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Enabled by Design’s Minibar slides

Part of the Social Innovation Camp prize was for both the winner and runner-up projects to present their ideas again to a Minibar audience last Friday, 25th April.

Minibar traditionally brings together loads of interesting types from London’s tech community to discuss web applications, start ups, social networking and general Web 2.0-related stuff. Each month, new online ventures are invited to come and pitch their ideas to a crowd of interested developers, entrepreneurs, funders and others.

A major theme of the Social Innovation Camp project has been to bring together those who know all about social needs with the technologists who are interested in building solutions to those needs, and Friday presented another opportunity to do just that. Minibar is usually quite a commercially-oriented event - and it’s very focused on the technology and start-up business models. So listening to Social Innovation Camp’s Enabled by Design discuss the poor quality of NHS living aids and Rate Your Prison talk about the justice system took Minibar well out of its comfort zone.

The evening was also a chance to catch up with some of the other Social Innovation Camp projects.

Development of all seven of the ideas that came out of the weekend continues apace. We’re told that Wibi.it now works with normal size barcodes - they were using scaled-up ones for their original prototype - and they’re considering what the best way to take the project forward might be. StuffShare are busy finishing their prototype. The On the Up team have a new blog set up and seem to be well away with meetings and scoping out their next steps. CVLifeLine have decided to focus their energies on building a tool specifically for economic migrants and are undertaking some focus group and interview-based research. And our rebel project, originally called TheGlue, is considering its next steps with regard to tech development and looking for a new name - any suggestions welcome!

We’re attempting to keep track of each of the projects’ progress here.

If you missed Social Innovation Camp the other weekend, never fear: The People Speak came along to record all the highs and the lows, the triumph and the tears, to bring you Social Innovation Camp, The Film.

And if you were in on the action, check out your five minutes of fame. Enjoy.

Last weekend, the Social Innovation Camp pitched our tent at the Young Foundation, Bethnal Green, London. Three months of preparation came to a head, and 48 hours of sun, snow and showers later, it was all over.

We had just one building with 6 projects, over 100 people, copious quantities of beer, wine, food and endless cups of coffee, to assist us in our mission to try and create some new online social ventures. And we had £3,000 of prize money to give away by Sunday afternoon.

At the end of a long weekend, all the projects had the chance to Show and Tell everyone else at the Camp what they’d been building. We had some stunning results, but our judges had to choose just one winner and runner up to receive £2,000 and £1,000 respectively to help their project develop beyond the weekend.

After a short deliberation, Rate Your Prison was selected as the runner-up and Enabled by Design as the winner.

Proof of potential

So what exactly were we looking for from the winning projects? The ideas selected for development at the weekend were all at different stages when the event kicked off. Some had a very clear idea of what they wanted to build and the main challenge of the weekend was to make the tech work. Barcode Wikipedia, for example, had a basic remit to link products in the physical world to an online space via their barcode. Rate Your Prison, on the other hand, began with a broad social challenge: to improve the experience of visiting a friend or family in prison. The first thing they had to do was to decide what the technical solution was that they needed to create.

But at Show and Tell we weren’t looking for the idea that had come closest to being built or progressed furthest in the short amount of time we had provided. Right from the beginning, the Social Innovation Camp has been focused on producing real outcomes from the weekend; we were interested in giving the first helping hand to new social ventures. Social Innovation Camp is just the start for these ideas; what the judges were looking for in the projects at Show and Tell was proof of potential to develop further – and we reckon that the winning projects, Enabled by Design and Rate Your Prison, have this quality in spades.

Creating grassroots change

The Social Innovation Camp experiment has been about building platforms that use the web to create social change from the grassroots up. What’s exciting about online technologies is their potential to help people to do things for themselves, outside of traditional institutional or organizational frameworks. This puts the power in the hands of the users who are often best placed to produce more relevant, efficient and effective change. The judges felt that the winning projects were the two which went furthest to tackle what are currently really under-served social needs by using the web in this way.

It was the extent of the social need that swung the judges in favour of Rate Your Prison. It’s a simple tool to help a group of people who are poorly served at present; families and friends of prisoners. And the potential social impact of the site also extends into wider society; there is strong evidence that maintaining social links with the wider world not only makes the experience of incarceration more humane for prisoners, but makes a real difference to re-offending rates once prisoners are released. The judges were also impressed by the way Rate Your Prison provided a bottom-up solution to a problem within a highly bureaucratic system.

