Social Innovation Camp Scotland 2009 from The People Speak on Vimeo.
If you missed out on Social Innovation Camp Scotland in June this year, now’s your chance to catch up on all the action.
The People Speak caught everything on camera - and they’ve made it into a short film.
If you’re really keen, you can see what happened at previous Social Innovation Camp weekends in December and April 2008 too.
We held our third Social Innovation Camp last weekend at the Saltire Centre, Glasgow and it was a lot of fun.
Over 60 people joined us from a Friday evening to a Sunday afternoon to help make six back-of-the-envelope ideas for web tools to change the world into real social start-ups complete with working software - all in under 48 hours.
Kicking off on Friday evening, we were joined by a talented bunch of software developers, designers, social needs experts and those with business, marketing and legal skills. We got them talking and kept them fed and watered, then asked them to split into groups and work out how to make our six ideas a reality.
We gave our teams a couple of things to think about (hacking together some software, deciding how they’d sustain the tool and how they’d get people to use it) but how and what they chose to develop was up to them.
All they had to do was be ready to pitch what they’d built at our Show and Tell finale by 2pm on Sunday in front of a audience of friends, family and fellow Campers. Our judges came along to award some prizes to the teams who’d shown most potential in the weekend.
The ideas
And here’s what they made:
MyPolice is a tool for members of the public to give feedback, express thanks or tell their story about their experiences with the police and offer suggestions for improvements. It’s Patient Opinion for the police service.
The team tackled a really tricky subject brilliantly, produced some fantastic design work and began to develop a functioning site. All of which earned them a well-deserved first prize.
Check out what it looks like now and their team blog.
Weedayout.com is a site which pinpoints accessible toilets and shows the facilities they have. And if you know where a loo should be, you can add a gap to the map too.
They had a small-but-perfectly-formed group of five with a one-man development team who built an impressive fully-functioning site in less than two days: you can upload details about a toilet, highlight the facilities it has, as well as search for your nearest accessible loo.
The team said they’d like to develop the idea further by using the site to highlight the public places and tourist attractions which don’t provide accessible toilets, as well as make it easy for individuals who have their own specialised facilities to open up their homes for others to use.
Impressed by how much the small team had achieved in such a short space of time and the real need for a tool like Weedayout.com, the judges awarded the idea a strong runner-up.
AngelFish is a platform for individuals to provide small loans, in-kind support and advice to small businesses by creating an online/offline community of ‘makers’ (those receiving advice and financial backing) and ’supporters’ (those who are giving advice or financial backing).
The team focused on developing a detailed, well thought-through business plan and carefully mapped out the process by which AngelFish would function. Their presentation and design will be up online shortly.
Citipedia is a platform for locating, tagging and commenting on future use of public space. Whether it’s derelict ground, an run-down park or vacant building, Citipedia lets you post suggestions for how to make the most of our under-used public space. But it’s not just about adding your comments: using SimCity-like tools you can design what the space should look like as well.
Alongside producing some stunning design work, the Citipedia team were responsible for building Social Innovation Camp’s first-ever Flash hack which was received with a round of applause from the Show and Tell audience: you can drag-and-drop trees, paving or even playground equipment onto a Google map to create your own piece of urban planning - and it’ll add up the cost of your design as you go.
Flock Local matches volunteers with local activities.
Volunteering often requires an ongoing commitment. But many people just don’t have the time to commit to a long-term project. And sometimes there is an urgent need for volunteers and no easy way to get organized. Some activities take forever to complete. Flock Local was created to fill these gaps. The site matches short-term volunteers with one-off activities. From cleaning a garage to painting a shelter, Flock Local makes it easy for you to get involved and help make a quick difference in your community.
With some outstanding project management skills, this huge team of 16 people not only built a functioning and beautifully designed site, but organised a test-run ‘flock’ on Sunday morning. All of which earned them an honourable mention from the judges.
Hitch ‘n Bitch is all about making buses easier to use. On the ‘hitch’ portion of the site you input where you’re going from together with the route you want to take and the site tells you when your next bus is due in real time. The ‘bitch’ section of the site asks you where you’re traveling to and lets you post feedback about the bus - whether it’s late, over-crowded or unclean. The idea is that this content could be fed back to the transport provider to make the service better.
It’s a great hack that powerfully demonstrates the potential of releasing this kind of data openly for developers to get their teeth into. The site is using a bus company’s data for Edinburgh at the moment, but has been promised access to information which will allow the team to extend the service shortly.
