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.
(You can read all about our work in Scotland over on the special Social Innovation Camp Scotland part of our site: http://scotland.sicamp.org.)
