social innovation camp

When I was trying to explain Social Innovation Camp to NGOs & journalists in Tbilisi I settled on the phrase 'Making Things To Make A Difference'.

I got enthused about the whole 'Making Things' meme by Chris Thorpe, while helping him cook up the idea for 'Making Things for 2morro' (a hackday for youngsters as part of 2morro 09). Making Things captures the proactive and DIY approach to problems that infuses Social Innovation Camp and marks it out as a social impact that's distinct from campaigning, policy or orthodox service delivery.

And kicking around Social Innovation Camp ideas with the helpful Dan Burgess of Naked Comms reminded me that the powerful flip side is '...because so much is BROKEN'. That's why we must make stuff; because we can all see that it's not just charities that are broken but the financial system, the economy, our cities and all the other fruits of collapsanomics.

There's a great article called 'Alinsky vs. Arizmendi: Redistribution or Control of Wealth In Changing the World' which contrasts two visions of changing the world. One is the campaiging of Saul Alinsky for "the improvement of the distribution of wealth that the system generated to include communities that were systematically excluded or shortchanged because they were Black, Latino, or working class." The other is the Mondragon network of worker-owned co-ops started by an anti-Franco priest in Spain, and which now has has 85 companies employing 130,000 people globally.

The article finds in favour of the co-ops, on the basis that the redsitribution model depended on a social contract that has since been shattered. Personally, I suspect that we'll always need a bit of both. But more than that we need the creative hacktivism that's breaking out as we realise we can (in the words of a Social Innovation Camp mantra) "use online tools to organise offline change". And that's why 'Making Stuff...' appeals to me; not just making tools or whole solutions, but in the process re-making expectations about what's possible. The tools are there and we don't have to ask permission, so...

Image by moleitau

The Social Camping Movement

Since we did the first Social Innovation Camp back in April I've stumbled across other interesting expressions of the social camp meme.

Evgeny Morozov was involved in the Riga BridgeCamp, which was set up to be a between the tech sector and NGOs.  As well as the camp, they planned to have roving tech support after the event (in a kind of erider-stylee): as Evgeny writes "Real results will be ensured by Support Laboratory: 'One day – one site'. It means, a programmer and a designer would visit a NGO (from all Latvia) and make a webpage for them."

The TransitCamp is a great example that has a specific social focus (improving Toronto's public transport system) and also manages to break away from having only web/tech ideas (e.g. proposing an 'Improve Your English Car' for their subway trains). I missed a recent chance to go to thinkpublic's Social Lab but they may be striving in a similar direction. Post-SICamp, I also heard rumours of interesting camping in Brazil, which would make sense given their strong open source movement and their stark social needs. 

Temporary Autonomy

For me, the far-reaching potential of social-camping comes when the aim is not just to improve the current system (whether that's charities or subways) but to develop something free of legacy constraints. The unfolding impact of the social web will come from the erosion of 19th century structures (such as charities and corporations) and the (re-)emergence of people-powered solutions. My German is way too limited to tell which way the Bremen SocialCamp leaned on this point, but there were obviously some interesting folk involved (hat tip to Christian Kreutz for that link).

Part of the creative energy for Social Innovation Camp came from freeing the participants from the expectations of their days jobs; the camp was a license to say 'all power to the imagination'. But how deep does this go - is it just the excitement of demob-happy designers, geeks & charity workers ignoring the fact that Monday morning will come again? Or does it prefigure some genuine social restructuring, which would make the camps a relative of Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone. After all, the "the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control" is also a neat summary of social media. It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds over the next months, and Social Innovation Camp will be pitching in now that we're back!

Mikey and Hektor from The People Speak have done us proud with Social Innovation Camp - The Movie! You can almost smell the coffee and the over-heating laptops...

Coming out of Social Innovation Camp, I've been wondering how the projects we helped to kick off can find sustainable structures for development.

Our criteria for the camp selected for ideas that could be carried forward after the weekend. The winning projects have certainly showed dynamism and commitment; but how can they organize to get things done when it's not (yet) anyone's day job? How can they get structure without losing the passion?

