Our Local High Street Online
A proposal for an open, democratic, digital platform to support local businesses with online retail
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Imagine you could shop at your local high street from your dining room table. Imagine that all the money you spent was fed back into local businesses, rather than generating profits for large corporations.
We want to create an open-source e-commerce platform that will create local clusters of online shops, replicating the localness of the high street and allowing local shopkeepers to sell online with ease. There is a digital rift between communities who want to support local businesses and the effective means for them to do so. The platform has many potential benefits: helping local businesses without the resources and means to invest in digital infrastructure and skills to get online; giving community members an alternative to ubiquitous online retailers; keeping money in local communities and strengthening our high streets; and allowing others across the globe to do the same.
Context
We are seeking support and collaboration to enable us to launch a prototype, ideally in one local context as a pilot for wider deployment. We are looking for local authority collaborators who want to lead the way in exploring new forms of local commerce.
Credits
- Dates: 2020
- Collaborators: Europa, Jerome Rigaurd
- Status: Ongoing
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