We had an amazing 133 ideas submitted to come to Social Innovation Camp Scotland June 09.

On Friday, the judges gathered to deliver their verdict and the results are in!

So the ideas we’re going to be helping to make a reality at the Social Innovation Camp weekend, 19th-21st June at the Saltire Centre, Glasgow are:

Citipedia

Google maps meets Sim City. Citipedia is an online public town planning tool: Derelict sites earmarked for development will be highlighted and made open to the public to suggest how they could be developed or to review proposed developments.

Community Investors Club

This idea helps people to form clubs to invest regular sums in small and micro-businesses in their own community. The judges thought this was hugely topical in the current recession and suggested that, rather than investment, it might focus on loans. Loans would be legally less complex than investment and there are already similar models to learn from – it’s a kind of hyper-local Zopa or Kiva. It’s also drawing on old ideas which provide an alternative to banking, such as credit unions. Community Investors Club was originally a closed submission, but it’s now up our site with all the others here.

Ex-Changing Places

A user-generated map of all public loos – complete with data about how accessible they are – and a way for individuals (or perhaps companies, shops and restaurants) to make their toilets available and accessible to anyone. The judges felt this identified a really important need. There have been a number of offline campaigns in recent years for better public toilets – especially those that are accessible. Scope ran a ‘Free to pee’ campaign in 2004, the British Toilet Association exists to campaign for better public loos and now Changing Places is pushing for better facilities for those with profound and multiple learning disabilities. However, there’s currently no searchable map of public loos in the UK. There is a great example from Australia, but nothing similar exists here. The Social Innovation Camp judges wanted to see the Ex-Changing Places address this need.

Fix the Freakin Buses

The very simple idea behind this is to put all the bus timetable data into a searchable, accessible form and plot it on a map. It got the judges excited, however, because they saw its potential as a campaigning tool to highlight the places where’s a real demand for transport but no provision – a particular problem in rural areas. So the next stage of Fix the Freakin Buses might be to get users uploading the journeys they make but are poorly served by existing transport links to surface demand for new routes. Finally, the idea could incorporate ways for people to solve the transport problem themselves through using tools like Liftshare.

MyPoliceService

We’ve sneakily changed the name of this one to explain the idea a little better – hopefully you can come up with an improved version at the Camp! It was originally entered as ‘My Public Service‘, but the idea is to create a feedback tool for the police service. The judges thought this had the potential to do what Patient Opinion is doing in the NHS for the police. And there’s an American version already called RateMyCop.com.

Social Chain Gangs

Flash-mobbing with a purpose. This tools aims to get a bunch of people together to get something done, whether it’s cleaning up a local park, helping your neighbours move in, a quick spot of gardening – fast.

Now all we need is the people who’d like to help.

If you fancy having a go at building any of these six ideas – whether you’re a coder, a designer or you now about the need – you can sign up here. And you can find out more about how the weekend works here.

But be warned: places are limited. Please don’t be disappointed if we can’t fit you in this time around.

How we chose the ideas

We were so impressed by the quality of the ideas sent in this time around. Huge thanks to everyone who took the time to enter something. Although we can’t give individual feedback because of the number of entries, we wanted to explain a bit more about how the judges made their decisions and why some ideas didn’t quite make the cut.

The judges were asked to think about the significance of the social need being addressed, how well the idea was using web-enabled people power, how new the idea was, whether it brought technology to a new audience and whether they thought the idea was sustainable – all the stuff we talked about here.

First off, there were ideas which weren’t quite right for Social Innovation Camp.

We were looking for ways to use the web to help people change something important for themselves. So stuff that made existing charities more effective or were very politically-focused weren’t quite right for Social Innovation Camp. There were also one or two ideas which didn’t quite go far enough to explain what their solution to the problem they’d identified was, or where the judges felt the solution suggested wasn’t getting to the real heart of what was needed.

There were also a number of ideas that were just so good, someone had already thought of them! JourneyShare reminded us of Liftshare; FamilyChange is very close to Netmums. There were several ideas submitted focusing on mental health – Being Well, for example – which we felt were too similar to existing campaigns.

Then there were fantastic ideas which were too well-developed for us.

And finally, there were some ideas we just couldn’t tackle in a weekend – we admire your ambition, but we felt that Social Innovation Camp might not be quite the right place to start!

So congratulations to the six selected ideas and thanks to everyone who took part. We’ll keep all the ideas that were submitted publicly up on out site here – please feel free to keep commenting.

And remember: you can sign up here to come and help make these six Social Innovation Camp ideas a reality from 19th-21st June 2009 at the Saltire Centre, Glasgow.

Photo: Proof of a great week spent reading ideas.