When we started this project back in January, we wanted the Social Innovation Camp model we were creating to spread virally – rather like the Barcamp format – where people could take what we’d done and create their own event.

So the 2gether08 festival last week saw us presenting the nine lessons we learnt from running Social Innovation Camp. Please do steal this Camp: bend the rules, break them and remake your own.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind some other stuff we’ve learnt along the way. Firstly, Social Innovation Camp was a participative event and this was at the heart of its success, but that’s not to say that this is a suitable format for every event you want to run. Not everyone will want to or be capable of participating all the time. In the right context, performance and speaker-driven events can be fantastic – you don’t necessarily want to go to co-produce a music gig for example. So to get this to work, a Camp has to be appropriate for your subject matter and what you’re trying to achieve.

Secondly, with an event which incorporates any degree of self-organisation, you can’t reproduce it exactly. There’s no magic formula – this isn’t like a set of flat pack furniture instructions where you do what it says on the box and it works every time. It’s more about creating an environment that is conducive to collaboration towards a particular end – but you should always expect the unexpected.

So with that in mind, here are our nine lessons from Social Innovation Camp:

Lesson 1: Make use of all the brain power

At a traditional conference, for every one speaker, there might be hundreds of people in the audience. Yet their presence makes very little impact on the flow of the event; the only way they get to input into the event is through commentating from the sidelines. This is what Clay Shirky calls ‘cognitive surplus’; a whole lot of minds are concentrated on one thing, but their responses and reactions are not being put to use. Social Innovation Camp began with the premise that we could do something useful with this cognitive surplus and get more people forming part of the proceedings rather than just sitting on the sidelines.

Lesson 2: Get the right people along

Compared to other events, we had a really detailed picture of our participants – we asked them before they arrived what their skills and interests were and what they’d like to work on over the weekend. We wanted to take an idea right through from first concept to early-stage start-up, including building a prototype and working out an organisational structure. To get this to work properly, we needed a good mix of skills and interests: a balance between software designers, developers, social needs experts and entrepreneurs or business and marketing buffs to collaborate and contribute to all the different but complimentary parts of getting an idea off the ground.

Lesson 3: Create moments of self-organisation

When you’re expecting people to do stuff for themselves, it’s really important to provide some kind of structure that supports this. Self-organising can be pretty exhausting – particularly when you’re working with people you’ve not met previously. By providing moments of self-organisation in between structured events you lessen the potential for this to become stressful. We structured chunks of self-organised time in between breakfast, lunch and dinner and brought all the participants back into the centre of the venue periodically to eat and have a rest – you didn’t have to do your own thing all the time.

Lesson 4: Set yourself a goal

When we set out to design Social Innovation Camp we were inspired by the un-conference, self-organising format of Barcamps. We thought these events are a great format for experimenting with social web tools, but in spite of the creativity they unleash, they don’t necessarily create concrete outcomes. We wanted to find a way to actually produce something at the weekend; so we set ourselves some goals. Participants had to build a fully-fledged organisation in just 48 hours – including a prototype tool and plan for sustaining the idea after the event. At the end of the weekend teams had to Show and Tell all the other participants what they’d produced. By giving everyone a common goal and a loose structure we focused collaboration towards a specific end in a very short period of time.

Lesson 5: First impressions count

The Social Innovation Camp began on a Friday evening by getting our Campers to tag each other according to their interests and skills. We had labels printed with keywords such as ‘innovator’, ‘coder’ or ‘trouble maker’ and a load of blank ones as well. Everyone was handed a couple of sheets of labels and pen on the way in and were encouraged to go round stickering the people they met depending on what they were interested in and what their skills were. Apart from making everyone look a little bit silly, the point of this Friday night activity was to set up expectations for the rest of the weekend: you could go up to anyone and just have a chat, removing that awkward networking moment.

Lesson 6: The importance of fun and fear

When you ask people to give up their weekends for free, your event has to be enjoyable. But we also put our participants under a little pressure. We didn’t give all that much away about what we were going to do to participants who came to Social Innovation Camp. This can be a more unnerving experience; you don’t really know what you’re signing up to. At the end of the weekend, there was also a chance that you might be put under the spotlight to present what you’d built in front of everyone else. We managed to turn these potentially damaging features into positive driving forces behind the weekend thanks to the trust and goodwill of our participants conserved by making the event a really friendly, fun and welcoming experience.

Lesson 7: Make your tech invisible

There’s nothing worse than not being able to get online – it’s all gone well if no one even thinks about the tech that’s supporting your Social Innovation Camp. The goodwill of our participants was absolutely central to the success of the event – and maintaining that involves having enough of the things needed to sustain life: food, caffeine and wifi. Get your tech right!

Lesson 8: Embrace the unknown

On the first day we were having a party in the garden; by the end, we were shivering in the snow: expect the unexpected.

It’s pretty clear that the Social Innovation Camp, although going by the name ‘unconference’, was actually very carefully orchestrated; with only moments of self-organisation. Having said that, we really didn’t know what was going to happen when we left people to their own devices – but this can be a good thing. You have to embrace the unknown, accept that risk might have its advantages and just see what happens. You can plan for mitigating the fall-out from the unexpected when it happens, but as soon as you over-organise, people loose the ability to think on their own and you lose the creativity and drive that makes this event work.

Lesson 9: It’s really about people, not technology

If digital media is to become more than an entertainment and shopping tool and actually integrate into the fabric of state and society as a provider of public goods, services and social support, we have to over come the disconnect between what technology currently supplies and what people need.

Right now, those who could benefit from the use of social technology don’t necessarily see there’s a technological solution to the challenges they face. You can build the flashiest software in the world, but if your users can’t see the point, it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference. Yet software developers and designers are not necessarily social change experts – how do they go about building the tools that are needed?

The geeks with the know-how need to be matched with the people with the need. And this was what Social Innovation Camp was all about. We built a platform to bring together skills and need to start creating more appropriate, meaningful, people-centric technology. And we didn’t do this online: we did it by getting people together in a room, to talk to one another face-to-face – the old-fashioned way.

2gether08 was a fresh take on attempting to bring together these different constituencies to see what cross-sector collaboration could do – it’d be great to see more events in the future try and bridge this gap between those with the technical skills to build solutions and those who know about the problems that need to be solved.