And the final ideas are…

Over several rounds of sandwiches and a good few cups of coffee, the Social Innovation Camp advisory board gathered on Friday to pore over the submitted ideas.

Not wishing to challenge any stereotypes, all the arts graduates sat round talking about social capital, whilst the techies gave each idea a 1 or a 0 depending on whether they liked it or not. Discussions continued over cake.

Several hours, much deliberating and a few disagreements later, a decision was reached.

So, the ideas that will be developed at the Social Innovation Camp, 4th-6th April 2008 are:

• Barcode Wikipedia
• Enabled by Design
• Personal development reports
• Prison visits
• Rate My CV
• Stuffshare

We’re going to be adding our comments on what we liked about these and why – please add yours too. We want to encourage discussion around how best we can take these ideas forward.

We’ve been overwhelmed by the response to this project. When it all started back in January we thought we’d be doing well if we got 20 half-decent idea seedlings that we could play around with. We didn’t expect that we’d have over 70 ideas submitted of such high quality and with so much potential.

We’re hoping that many of the ideas which have come to the surface through this process will be given a home elsewhere. Even if we weren’t able to develop your idea further, please feel free to keep using our website to continue to discuss them. And if the event in April is successful, why not borrow our format, learn from our mistakes and set up your own Social Innovation Camp?

Choosing our ideas

We’ve also learnt a lot from the Social Innovation Camp ‘call for ideas’ that we wanted to share.

The ideas that have been selected for development are all tools to help users do or create things or 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 organization frameworks. This puts the power in the hands of the users who are best placed to produce more relevant, efficient and effective change.

But this doesn’t just happen on its own; you have to build the structures that support it. And this is what the Social Innovation Camp is all about. All the ideas we have chosen are great examples of disruptive social innovations which create platforms for assisting people to help themselves.

Out of the many fantastic examples that we were sent – from ideas to help people share their food to their journeys to work – the advisory board made their decisions because they felt specific ideas created the most social capital, held the greatest potential to create a more equitable distribution of resources (i.e. they didn’t just help people who were already advantaged or who were traditionally technology users) and, crucially, that they had enormous potential for future development.

Yet a glance through the submitted ideas shows you that there are a number of other needs in the technology-social change nexus that have been identified here. There’s not a single answer for how technology can be used for socially desirable ends; there are many. We hope the Social Innovation Camp process has been a way of drawing some of these out.

Beyond Social Innovation Camp

We had lots of suggestions for ways to better map and coordinate the voluntary and charity sector online which would tackle some of the big problems that existing organizations face: overlapping purpose; incomplete knowledge of others in the field; identification of sources of social need; lack of transparency and so forth. There were a number of suggestions for social networking for social organizations and web 2.0 tool kits. Some nice examples include Arjen Mulder’s COOpen.net, a social networking platform for international development organizations, and Andy Gibson’s Partner Up, which is designed to encourage the sharing of best practice and collaboration to help organizations get far more done with fewer resources. David Munir Nabti, Jessica Dheere, Patricia Nabti and Hala Makarem submitted a similar idea tailored specifically for the Lebanese third sector.

We also had a cluster of ideas for innovative tools that make giving money or time to charity easier or more efficient. An underlying theme behind many of the ideas we received was that technology could be used to provide a better link between the people who give to the charities with the outcomes that they produce. Examples of these included Basil Safwat’s We Appreciate Your Interest and Clare Campbell’s Give a Little. There were also ideas that focused on giving your time, rather than your cash – for example, Peter Grigg’s corporate social enterprise scheme and the team from ruralnet|uk who sent in their idea for Active Brokerage.

Finally, there were the ideas that focused on helping individuals connect with government. Kieran McCann and Alex Templeton both drew on open source software organisational models to devise consultation forums for public services and policy. And we had a number of ideas that were looking for solutions to the ‘information problem’ which lies at the heart of discussion around e-government – how does the web make government and services data more accessible and localized to the individual? Mori Sugimoto, Ben Howarth and Kerri Jones all focused on the issue of access to health care provision in this context.

Many of these are huge, ongoing projects which we couldn’t hope to tackle in a weekend. Yet there are gaps in provision here which should be addressed and for now, with the Social Innovation Camp, we aren’t the people to do it. Are you?