Again, it was the social need that impressed the judges in the case of Enabled by Design. They thought this was a brilliant idea to solve the problem of disabled people being shoehorned into products and services that they don’t really want and aren’t suited to.

Technology isn’t just for geeks

Enabled by Design is also a great use of technology to bring together two groups who might not ordinarily come into contact; the design community and people who need adaptive, highly specialized products. And the target user-base was another focus for the judges. A theme that has run right through the Social Innovation Camp project – from our initial call for ideas to our Show and Tell finale – was our interest in creating projects that weren’t just targeted at traditional tech users. We wanted to design tools for ordinary people to use, not just creating something cool for the sake of it. Both the projects chosen by our judges could extend the benefits of being online to new groups of people.

So what happens next?

Social Innovation Camp is just the start for all the ideas developed over the weekend. We’re already hearing some exciting stuff about what they’re going to do next – and the news isn’t just coming from our two winners. We’ll keep you updated on their progress through the Social Innovation Camp blog and their project pages on our site.

And there are a number of ways you can get involved as well.

Why not offer your skills to one of the projects? One of the most striking successes of the weekend was the number of people who just came along to help others out. We had a load of Campers with start-up experience, business know-how or technical expertise who went from project to project mentoring the teams; giving them advice ranging from what to call their site to helping out with their code. A number of people have offered to meet up with the teams again or just offer a friendly line of advice via email in the future. If you were a mentor last weekend and you want to continue to help out any of the projects, please do get in touch.

But what about Social Innovation Camp itself? You can sign up to our mailing list to hear how the project develops from here. And you can continue to follow us on Twitter.

We’d also like to hear what you think. Did you join us at the Young Foundation last weekend? Send us your suggestions for what we did right and what we could have done better.

And if you enjoyed yourself, why not take our format, learn from our mistakes and set up your own Social Innovation Camp?

On Friday, we were enjoying the sunshine; we were a little surprised to wake up to a London snow fall on Sunday.

After a crazy weekend, we felt a litte bit like this

Despite the snow, the Social Innovation Camp team had only been in the building ten minutes when the first Campers arrived on Sunday morning.

With only five hours to go before Show and Tell, all the teams seemed to be feeling the pressure and, armed with breakfast, hurried off to their hubs for a morning for frenetic activity.

By mid-morning, entrepreneurial types, seasoned in the art of pitching, were giving teams last-minute advice and designers with CSS/html skills were at a premium as the finishing touches were made to the prototypes.

Lunch passed by in a flash with pasta and salad disappearing around the building as the deadline approached and, at 2pm, we herded everyone over to the Museum of Childhood for the Show and Tell part of the weekend.

In front of a packed out hall, the seven teams (including our sneaky rebel project) put on a fantastic show. We were staggered by just how much they’d accomplished in well under two days: there was some really thoughtful research on the social needs captured on short film clips; Barcode Wikipedia had built an entire working website and mobile app and the small-but-perfectly-formed team behind Rate My CV had done an incredible amount of work with a core group of only three.

And the winners of Social Innovation Camp 2008 are….

After every team had shown and told, there was a judgly huddle to vote on the winners of our £3,000 prize.

After some deliberation, they awarded £2,000 to Enabled by Design as the winners and £1,000 to the runners up, Prison Visits. (We’ll post a bit more on the judges’ decision elsewhere on our site where we have more room to do the projects justice….)

It may be clichéd, but it really wasn’t the winning that was the important bit. We were so impressed by every single one of the projects that came out of Social Innovation Camp and we’re looking forward to hearing about what the teams are going to be doing next with all the hard work they’ve put in so far.

The Young Foundation has been a hive of activity for the first day of Social Innovation Camp.

The project formally known as Barcode Wikipedia hard at work

Prison Visits team making use of the neon post-it notes

And what a day it’s been. Such a buzz, great atmosphere and whole host of fascinating people doing some really interesting stuff.

We kicked off the day (and nursed some sore heads from last night’s introductory drinks) with strong coffee and giant croissants, followed by a morning of project development.

And it all sort of took off from there….

