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.

We had a fantastic three days at Abertay University’s Whitespace, speaking to Realtime Worlds, stealing time with Scottish Enterprise and meeting Scotland’s Girl Geeks.

And we also ran our own Social Innovation Meetup; an evening where we get people talking about what they’d really like to change and ask them to work out how they’d do it over a few drinks.

We brought together a bunch of developers, designers and students in the corner of a pub and a few hours later, they’d come up with some fantastic ideas:

• Beamers

The online world - just like the real one - can be a nasty place. Anonymous ‘have your say’-style blogging and user-generated feedback are great for an anger-venting rant, but the odd ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ here and there wouldn’t go a miss.

So Beamers is all about recognising the nice people in this world. If someone’s treated you well or done something for you - whether they’re a shop assistant, a bus driver or someone you bump into in the street - Beamers is a website where you can say thank you. You can order your own stickers or stamp (the photo above shows a prototype version!) to give to those who you’ve earnt your thanks and they’ll be various applications for Facebook, Twitter and your phone - all of which aims to create a map of the friendliest places in the UK. Lovely.

• Guerrilla Gardeners

Fed-up of waiting for the council to do something with that patch of grass at the end of the road? Guerrila Gardeners will help you gather together a group of green-fingered friends and do it yourself: clear up, plant trees, seed a lawn - you could even grown your own veg. This is a site for local people to reclaim and improve local space for themselves. It’s a horticultural flash-mob. And the team who came up with this reckon you could use FixMyStreet.com as a starting point for building the site.

• PANIC.com

Inspired by the swine flu fears which hit the UK in mid-April, PANIC.com is all about helping the hypochondriacs amongst us to gain a little perspective. Using data aggregation and mashups, it would display the latest sensationalist headlines next to real-time statistics about the number of people infected by the virus as a percentage of the world’s - or an individual country’s - population. It could even compare the probability of being involved in a particular accident and or contracting a specific illness. And once we’ve all forgotten about swine flu, PANIC.com can adapt to calm our fears about the next mutant virus pandemic.

• Wikicity

Wikicity is a virtual map of disused space in a city. It’s a cross between Sim City and Google Maps, where communities can work out what should be done with a space, vote on a variety of ideas and match themselves up with architects and developers who could pitch to make the winning idea real. Wikicity is a timely idea: the economic climate means that there’s lots of empty retail and office space that needs to find a new use.

Not bad for an evening’s work; we’re looking forward to some fantastic stuff coming our way for Social Innovation Camp Scotland from Dundee.

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 at Social Innovation Camp Scotland, 19th-21st June 2009 at the Saltire Centre in Glasgow.

If you look closely, the first photo here shows the history of the games industry - everything in green came from Dundee.