Ireland

Spirituality

1. Monks using MDMA as an aid to meditation
2. Evaluating the danger of cults
3. Danger signs in cults
4. A short guide to comparative philosophy
5. A new physics of the spiritual realm needed
6. H. G. Wells and the urge for transcendence
7. A labyrinth in every hospital, school and park

Old Age

1. Children legally obliged to support elderly parents
2. Gold medals for caring for old parents
3. Old age pensions paid by robots
4. A village for midwives and the retired
5. Inter-generational home sharing
6. Innovation centres run by elders

Death & Dying

1. Before and After - news from the front-line

Promoting Social Inventions

1. Alec Dickson, founder of VSO and CSV
2. Robert Jungk, futurist and social inventor
3. The start of the National Suggestions Centre
4. The first meeting of European social innovation centres
5. Social and technical inventions in the Philippines
6. Social innovations for women
7. Ideas for the Future project
8. The Innovation Diffusion Game
9. Social change unlikely but worth working for

Letters

1. Non-religious naming ceremonies in church
2. Hyperventilation for prisoners
3. An experiment to save lives by sleeping at an angle
4. Environmentalism not in need of debunking
5. Microfiche versus Internet
6. Developing thinking skills
7. Activist hoarding space offered in London W2
8. The enrichment of learning poetry
9. Learning 3 or 4 poems a week
10. Poems written to order
11. Writing poems on trains
12. One share each in Britain
13. A social innovations bibliography
14. Giving ratings to social inventions

1. On editing magazines
2. News wanted
3. Publications available