The beta community is well underway in Louisville, KY, allowing future tenants to co-design and co-develop a key downtown block.

However, sometimes it’s easier to explain this customer-led, co-design, crowdsourcing at a much smaller scale, which is what CrowdSpirit does for us.  The basic concept is straightforward, as defined in their image above (excluding the urban village elevation, developed by Urban+West+Strategies). The goal is to co-design and manufacture any electronic product under $190 that the collective crowdspirit community feels should be made, but currently isn’t.

So what’s the CoolTown version of CrowdSpirit?  We’ll partner with a local representative (is that you?) in your community to establish a beta community to do the same, except that we’ll also partner with a forward-thinking developer instead of an electronics manufacturer. In addition, we’ll reward $10,000 to people who identify such a developer that is able to take advantage of at least $5 million in equity capital from a $150 million fund dedicated to investing in cool towns.

As Ghandi taught us, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.“