What’s your idea?

To create a website that engages young people to explore their aspirations before they drop them into the bin.

Brainstorming for S.I .Camp from Rodrigo on Vimeo.

The message is simple: ‘You can be anything you want to be. Explore it.’

It’s somewhere young people can connect their aspirations with existing opportunities to fulfil them – be that designing the next iPod, volunteering on a conservation project, or just earning a fast buck to go travelling.

We want people already involved in those activities to present their experiences, providing a source of ideas. The website itself would also provide a safe online community space for discussion.

What is the social need or challenge your idea could address?

This project could address various challenges, long and short term:

1. Get young people motivated and connected to people who can help them realise their ambitions.

When we’re teenagers, we all have an idea of what we’d love to “be”. These ideas get diluted by lack of support, local opportunity, or just the practical reality of needing to make some cash ASAP. Suddenly, it’s all about getting a j.o.b.

We want to show young people that:

a. There are alternatives to the word “job” (which we don’t like very much)
b. There’s nothing to lose by going after your ambitions. Whatever they do is all part of that great thing called life.

2. The internet offers myriad anonymous spaces where people can be who they really want to be, Second Life being the most extreme example. This website could redress the balance between cyber-anonymity and reality, creating an open virtual space where young people can find meaning and direction within the real world.

What’s really new about your idea?

There are loads of job and social networking websites available. But existing sites seem to fall into the following categories:

• Recruitment: profit-making company websites with a bit of editorial content stuck on to add credibility (and beef up SEO)

• Advice centres created by adults with an “idea” of what young people want

• Social networking sites with little helpful editorial content

What’s exciting about our idea is that we want young people to create the space that they want.

We’d work with young researchers to find out from their peers what jobs they love to do; we’d get young people, or adults who have the experience, to create the editorial content; we’d encourage young people to help each other by sharing their experiences between them.

What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place?

We were talking about how boring the existing online job search services are, and how these services seem mostly business oriented, not really user oriented.

As newcomer to the UK five years ago, Rodrigo experienced the complexities of finding work. A seed of an idea was born – wouldn’t it be cool if there was an online resource where you could learn from the experience of people who’d already been there and done it? Like TripAdvisor for jobs?

So we got the idea of creating a kind of alternative job information site, where people could post MySpace-style CVs, comments, and ratings for jobs in terms of how cool they were, or fun or whatever.

We kept thinking about what will happen if this service existed. What age group would it serve? Would anyone actually be interested? Would it even be useful?

Finally, we came to the conclusion that people would probably be more likely to engage with the site if we moved away from the idea of “jobs”; instead they could explore their aspirations.

From 1-5, what stage of development is the idea in?

We’d say we’re in stage 1. We have defined a question that needs to be addressed, but we don’t have an answer yet.

We created the outline of a website called ZooCV with some design templates and a few draft pages of how a site that combined editorial and UGC might look.

We drew up an initial content plan and looked at rough costs for creating editorialised content for some of the pages.

We also discussed a couple of other avenues: one a kind of Wikipedia for young people, the other a project based on users’ posted videos. As it’s about exploring aspirations and listening to other users’ experiences, video could be a more engaging way to do this.

What can we do for you?

We need geek power to build a prototype, and a mentor to guide us and turn this from a project into a reality. Funding is not needed yet (but we appreciate your kind offer).

If Social Innovation Camp is able to help push your idea forward, do you have the time or desire to take ownership of it?

We absolutely have the time and desire to push the idea forward. We’ve created our own company (called Friendly Click) so that we can build this social project under one umbrella.

Our idea is to get the project off the ground as soon as possible, and to concentrate on making it a successful tool for young people.

If not, would you be happy for someone else to take your idea forward?

We are more than happy to bring more people on board.

This idea was submitted by Rodrigo, Roddy and Ruth.

Rodrigo is an Interaction Designer. Roddy is an IT Analyst and Ruth is a Web Content Editor. Rodrigo and Roddy work in an investment bank in the City, doing IT stuff. Ruth is a freelance website editor, currently working for a charity.