The Feast presents: The Worldwide Dinner Party, 7pm, October 5, 2012

Data Challenge

Presented by John Sherry, Director of Business Innovation Research at Intel

Broad Challenge

Each of us is creating data at a faster rate than ever before. Meanwhile cities and governments are making more and more civic data freely available. Help people reveal the opportunities hidden at the intersection of these two emergent forms of data.

Specific Challenge

Design a tool that utilizes the data that is being or could be created in the public and private realms to help improve the lives of one of the following people:

1. Elderly person in the city

2. Young mom of 2 kids with a low income in the city

We generate a ton of data every moment of everyday, from wifi and GPS signals that say where we go, to the metadata about our friends and shared interests. Meanwhile, there are needs that go unmet because much of that data is never turned into personal value or collective relevance. New models are making this possible: Airbnb means we can share information about the availability of our rooms, allowing others to rent them providing direct revenue to the owners. Skillshare allows us to share data about our skills, their worth, and where you can find them.

There are opportunities for us to ask questions of the data we are and can be making; for our own data and the data about all of to help address our needs. We are out to use this data to help those who need it most. From assisting the elderly to find services that maintain their independence and contribute to society, to enabling single moms to find the resources they need to stay healthy, we are out to unleash the power of data to make life better for all of us.

Open Design Challenge

Presented by Beth Comstock, Chief Marketing Officer at GE

Broad Challenge

Almost everything we use daily was carefully designed and built by someone. Show people how the world is made so they can make it better.

Specific Challenge

Use the open tools available today (or even create your own!) to empower a new group of people to make something that improves their physical environment.

We made the world around us. Every object and even the machines that made those objects were once designed and built by someone. Today, an exciting community of makers is taking charge of the physical world by creating accessible tools and open-sourcing plans for items once reserved only for major manufacturing. This translates into opportunities for anyone not only to independently make the things they need but to better comprehend what it takes to produce something and the impact that has.

What can we create that will inspire more people to see how the world is made, make informed decisions about what is made, and learn how to make the world work better for people and the planet?

Health Challenge

Presented by Arcade Fire on behalf of Partners In Health

Broad Challenge

Help others see healthcare as a human right.

Specific Challenge

PIH does whatever it takes to provide high quality care to millions of the world’s poor. Creatively inspire your community to back PIH as if they were caring for a member of your own family. Design enduring systems of financial support that can continue year after year.

It is hard to treat patients living in Russian prisons, Peruvian shantytowns, or the mountains of Haiti, but Partners in Health (PIH) is remarkably good at it. They are an international health care organization relentlessly committed to improving the health of the poor and marginalized, and they deliver this high quality care to some of the poorest regions of our planet by listening to and fully joining the communities they serve.

How can we amplify the life-saving impact of PIH? Part of the equation is obviously funding but there’s also huge potential if we can better bind supporters to the communities PIH seeks to help. How can we prompt, say, college students in Manhattan to feel that teenagers in Malawi with TB, or AIDS patients in Boston are an integral part of their world? How do we build not merely broad but deep support for a vision of the world where all sick people are treated equally?

Poverty Challenge

Presented by Mark Bezos, Senior Vice President at Robin Hood

Broad Challenge

Most New Yorkers do not realize that there are 1.8 million people living below the poverty line in NYC. How can we engage the other 6.2 million New Yorkers to spread awareness of poverty in NYC?

Specific Challenge

Re-brand poverty to engage New Yorkers in opportunities to take action.

Robin Hood is a leading innovator in the fight against poverty and one of the most influential philanthropic organizations in the country. Their poverty fighting solutions in New York are shared with the rest of the country and the world.

Robin Hood was a pioneer in what is now called venture philanthropy, or charity that embraces free-market forces. An early practitioner of using metrics to measure the effectiveness of grants, it is a place where strategies to alleviate urban poverty are hotly debated, ineffectual plans are coldly discarded, and its staff of 100 hatches radical new ideas. They understand that poverty is an inter-related series of problems, hunger, joblessness, lack of education, of healthcare, of opportunity.

How can we take advantage of the power of emerging technologies and digital media to scale Robin Hood’s efforts by shifting perspectives on poverty from an overwhelming problem to one that’s full of opportunities—from something that someone else will solve, to something that will empower all to take action?

*This challenge can be applied to every city in the world. Feel free to adapt the challenge for your own!

Eco Challenge

Presented by Graham Hill, Founder of Treehugger

Broad Challenge

Hack the City. Using the tools at your disposal, make your city more sustainable and less energy reliant while increasing quality of life.

Specific Challenge

What if a big part of solving climate change wasn’t about making a new solar panel but more about connecting with each other and sharing what we have? What if it’s not about new energy and more about less energy? Find a way to reduce our energy needs while also making our lives better.

Our impact on the natural environment isn’t slowing down. Last summer, all of Greenland’s surface ice melted in less than a month. As the effects from global warming become more apparent, we’re also seeing more and more people moving into urban areas seeking a higher quality of life. At the same time, our energy use per person has skyrocketed as we try to meet our growing demand.

With more than half of the world population now living in urban areas, how could we fight climate change by re-imagining how cities work? In what new ways can our relationships with neighbors and friends be repurposed as a powerful tool in this effort? Leverage collaborative consumption, mobile technology, urban agriculture, architecture, product design and more to reduce our cities’s energy needs and make our lives better.

Create Your Own Challenge

Have something else you're passionate about?

Give your dinner a starting point

Every dinner should have a “challenge.” It’s the topic of conversation. Identify an issue you’re passionate about and rally your dinner guests to start doing something about it!

From education to the environment, from elder care to affordable rent, don’t worry too much about the exact wording and understand that this “challenge” will inevitably evolve thanks to the contributions of your guests. That’s a good thing. It’s just important to set the tone and give your dinner a starting point.

Examples

We recommend phrasing your challenge as a question.

•   - ”In what ways might we be able to clean up our main street? (and keep it that way!)”
•   - ”How can I encourage recycling in my office and maybe my whole building?”
•   - ”Is there a way to help students at our local high school feel more creative?”
•   - ”I’ve always wanted to create a blog about women’s health issues. How can my friends and I make it happen?”
•   - ”How can I get my local cycling startup off the ground?”

Some Tips

• Start local. What issues affect your community, and what could you and your friends do about it?
• Stay small. Don’t try to conquer world hunger or change the education system of an entire country. Think instead about your local school district or after-school program. What do they need, and how could you help?
• Be selfish. What skill, project or passion have you wanted to dedicate yourself to but could never find the time? Use this dinner to kick it off.
• Latch on. Choose some organizations in your area whose work you admire. Instead of reinventing the wheel, think of new ways to support them.