Am just back from the rather brilliant Catalyst Awards – designed to encourage innovation around social technology for community benefit. There were some really fantastic projects nominated as finalists including:
Rafi.ki a global citizenship project which partners schools across the world, facilitating connections through the wonder of social tech.
LocalEyes, which provides a platform for citizen voice from a grass roots level up, and aims to connect people at a very local level. (And which was commended for future potential.)
BigArtMob which simply uses interactive mapping to build up a map of public art across the UK
Yoosk! - an innovative question answering facility which connects public figures with citizens
EnabledbyDesign - an online community whose ultimate aim is to make independent living more accessible through the use of clever modern design
I just wanted to highlight these few catalyst finalists who didn’t scoop one of the main prizes as I thought they were also brilliant ideas. Check out the award winners here.
The only bad point about the morning was having to climb five floors in high heels cause the lift was being held for ‘a senior cabinet minister’ AKA the PM…. Poor plebian Casey.
However, he made up (a bit) for this great inconvenience by chipping in with a decent speech about the future of social innovation and also mentioned future work focusing on the Criminal Justice System.
It all sounds very positive etc. and am looking forward to the follow up at Chain Reaction later this year.

3 responses so far ↓
socialreporter // July 24, 2008 at 5:22 pm |
Hi Alice – as you say, it looks as if Chain Reaction is the next staging post. I think there’s scope for a bit of mashing up of networks … http://snurl.com/34b9y Coming over to UnltdWorld to chat with others about that?
FutureGov » Useful links » links for 2008-07-24 // July 24, 2008 at 11:31 pm |
[...] Catalyst Awards : And the winner is… « Cased Interesting approach as Alice blogs about the, ahem, non-winners (thanks Alice!) (tags: enabledby catalystawards events socialenterprise) [...]
Enabled by Design » Blog Archive » Inspiring Innovation - UK Catalyst Awards 2008 // August 13, 2008 at 1:50 pm |
[...] Enabled by Design didn’t receive an award this time round (although happy to get an honourable mention elsewhere as non-winners!), but we feel extremely proud to have made it to the shortlist, and be [...]