The winning MyPolice team
So what next?
Once again, we were stunned by the sheer energy and generosity of everyone who joined us for our third Social Innovation Camp - as well as their talent, skills and the quality of what they created in such a short space of time.
Social Innovation Camp is partly an experiment to see whether we can get some new ideas off the ground: we’ll be supporting the teams to take their projects to the next stage in the coming months if they so wish and we’re looking forward to seeing how their ideas develop.
But the weekend is also about demonstrating the power of putting different people in a room together and giving them some space to do their thing. We hope Social Innovation Camp shows that if you have a little faith in people, they can do amazing things for all sorts of different reasons - whether it’s to solve a problem; to do something that’s worth doing or because it’s simply really good fun.
The great thing about the online world is that it makes all of this possible: the web helps people to organise things better for themselves. We don’t have to complain about stuff that needs fixing or rely solely on government/companies/charities to do it for us.
Instead, we want to give people the connections and skills they need to start up their own thing and mend something that’s broken.
And as a result of coming to Social Innovation Camp, we hope more people will get excited and make things that make stuff better.
And the winners are….
Honourable mention: FlockLocal (formerly Social Chain Gangs)
Runner-up: Wee Day Out (formerly Ex-Changing Places)
Winner: MyPolice (MyPoliceService)
A full write up to follow when we’ve recovered.
Congratulations to our winners and a huge thanks to everyone who’s been involved!
And so it begins.
Social Innovation Camp Scotland swung into action this evening as our Campers descended on the Saltire Centre, Glasgow. They came from Dundee, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow and London - as well as Canada, Estonia and America.
Back in March, we launched a competition to find the best ideas to use the web to change something important. This weekend, we have less than 48 hours to make six of those ideas a reality.
This evening has been a chance to meet everyone who’s going to be involved; tomorrow morning we’ll all be back at 9am and the hacking will commence!
It’s been three months in the making, but finally our third Social Innovation Camp is just two weeks away.
From our eight-week call for ideas, we’ve chosen six back-of-the-envelope projects we’re going to be helping to make a reality in just one weekend from 6.30pm, Friday 19th June to 4pm, Sunday 21st June at the Saltire Centre, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow.
So now we’re looking for people who want to sign up, get involved and help build some web-based tools that can change something that matters.
Are you a great software developer or designer? Or perhaps you have business, fund raising, legal or other expertise that could be needed to get an idea off the ground? Or maybe you have experience of one of the social problems we’re trying to solve?
Want to come and help build one of these ideas?
We’re looking for all sorts of talented people to get involved and come for the Social Innovation Camp weekend: right through from people who can hack together some software to those who can work out how to sustain an idea in the long-run.
You don’t have to be based in Scotland - or even in the UK - to take part, as long as you can get yourself to the Saltire Centre, Glasgow from the weekend 19th-21st June 2009. You can come along for all or part of the weekend and you can get involved in one particular idea or help out several different projects - just let us know when you’d like to come and how you can help by signing up here.
Places are filling up: we’ve not got a huge amount of space and we need a balance of skills and expertise to make this work, so please don’t be disappointed if we can’t fit you in this time around.
You can read about how the Social Innovation Camp works here, find out more about the weekend here or check out what will be happening when here. And you can watch previous Social Innovation Campers talk about why they came and what it was like here.
So if you fancy a weekend of good company, interesting ideas and making exciting things, sign up to get involved!
We had an amazing 133 ideas submitted to come to Social Innovation Camp June 09.
On Friday, the judges gathered to deliver their verdict and the results are in!
So the ideas we’re going to be helping to make a reality at the Social Innovation Camp weekend, 19th-21st June at the Saltire Centre, Glasgow are:
Google maps meets Sim City. Citipedia is an online public town planning tool: Derelict sites earmarked for development will be highlighted and made open to the public to suggest how they could be developed or to review proposed developments.
This idea helps people to form clubs to invest regular sums in small and micro-businesses in their own community. The judges thought this was hugely topical in the current recession and suggested that, rather than investment, it might focus on loans. Loans would be legally less complex than investment and there are already similar models to learn from - it’s a kind of hyper-local Zopa or Kiva. It’s also drawing on old ideas which provide an alternative to banking, such as credit unions. Community Investors Club was originally a closed submission, but it’s now up our site with all the others here.
