We’re looking for people who are interested in running their own Social Innovation Camps in countries across the globe.

Since we first created Social Innovation Camp in 2008, we’ve had over 300 ideas submitted to three Camps in the UK, helped build 20 prototypes and kick-started social start-ups such as MyPolice, the GoodGym and Enabled by Design.

We’ve also started to help other people run their own Social Innovation Camps in other parts of the world.

There have been four so far – in Slovakia, Australia, Georgia and South Korea – and a further two are planned in Azerbijan and the Czech Republic.

And we’re getting a lot of interest from many more people who want to get involved from across the globe.

So we thought it might be time to think about how we help people to run their own.

At the moment, there’s a simple ‘how to’ guide – the Social Innovation Camp Cookbook – for people who want to run their own Social Innovation Camps. But we’re finding that written instructions just don’t quite cut it.

So here’s the plan.

Working with SIX, a global network of social innovators based at the Young Foundation, we want to run a three-day workshop in early 2011 for people from around the world who’d like to help set up a Social Innovation Camp in their own country. The idea is that it’ll work a little bit like this:

Who should take part:

Anyone who’s interested in helping seed new ideas, projects and start-ups that use web or mobile tools to solve a social problem in their country. Those people might be part of software developer communities, entrepreneurial types or organisations (companies, non-profits, foundations, philanthropists, governments etc) who can provide funding or in-kind support to help.

How it works:

There are several different parts to running your own Social Innovation Camp: building a community, finding your ideas, and running the hack weekend. We estimate that once you’ve got your funding sorted, this is a full-time job for one person for around four months (or a very part-time job for a bunch of people working together). To run one, part of what you need is a simple step-by-step ‘how to’ guide, but running a successful Social Innovation Camp is more art than science: it’s all about finding great ideas and smart people, then helping them work together productively. We’ve learnt lots about how you do that, but we reckon it’s much easier to share what we know face-to-face.

So the workshop will be an opportunity to learn about the thinking behind Social Innovation Camp, see how it works and think practically about questions like: Where are the main social opportunities for web and mobile tools in my country? What does a good idea look like? How do I find good ideas? How do I shape a good idea? What do I look out for in a person and a team that makes them successful? How do I get people working together well? etc etc.

We’ll be sharing how we do this in the UK, but we also reckon there’ll be loads of culture- and country-specific experiences to bring into the mix.

What you’ll get:

The idea is that people who come to the workshop will leave with:

• A simple step-by-step ‘how-to’ guide to run your own Social Innovation Camp
• Tools and techniques to help you seek out and shape good ideas and bring them together with the right people to help create new socially innovative web and mobile-based projects
• New connections to others who want to run and support Social Innovation Camps globally

We’ll be working on this project over the next few months, but right now, we want to know who might be interested in joining us for the workshop and where they are in the world.

If you think you might be interested in getting involved, fill out our questionnaire and tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Image: A team from Social Innovation Camp South Korea, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sicamp36/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This autumn, we’re very excited to be launching a new project.

Using everything we’ve learnt running Social Innovation Camp for the last few years, we’re setting up Bethnal Green Ventures – a practical school for people who want to use the web to make the world a better place.

Social Innovation Camp is all about taking a back-of-the-envelope idea and working out how to make it real. We’ve learnt a huge amount about what makes an idea fly or flounder as we’ve watched projects develop after Social Innovation Camp and now we want to build a new way of helping people grow an idea that one stage further: from prototype idea to social start-up.

Bethnal Green Ventures Nightschool is the first step in doing that.

From October to December 2010, we’re running a ten-week, one-evening-a-week nightschool for ideas, projects and start-ups that use the web to tackle a social problem.

The idea is to bring projects together with all the people, advice and support they need to help an early-stage idea to launch and grow.

Right now, we’re looking for people who’d like to participate.

It’s free (although we’ll ask you to put in £5 each week for dinner) and it’s a chance to meet a whole range of interesting people – both those at the same stage of starting something as you are, as well as people to share their experience and help you work on anything from product development to raising investment.

You can find a little bit more about the kind of ideas, projects and start-ups we’re looking for to participate over on the Bethnal Green Ventures site here.

If you’d like to know more drop us a line before 1st September 2010: anna(AT)sicamp(DOT)org

People often ask us what has happened to the ideas we help get off the ground at Social Innovation Camp. Well the winners of our December 2008 Social Innovation Camp The Good Gym are going great guns and made it onto BBC London News yesterday evening. Here’s the clip.

We’re thrilled to hear that Social Innovation Camp’s first ever winner, Enabled by Design, has just received a Level 2 Award from UnLtd, the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs.

We’re finding it hard to believe that it’s been two years since Enabled by Design’s founder Denise Stephens, entered her back-of-the-envelope idea into our first ever Social Innovation Camp in April 2008.

Enabled by Design is now a site where you can post an idea for a product you need, write a review of a product you’ve used or post a note about a product or service you either love or hate. The idea is to build a community of people who are passionate about well-designed products and to provide a platform for them to share ideas that will inform smarter design for assistive equipment.

Enabled by Design incorporated in October 2008 and received some initial support from UnLtd’s Level 1 Award, as well as becoming part of the Innovation Exchange’s Next Practice Programme.

Since then, Denise has become a bit of an authority on accessibility in the design world. From the very beginning of Enabled by Design, her mission has been to change the way we think about disability and aging. She’s passionate about mainstreaming accessibility. This isn’t just about creating special products for people with very specific needs. Denise wants to see the design world embrace what she calls ‘design for all’ – product and service design which has usability and accessibility at its core, whoever the intended user is.

As well as developing the Enabled by Design website, Denise’s Level 2 Award from UnLtd’s Better Net programme will pay for her time to test a number of different business models to grow the company in the long run. And she’s got plenty of ideas: from consulting work for product design, to providing a marketplace for peer-reviewed items to signposting ‘expert users’ to companies testing products. Denise is even exploring how an Enabled By Design kitemark might work for products that have worked hardest to build accessibility into their DNA.

If you’re interested in meeting Denise and finding out more, Enabled by Design are hosting their first We Are Enabled By Design day-long event for their community tomorrow, Thursday 17th June from 9.30am at the Design Museum, London. With speakers including Charlie Leadbeater and Wayne Hemmingway, it’s set to be a day full of interesting ideas.

And as for Enabled by Design, we’re looking forward to seeing what the next two years bring!

Image: EbD founder, Denise Stephens and the EbD homepage

We’re really excited that the third international Social Innovation Camp is kicking off in just a few weeks’ time, from 8th-10th April 2010 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Following in the footsteps of Bratislava in September 2009 and Australia earlier this year, a whole bunch of different organisations and individuals have pulled together, led by Open Society Georgia Foundation, to bring Social Innovation Camp to the Caucasus.

Almost exactly two years on since we put together the first ever Social Innovation Camp in the UK, it’s fantastic to see the idea behind it spread to new countries where the problems Social Innovation Campers are trying to solve may be very different, but the ethos remains the same: it’s all about bringing people together to build practical solutions to real problems using the social power of the web.

And there’s still time to submit an idea or sign up to participate.

Or drop Anna Keshelashvili a line for further details: annake(AT)gmail(DOT)com.

http://sic-caucasus.net