We’ve had some very concentrated development work going on buried deep in the Young Foundation and on our way out this evening there was some snazzy-looking design stuff underway. Teams have been re-naming their projects, and a break-away faction is developing a new Open Mike site. We’ve had market research conducted on Bethnal Green high street and there’s some really creative stuff going on for Show and Tell tomorrow with several projects filming team members and commentary from potential users. The People Speak have been recording all the action, capturing the atmosphere and interviewing participants. And there’s been some serious mentoring going on; so many people have given up their Saturday to help others with their ideas - at one point we had the freelance marketing police visiting each project in turn and our digital media lawyer was in high demand this afternoon.

So tomorrow morning is going to be a dash to polish those pitches for Show and Tell.

Everyone has a five minute slot at the end of the weekend to demonstrate what they’ve built and tell us about their social need, how their project will be sustainable and grow and, crucially, what they want to do with it next. As Dan McQuillan mentioned earlier today, it’s all about having proof of potential. All the projects are at different stages of development: some have working prototype tools to demonstrate, others will be a little way off this. But what’s really important is that each group has found the interesting kernel at the heart of their idea and shows how it could grow into something that could create real social change using the web.

Thanks so much to everyone who came today and gave so much of their time and energy. We just hope you had fun.

See you in approximately nine hours.

So Social Innovation Camp 2008 is underway! We had a huge turnout last night for the opening session. The little trick we used to get people talking to one another was to let them tag each other with stickers. It seemed to work a treat. Here are some of the results…

We’ll try to keep you updated but Bobbie Johnson from the Guardian is blogging all weekend and will probably do a much better job than us! You can follow progress here.

So we’ve been a bit secretive (or vague) about details of our closing session at Social Innovation Camp – we just like to keep you on your toes.The weekend ends in a Show and Tell session over the road from the Young Foundation, in the Museum of Childhood.

By 2pm on Sunday 6th April, we’re hoping that project teams will be ready to tell everyone who’s been at Social Innovation Camp (plus some extras) all about what they’ve been up to all weekend.

This will be an informal presentation of ideas – we’ve made some suggestions about what might be included in a Show and Tell presentation as well. And they’ll be a demonstration of the tech of course.

Prizes

And, thanks to our sponsors, we also have some cash prizes.

We’ve got £1,000 for a runner up and £2,000 for a winner, to be chosen by our team of sponsors and supporters.

We realise this isn’t enough to make a serious dent in funding an early-stage start-up; think of it as more of a treat. It’s to be used by the people who are going to be taking the idea forward (and that may include people who weren’t at Social Innovation Camp or who didn’t work on the project all weekend) to help keep the momentum going after the weekend is over. Use it to pay for web hosting or travel to visit potential funders. Or take the team away for the weekend to develop the idea further or maybe out for a good meal.

Minibar

But that’s not all. Both the winners and the runners up will be invited to come and present their idea at a future Minibar, run by one of Social Innovation Camp’s organizers, Christian Ahlert.

Minibar is an evening social event, bringing together loads of interesting types from London’s tech community to discuss web applications, start ups, social networking and general Web 2.0-related stuff. Each month, start-ups are invited to come and pitch their ideas to a crowd of interested developers, entrepreneurs, funders and others. It’s a great opportunity to launch on the London tech scene and an incentive to push the project forward after Social Innovation Camp. And we’ll want to hear how they spent the prize money.

Further info on what our judges will be looking for over on BackNetwork – nothing new here; as with our original call for ideas, we’re after innovative web tools that give people the support they need to participate, contribute, collaborate and create change for themselves.

Really looking forward to having the guys from The People Speak around this weekend.

They’re going to be recording impromptu discussions with people, doing a bit of facilitation and capturing the atmosphere. They’ll also record the final session, Show and Tell, and edit the whole lot it all into a video snap-shot of Social Innovation Camp so those that couldn’t make it in person will get an idea of what the weekend has been about.

Say hello if you bump into them – they’ll be based in the Michael Young Room as well as roaming the building to seek out all the juicy creative stuff.

We’re going to be blogging over the next few days about why we selected our ideas.

We met up with Denise Stephens last week to talk some more about her Enabled by Design idea. There’s so much potential with this one to go in all sorts of different directions; one of the biggest challenges is going to be focusing on what’s possible in just a weekend!

