Goodgym Wins @ Social Innovation Camp

What is Social Innovation Camp?

Well, the sicamp website explains far better than I could here and here so in their own cut n’ pasted words, the idea is basically that:

The web has already had a huge impact on the way we live our lives: it has changed how we communicate, how we entertain ourselves, our friendships and the way we work. Now it is going to change how we access our health care, how we educate our children and how we provide for the most vulnerable in our communities….

Social Innovation Camp is an experiment in creating social innovations for the digital age.

It  is a competition to find the best ideas for web tools to create social change, a participant-driven event aimed at bringing together software developers and designers with those at the sharp end of social need: social innovators, entrepreneurs and those with direct experience of need themselves.

Got that?

So I spent the last weekend holed up in the basement of The Young Foundation working with a bunch of talented people with a whole range of different skills in order to build a prototype webtool, business model, social case and funding pitch for a project called The Good Gym. Which then won!

The idea of GoodGym is to provide isolated or immobile older people with regular human contact and to provide motivation for people to run and get fit.   The Good Gym aims to make it easy for people to channel the energy used up as part of their exercise routine  toward a wider social good.  The project will set up a matching and vetting service for joggers/cyclists to integrate brief visits to isolated older people into their regular exercise routines.

Here’s the final presentation which should explain a bit more of the detail. Check out the other finalists here.(The sheer amount of work done on AccessCity is worth a look!)

So, just goes to show – lock people with different skills together in a room, feed them, give them a deadline and an incentive – result = a bunch of amazing online projects for social good!

Now to sustain the momentum…will keep you posted.

Social Innovation Summer School : Vocab Test

I went to the SIX Summer School organised by the Young Foundation in partnership with Mondragon (mik) last week. It was a gathering of people with a fantastically varied set of experiences and skills who descended on sunny San Sebastian from all over the place – but all of whom had one thing in common - an involvement in social innovation. (Whether they really knew it or not!)

What exactly social innovation IS seemed to be less clear to me as the days went by… and in a way seemed less important than the fact that ’something’ is happening in the way society arranges itself. (Plus there was a rigorous social programme which meant that many things seemed less clear as the days went by…)

However, Charlie Leadbeter had a good go at summing things up at school’s close - saying that it’s all about doing things ‘with’ people, rather than ‘to’ or ‘for’ them.

Whether that’s a good summary of ’social innovation’, I am truly unqualified to say! ;)

However I do think that its a good vocabulary for talking about much of the change we’re now seeing in terms of government, power structures and commerce – and of course, quite clearly, on the web.

We often stop ourselves from seeing through to the core of a system by building up vocabularies and terminologies which are quite restrictive and precise to define that system or driver. Of course there’s a valid purpose for this drive to tightly define our meaning – but sometimes we say ‘participative process’, when we just mean ‘with people’.

Anyway – it was three days very well spent – lots of room for thinking, new ideas, and most importantly meeting people from all over the world who are active in this field of social innovation - doing an astonishing variety of different things.

Here are just a few examples for you. There were many other very interesting projects too which I will be linking to in later posts :

Aussie-based young people’s org: Act Now

Brazil-based Sitawi : providing capital for social enterprises

MindLab – innovation in public administration- based in Denmark

Kennisland/Knowledgeland – Dutch thinktank that runs digital pioneers programme

The Hope Institute in S.Korea – making citizens’ small ideas for change make bigger impact

Catalyst Awards : And the winner is…

Catalyst Awards

 

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.

Isn’t that what political parties are for….?

When trying to explain the recent rise of the social innovation/unconference by saying something to the effect that ‘its about getting a group of people together to create shared solutions to social problems’ – I was met with the response:

“Isn’t that what political parties are for…?”

This is a bloody good question. Yes, of course that is what political parties are supposed to be for, but has our common perception of what a party is/does now lost sight of that focus on fellowship in problem solving and collective action for the greater social good? Surely parties are for arguing, combat and infighting – not problem solving…?

It seems that people  now increasingly think of political parties as not being applicable to their own lives. Is this a question of party political structure that needs revitalising from the inside out, or a far wider reaching issue connected to social trends at work in society at large, such as the relentless rise of the single issue politics and individualism?

Whatever the preceise nature of the problem, it is clear that parties cannot carry on the way they are as membership dwindles ever further. So what would the parties of the future look like and what can they learn from social innovation style problem-solving models and ways of working?

(I can’t resist saying it) – What would PartyPolitics 2.0 actually look like, and would an innovative social approach be any better than a traditional route to renewal?