A user-generated map of all public loos - complete with data about how accessible they are - and a way for individuals (or perhaps companies, shops and restaurants) to make their toilets available and accessible to anyone. The judges felt this identified a really important need. There have been a number of offline campaigns in recent years for better public toilets - especially those that are accessible. Scope ran a ‘Free to pee’ campaign in 2004, the British Toilet Association exists to campaign for better public loos and now Changing Places is pushing for better facilities for those with profound and multiple learning disabilities. However, there’s currently no searchable map of public loos in the UK. There is a great example from Australia, but nothing similar exists here. The Social Innovation Camp judges wanted to see the Ex-Changing Places address this need.
The very simple idea behind this is to put all the bus timetable data into a searchable, accessible form and plot it on a map. It got the judges excited, however, because they saw its potential as a campaigning tool to highlight the places where’s a real demand for transport but no provision - a particular problem in rural areas. So the next stage of Fix the Freakin Buses might be to get users uploading the journeys they make but are poorly served by existing transport links to surface demand for new routes. Finally, the idea could incorporate ways for people to solve the transport problem themselves through using tools like Liftshare.
We’ve sneakily changed the name of this one to explain the idea a little better - hopefully you can come up with an improved version at the Camp! It was originally entered as ‘My Public Service‘, but the idea is to create a feedback tool for the police service. The judges thought this had the potential to do what Patient Opinion is doing in the NHS for the police. And there’s an American version already called RateMyCop.com.
Flash-mobbing with a purpose. This tools aims to get a bunch of people together to get something done, whether it’s cleaning up a local park, helping your neighbours move in, a quick spot of gardening - fast.
Now all we need is the people who’d like to help.
If you fancy having a go at building any of these six ideas - whether you’re a coder, a designer or you now about the need - you can sign up here. And you can find out more about how the weekend works here.
But be warned: places are limited. Please don’t be disappointed if we can’t fit you in this time around.
You’ve got just five days left to send us your idea for a web tool to change the world: our competition to get your idea developed at Social Innovation Camp Scotland closes at midnight on Friday 22nd May.
We’re looking for the best ideas that use the web to tackle stuff that matters.
Over one weekend from 19th-21st June 2009, we’re bringing together some of the best of the UK’s software developers and designers with those at the sharp end of social problems at the Saltire Centre, Glasgow.
Their mission will be to turn six back-of-the-envelope ideas that could change the world into social start-ups in under 48 hours - complete with working software.
You’ve got until this Friday to send us your idea that uses the web to create social change and you could be joining 100 other participants to try and make it a reality.
Find out how it works here and check out all the details of how to enter your idea here.
Need some inspiration? Check out some of our suggestions to get you thinking here and or read about some of the ideas that have already been submitted here.
There’s only one thing that every idea must have in common: that it uses the web to help people do something for themselves.
So get thinking and good luck!
UPDATED - UnLtd award up for grabs for Social Innovation Camp Scotland winner!
The Social Innovation Camp Scotland tour continues and Edinburgh is next on our list.
For the final time during our call for ideas, we’ll be looking for people and ideas interested in getting involved with Social Innovation Camp Scotland.
If you’re in Edinburgh and you’d like to say hello, here’s what we’re up to:
Wondering if you should come along?
If you’re simply interested in who we are and what we do, if you reckon you might like to get involved, if you think you might have an idea to enter into Social Innovation Camp Scotland or if you’re just so keen you can’t wait till the 19th-21st June to meet us, come and say hello!
And please do tell your friends….
As part of our search for the best ideas that use the web to change stuff that matters, we’ve been out and about meeting new people and seeking out great ideas.
Last week, the Social Innovation Camp team was up in Dundee.
The city boasts a thriving gaming industry, responsible for producing around ten per cent of the UK’s digital entertainment industry. The creative industries account for some 200 companies, with a combined annual turnover of more than £100 million.
So we thought we’d go and meet some of the people involved.
There are just four weeks to go until our call for ideas closes for Social Innovation Camp Scotland.
You’ve got until Friday 22nd May 2009 to send us your idea that uses the web to create social change and you could be joining 100 other participants to try and make it a reality.
And this week we’re really pleased to be able to announce some of our prizes for the weekend.
At the end of each Social Innovation Camp, we run a Show and Tell where everyone pitches what they’ve built in the weekend.
We’ll be awarding some prizes to the ideas we think have shown most promise. And this time around, we’re lucky enough to be supported by our partners Firstport, IfLooksCouldKill and O Street.
