Every week we’re going to be choosing our favourite idea from the ones we’ve received and explaining what we like about it.

Entrepreneurs often talk about the seed of an idea coming from having an ‘itch to scratch’ – that one thing that’s been niggling away at you that you just have to do something about.

Over the last few months at Social Innovation Camp, we’ve been benefiting from a good deal of itchiness. Saul Albert’s thatsmybike.org was the result of finding his beloved red Brompton folding bike, which had been stolen, advertised for ‘quick sale’ on Gumtree. The itch for Mike Amos-Simpson, who sent us an idea for personal development reports, was his frustration with not being able to demonstrate the impressive examples he’d seen of young people learning outside traditional educational environments.

Our favourite idea this week similarly draws its inspiration from a personal itch. Steve Cochrane and Dan Beattie’s Yoroomie is an idea which will appeal to anyone who’s house-sharing experience badly needed a washing-up rota and at least one housemate who paid the Council Tax before the final warning notice.

Yoroomie is a web tool to help manage issues that arise from communal living. Sharing your home with others can be a minefield and – if it goes wrong – a very isolating, stressful experience. This would be a social platform for centrally sharing information between housemates, managing bills, rent, cleaning and so forth.

But there’s another interesting feature of Yoroomie that we’ve been thinking about here at Social Innovation Camp HQ. Steve and Dan suggest it wouldn’t simply focus on building links between individuals, but on connecting homes with one another, thus forming neighbourhoods and communities between house shares through the site.

The decline in community cohesion and rise in anti-social behaviour in the UK’s towns and cities is a big political issue at present. Few residents could say that they knew their neighbours well or indeed at all. Does technology have a role to play in reinvigorating our neighbourhoods and local community lives?

In its early days, online technology was thought to be the beginning of an era of entirely virtual friendships between people who had never met in person. Yet for the average web user, these early predictions haven’t materialized. What the web does appear to be really good at is reinforcing and maintaining weak pre-existing offline linkages between people – Facebook is prime example of this in action. So it seems that whilst the web can strengthen pre-existing communities, it’s not so good at creating new ones where no connection between people is in evidence in the first place.

Returning to the question of community regeneration in our towns and cities, if there’s no offline interaction between neighbours and people living in close proximity to one another to build on, will the web make any difference?

We’d like to hear more from Yoroomie about how their idea might be a step towards not only making us nicer to our housemates, but more friendly with our neighbours as well.

So can you beat the Idea of the Week?

Send us your idea for a web tool to change the world.

Every week we’re going to be choosing our favourite idea from the ones we’ve received and explaining what we like about it.

This week, we’ve been thinking some more about the potential for a Barcode Wikipedia. Ever stood in Tescos wondering who picked your tea leaves or just where your chicken’s been? When your shampoo bottle claims to be made from ‘100% recycled materials’, what exactly does it mean? Where did the trees grow that have become your nice new bookcase?

The idea behind Barcode Wikipedia is to provide the kind of information consumers need to make informed choices. Simply scan or type in the code on your product into a mobile phone or the website directly and you could call up a wiki page which has collated data on the manufacturer, carbon footprint, related news articles, customer reviews and so forth.

Thanks to the snappily-named Global GS1 Electronic Party Information Registry, which provides the barcode data, and the kind of user-generated stuff that makes the original Wikipedia work, this tool could give the consumer unprecedented power.

What’s great about this idea is the way it uses the web to democratize access to knowledge. It creates a one-stop-shop for all the bits of data already out there that you could spend hours trawling for – you could search for a manufacturer online, search through some news articles, teach yourself about different methods of chicken rearing, but that’s really a bit too much hassle to bother with when all you want is to know why Tesco Value eggs are so much cheaper than the normal Tesco brand.

So providing a centralized way to do this makes accessing that information fast and easy. And it’s all user-generated so it harnesses the power of many minds all focused on one thing; creating a huge database of useful information. It’s a perfect example of what the web can do: if a traditional commercial or public body doesn’t give you the information you need in a meaningful format, you can just collate and create it for yourself – with the help of a few hundred thousand friends.

There are a couple of other ideas we’ve had sent in which work on the same premise. The disability map, for example, helps users create a database for themselves of all the features of buildings and facilities that might make access for someone with a disability difficult.

There’s got to be other pools of information that the web could help make more accessible, meaningful and useful to the individual in this way. Send us your suggestions.

So can you beat the Idea of the Week?

Send us your idea for a web tool to change the world.

This morning’s headlines focused on research suggesting that the new generation of anti-depressant drugs aren’t as successful as was previously thought for tackling mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.

With more than 31 million prescriptions written in the UK for anti-depressants in 2006, mental well being is a serious political issue. And – based on today’s news at least – the Government appear to be backing the right horse: Health Secretary Alan Johnson came out firmly in favour of improving access to counselling services across the UK when he pledged an extra £170 million to be spent on ‘talking therapies’ to help people tackle depression.

If person-to-person support is so important for mental well-being and recovery from depression-related illnesses, could the online social space created by the web complement such therapies?

This might be especially useful for young adults and children. It has been claimed that as many as one in 10 young people suffer from mental health problems in the UK. Yet this is also a generation growing up deeply immersed in communications technology from an increasingly early age. Over 90% of UK teenagers belong to a social network, for example, and a third of those keep at least four separate profiles running at once.

The fear that technology and youth is a dangerous mix has reared its head again in the last few weeks with social networking sites in the firing line following a number of highly-publicised teenage suicides in Bridgend, South Wales. Questions were raised over whether such sites encouraged copy-cat acts in the area by romanticising the idea of suicide.

Yet surely the way young people use technology can be turned into something positive for children and young adults? Danah Boyd’s brilliant work at Harvard’s Berkman Centre in the US focuses on the importance of online interaction for young people. She argues the web is pretty effective at reinforcing offline bonds between people and that the social space it creates is a great place for young people to explore who they are and who they want to be away from adult eyes – all really important parts of finding your feet in the big wide world.

So if there’s a need for better talking-based therapies and person-to-person support to improve the mental well being of the UK, how could the tech-literacy of youth be harnessed to provide support for those at risk of or suffering from mental illness?

Take a look at an idea for the Social Innovation Camp sent in by Kerri Jones for a Health and well being centre. Could this be a starting point? How could a tool be integrated into the ways in which young people are already using technology?

Every week we’re going to be choosing our favourite idea from the ones we’ve received and explaining what we like about it.

So the idea that’s been getting us all excited this week is the prison visits tool.

The basic thinking is that visiting family or friends who are in jail can be an incredibly difficult experience for people. Yet it’s really important for the well-being of both prisoners and their loved ones to keep in touch – as well as holding wider social benefits, such as reducing re-offending rates. Better generating and sharing of resources for those who are visiting prisons is a real social need which the current system is failing to tackle – we think the web can help.

Although not a fully-formed idea, what we really like about it is that it has great potential to demonstrate how social technologies can be used in unexpected ways and places.

The UK prison system is hardly something you’d associate with the transparency and user-generated input that social web tools are so good at creating, yet there’s room for the web to provide for a genuine need here.

We want your input in how this could work – add your comments and suggestions on the idea page.

So can you beat the Idea of the Week?

Send us your idea for a web tool to change the world.

Are you already creating social change using the Web? We want to hear from you.

We’d like to use the Social Innovation Camp website to document some of the work that’s already going on in the UK and Europe to use the web to create social innovations.

If you’ve been involved in a web start-up and you’d like to share your experiences on the blog, please get in touch.