At its core, Denise has identified a really simple need for better user-centric design solutions, but we discussed a whole range of ways the project could develop, including incorporating aspects of another Social Innovation Camp submission for a user-generated map of disabled access.

But there’s one aspect that the Social Innovation Camp advisory board liked in particular. Its Ebay-like shopping portal is great, but there’s also scope for Enabled by Design to include more user-generated stuff as well.

Open source design

The success of the open source software organisational model has led to it being adapted to build and design other products.

There are quite a few experiments in open source manufacturing and product development, there’s a couple of open source cars and an open architecture community. The collaborative design spirit has also reached prosthetics; Pimp My Arm is all about prosthetics users sharing their needs and adaptive designs.

Enabled by Design could incorporate an open design element, allowing people to share their own adaptations with others. It could work a little like Instructables; say you’ve adapted you kettle to make it easier to pour your tea. You post a photo together with ‘how to’ instructions for making your own and share it with others through the site.

Could you help build a shopping portal for adaptive design or maybe you’ve had experience with open source design? Get in touch and tell us how you can help the Enabled by Design team.

We’re going to be blogging over the next few days about why we selected our ideas.

Rate My CV

Recruitment has definitely moved online (Monster.com etc) but this doesn’t mean it’s become more innovative or adapted to the internet age. The world of CVs, covering letters and qualifications remains stuck in the days of pens, paper and the postal service.

But through innovation in this area, we felt there was something in this idea that had the potential to redress some serious inequalities in life chances in the UK and, well, just make job hunting a bit more imaginative….

Connecting and networking

Providing careers advice, CV and covering letter writing is a lucrative business. Getting this information to young people, the long-term unemployed, people returning to work and those new to the UK isn’t cheap and there’s no easy way right now to provide equal access effectively.

But it’s not only the cost of advice that can be prohibitive to job seekers. Many people benefit from the networks they are born or educated into – knowing someone to help you along makes that career oh so much more accessible. But what about the people who have all the talent, but none of the connections?

Perhaps Rate My CV could be incorporated into corporate social responsibility packages to encourage employers to input into the system? Or maybe it could be an extension of existing mentoring schemes? Privacy will be a challenging issue – maybe a semi-closed platform would be suitable.

But this is only the start of where this idea could go….

Mind your language

The skills you need to apply for a job aren’t necessarily the same as the ones you need to do the work. You might be a brilliant candidate, but if you can’t string a sentence together, applying can be a nightmare. Traditional job application processes are great for people who like words. But many of us are wired to think in images or patterns; things sometimes just make more sense that way.

This could be a neat tech/design question. So much of the important stuff in our lives is recorded in text - but why should the ‘how to’ manual be in words when we think in pictures? They Rule is a simple example of how graphics can make data more meaningful. It looks at some of the most influential US companies and represents the linkages and crossovers between their boards of directors. The idea is that you can trace where conflicts of interest and hot-spots of commercial or political influence lie. And when it’s represented as an inter-connected spider diagram the information is a whole lot easier to access than wading through a load of text.

Writing a CV can be like writing in code – you have to push the right buttons with the right language and you have to describe yourself in sentences. But what if you’re not any good at that? And even if you are, does it do you justice? Are there other ways of conveying who you are and where your talents lie - is there a tech-inspired answer?

Could you use del.icio.us-like tagging to help someone explain their identity and abilities? Is there a visual way to show the links and paths in someone’s skill set? There’s loads of ideas for how to visualise online data out there – how could we use this to help someone create a more meaningful CV?

Going soft

Could you take this all one step further? There are increasing numbers of qualifications for employees to collect, but do they help you actually succeed in a job? ‘Soft skills’ – your social and interpersonal abilities - can be as, if not more, important than the appropriate training or academic certificate. But the traditional job application process is really bad at capturing these. Could we develop a tool that helps individuals better show what they’re really good at that’s relevant to work? Another submitted idea touched on this – My Real Resume proposed a tool to collate all the soft skills that are evidenced in an individual’s use of collaborative web platforms. Ok, so we decided that this idea didn’t really have enough potential for widespread usage, but could it be adapted?

We think there’s some great stuff to be explored around technology and the development of soft skills, especially amongst young people. And a lot of these ideas are related to why we like Mike Amos-Simpson’s Personal Development Reports as well.