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.

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.

Read more »

The Social Innovation Camp June 2009 call for ideas is now open!

Once again, we’re looking for the best ideas that, in the words of Tim O’Reilly, 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 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.

Find out how it works here and check out all the details of how to enter your idea here.

So what are we looking for?

Absolutely anyone can enter an idea: if you’re a hacker with an itch to scratch, we want to hear from you - but you don’t have to be technically skilled to get involved. We’re looking for software developers and designers, people with business brains and seriously creative minds, together with those of you who simply know about a problem you want to solve. And there’s no need for you to be based in Scotland - or even the UK - to enter.

We’re looking for the best ideas that use the web to change stuff that matters - be that in education, health care, the environment; it could be something on your doorstep or stuff that effects the world as a whole.

There’s only one thing that every idea must have in common: that it uses the web to help people do something for themselves.

You can read more about the Big Idea behind Social Innovation Camp over on our main site. But if you’re after some inspiration, take a look at some of our past winners from Social Innovation Camp April and December 2008. We’ve also suggested a couple of big themes you might want to think about.

We’ll be in and around Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and elsewhere in the next couple of months. If you’d like find out more, catch up with us when we’re in your area or keep in touch with what we’re up to then you can either join our mailing list, follow us on Twitter, join our Facebook group or sign up to our Meetup group.

So get thinking: you’ve only got eight weeks to send us your idea.

Welcome to our brand new Social Innovation Camp Scotland site!

This is the place to find out everything about the next Social Innovation Camp running from Friday 19th to Sunday 21st June 2009 at the Saltire Centre in Glasgow.

From a Friday evening to a Sunday afternoon, we’ll be bringing together some of the best of the UK’s software developers and designers, together with those at the sharp end of social change. They’ll have just 48 hours to build some web-based solutions to a set of social problems - from back-of-the-envelope idea to working prototype, complete with software.

But first off, we’re starting with a call for ideas: we want to find the most exciting ideas for how the web could change stuff that really matters. You can enter your idea when our call opens on the 30th March.

And you can read all about how the Social Innovation Camp works over here.

But if you can’t wait till then, you can always get in touch if you’d like to find out more. Or you can join our mailing list, follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

This the third Social Innovation Camp of its kind - but it’s the first time we’re taking the idea out of London and north of the border. If you’d like to find out more about who we are and what we get up to, all the details are here.

More information about how to get involved and what our plans are for the next few months will be up on this site very soon - watch this space!

In the meantime, we’d like to thank our sponsors for making Social Innovation Camp Scotland possible: