Social Innovation Camp workshops with IRISS and DDD Scotland

Several updates from Social Innovation Camp this week:

Don’t forget: events in Edinburgh and Glasgow next week, and Inverness tomorrow

We’ll be in Inverness tomorrow, 10th May, at the Ironworks in Inverness at 1630 and 1930:

The Ironworks
122b Academy Street
Inverness
IV1 1LX

Also get in touch if you’re in Inverness and fancy a chat!

We’ll be at the Melting Pot in Edinburgh on Monday, 16th May. Sign up here.

…and in Glasgow at the Bath Street Pony on Tues, 17th May. Sign up here.

Call for Ideas events

Last Thursday, we jumped back on our train to Scotland, leaving behind a lovely summery morning for the light soaking rain of a Glasgow May (we heard it rained back home as well).

We ran two Call for Ideas workshops, one during the day at the IRISS offices, and one on Saturday afternoon at DDD Scotland. We had about 50 people between the two distinct groups—one composed of mostly developers and one composed of mostly workers in mental health and social isolation.

Some excellent ideas cropped up from these sessions, including (but certainly not limited to):

Bubble: A smartphone app that monitors your social interactions with your friends & associates, and allows you to check in with them. It displays people in progressive rings of bubbles around you, and they move inwards or outwards depending on how much contact you have with them. Applying social gaming elements, this also allows monitoring of how connected you are to the people around you.

Instant Neighbour: (our name). This started out as “Freecycle for lending”, but morphed during development into a market place for trading favours—anything from trading or selling services or loaning items to selling services for those who don’t have time to trade. The team felt that they could build more community cohesion by letting it be a trade or purchase of favours rather than simply a tool hire. This is an excellent take on a new way to make local friends in your locality—and to build relationships with elbow grease.

These are just 2 of the excellent ideas that came out of our two workshops—everything that came up that day was certainly developed well enough to come to the weekend—if they make the cut by the judges.

The Call for Ideas is a short-timer…

You’ve got just 11 days now, though, to check out all the details of our upcoming Social Innovation Camp in Edinburgh, see what ideas have been submitted so far (and previous camps’ ideas), see our criteria, and submit your idea.

It’s not a lot that we’re looking for—just a back-of-the-envelope sketch. We’ve even blogged some tips for doing it well.

Culture Hack Scotland

We ran into several Social Innovation Camp veterans & friends at Culture Hack Scotland – a great event filled with interesting folks doing cool stuff. Check out what they’ve done as soon as it’s up.

Prize updates

More prizes announced for the winners! It’s shaping up to be a flexible & great round of assistance to keep your idea off the ground (after you’ve launched it at the Social Innovation Camp)

‘Til next time…