
Last weekend, the Social Innovation Camp pitched our tent at the Young Foundation, Bethnal Green, London. Three months of preparation came to a head, and 48 hours of sun, snow and showers later, it was all over.
We had just one building with 6 projects, over 100 people, copious quantities of beer, wine, food and endless cups of coffee, to assist us in our mission to try and create some new online social ventures. And we had £3,000 of prize money to give away by Sunday afternoon.
At the end of a long weekend, all the projects had the chance to Show and Tell everyone else at the Camp what they’d been building. We had some stunning results, but our judges had to choose just one winner and runner up to receive £2,000 and £1,000 respectively to help their project develop beyond the weekend.
After a short deliberation, Rate Your Prison was selected as the runner-up and Enabled by Design as the winner.
Proof of potential
So what exactly were we looking for from the winning projects? The ideas selected for development at the weekend were all at different stages when the event kicked off. Some had a very clear idea of what they wanted to build and the main challenge of the weekend was to make the tech work. Barcode Wikipedia, for example, had a basic remit to link products in the physical world to an online space via their barcode. Rate Your Prison, on the other hand, began with a broad social challenge: to improve the experience of visiting a friend or family in prison. The first thing they had to do was to decide what the technical solution was that they needed to create.
But at Show and Tell we weren’t looking for the idea that had come closest to being built or progressed furthest in the short amount of time we had provided. Right from the beginning, the Social Innovation Camp has been focused on producing real outcomes from the weekend; we were interested in giving the first helping hand to new social ventures. Social Innovation Camp is just the start for these ideas; what the judges were looking for in the projects at Show and Tell was proof of potential to develop further – and we reckon that the winning projects, Enabled by Design and Rate Your Prison, have this quality in spades.
Creating grassroots change
The Social Innovation Camp experiment has been about building platforms that use the web to create social 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 organizational frameworks. This puts the power in the hands of the users who are often best placed to produce more relevant, efficient and effective change. The judges felt that the winning projects were the two which went furthest to tackle what are currently really under-served social needs by using the web in this way.
It was the extent of the social need that swung the judges in favour of Rate Your Prison. It’s a simple tool to help a group of people who are poorly served at present; families and friends of prisoners. And the potential social impact of the site also extends into wider society; there is strong evidence that maintaining social links with the wider world not only makes the experience of incarceration more humane for prisoners, but makes a real difference to re-offending rates once prisoners are released. The judges were also impressed by the way Rate Your Prison provided a bottom-up solution to a problem within a highly bureaucratic system.
Again, it was the social need that impressed the judges in the case of Enabled by Design. They thought this was a brilliant idea to solve the problem of disabled people being shoehorned into products and services that they don’t really want and aren’t suited to.
Technology isn’t just for geeks
Enabled by Design is also a great use of technology to bring together two groups who might not ordinarily come into contact; the design community and people who need adaptive, highly specialized products. And the target user-base was another focus for the judges. A theme that has run right through the Social Innovation Camp project – from our initial call for ideas to our Show and Tell finale – was our interest in creating projects that weren’t just targeted at traditional tech users. We wanted to design tools for ordinary people to use, not just creating something cool for the sake of it. Both the projects chosen by our judges could extend the benefits of being online to new groups of people.
So what happens next?
Social Innovation Camp is just the start for all the ideas developed over the weekend. We’re already hearing some exciting stuff about what they’re going to do next – and the news isn’t just coming from our two winners. We’ll keep you updated on their progress through the Social Innovation Camp blog and their project pages on our site.
And there are a number of ways you can get involved as well.
Why not offer your skills to one of the projects? One of the most striking successes of the weekend was the number of people who just came along to help others out. We had a load of Campers with start-up experience, business know-how or technical expertise who went from project to project mentoring the teams; giving them advice ranging from what to call their site to helping out with their code. A number of people have offered to meet up with the teams again or just offer a friendly line of advice via email in the future. If you were a mentor last weekend and you want to continue to help out any of the projects, please do get in touch.
But what about Social Innovation Camp itself? You can sign up to our mailing list to hear how the project develops from here. And you can continue to follow us on Twitter.
We’d also like to hear what you think. Did you join us at the Young Foundation last weekend? Send us your suggestions for what we did right and what we could have done better.
And if you enjoyed yourself, why not take our format, learn from our mistakes and set up your own Social Innovation Camp?