Synchronously, similar questions & suggestions have cropped up in other discussions. In the Gaming for Good roundtable folk wondered how to apply the voluntary association & dynamic purpose of the World of Warcraft raiding party to the real world. At the Tuttle Club Breakfast , freelancers were feeling their way to structures that sounded to me most like medieval Guilds (an idea that Open Business has already written about) . And in an ippr briefing, the MP Tom Watson invoked the cooperatives of the nineteenth century as a good fit for organisations making a social use of the web.

Seems there's a sea-change coming as organisational models are mutated by the web. With the emphasis on lightweight, dynamic & flexible structures, it seems to echo the radical architecture of Archigram back in the 1960s.

Whatever model we raid, from real or imagined history, there's still the practical question of who pays the bills. Sustainability is the plan for all Social Innovation Camp projects, whether from a commercial business model, grant funding or a mix of the two. Can we also learn from open source, where companies pay staff to work on open source projects for part of their time because there's a wider value to the employer? Social Innovation Camp had the backing of a sizeable posse from Headshift (thanks guys) - perhaps signposting a wider possible solution where commercial companies support social ventures with geek-time? As my colleague Peter Grigg has pointed out, companies need to go beyond CSR and get real about supporting pro-social activity; and what better way than to back projects like these ?

I'm really starting to think that games are one of the magic ingredients in getting this new wave of social change off the ground. When I was at Amnesty I wanted to use games to raise awareness, but maybe we should just make more actual stuff in to games if we want to get a result.

After a the excitement of last weekend's Social Innovation Camp I wondered if part of its magic was that it was a game. Applying competitive teams, rules and time limits to a bunch of hackers & creatives really did the trick.

Last week's How I fell in love with Wikipedia article quotes its first employee saying "it's almost more like an online game, in that it's a community where you hang out a bit, and do something that's a little bit of fun: you whack some trolls, you build some material, etc".

In this week's updated post on Thinking out of the (x)Box: Gaming to expand horizons in creative writing Ewan McIntosh reports myriad ways in which "Certain games are incredibly effective at generating more expanded horizons in students imaginations when they are writing and speaking creatively or transactionally", And his references to "the moral dilemmas and complexity of decision-making in more long-term games like Sim City or Rollercoaster Tycoon" indicate how games could impact the youth enterprise agenda of my day job.

But it was Charlie Leadbeater's invocation of I Love Bees in Social Software for Social Change that switched me on to the exciting social potential of alternate reality games (ARGs), a trail I followed to Jane McGonigal's World Without Oil. As Jane says; 'Reality is broken. Why aren't game designers trying to fix it?'.

So with all this incoming synchronicity I was delighted when David Lundblad invited me to the Gaming for Good event he's puttiing on with Johnnie Moore on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm at NESTA: "An informal gathering of people who think that organisations and society can benefit from a deeper appreciation of the upside of gaming - whether that's online mutiplayer games or real world games..." According to David, they see the three main themes as gaming to improve products & services, gaming to improve organisations, and gaming for social good. As per Ewan's stuff, we should add gaming for education. Then you've got yourself a pretty broad swathe of social impact where games could be a magic ingredient.

Whereas Games for Change (G4C) uses gaming as a way in to social issues, it might be that the bigger long term impact comes from a general spread of a gamer attitude. Research tells us that young people in the UK already treat social media as a multinodal game; so the gamer attitude could spread to online/offline projects for social impact, bring with it the energy, imagination and lateral thinking that makes solving problems into fun.

Social Innovation Camp happened this weekend, and it rocked.

Inspired by a mashup of netsquared, barcamps and seedcamp, it brought together a diverse bunch of hackers & social change activists to cook up prototype projects over the space of a weekend.

And it worked. People brought dedication, passion and skill. They had some fun. They went without much sleep. (I wrote my half-way analysis at 2am; Live from Social Innovation Camp, the laboratory of buzz).

Two things stood out for me; first, it proved (again) that the social web is a generative platform for social impact; and second, that it's possible to do events that go beyond talk and lead to real projects and social businesses. But of course, that's the business of netsquared as well :)

Our small organising collective is now recovering, er, aiming to help the projects sustain and grow. There'l be a lot of write-ups, inteviews, videos etc coming out of the camp - more of this later. In the mean time here's a flavour (more materials at Social Innovation Camp materials):

David Wilcox says Social Innovation Camp: imitations, please and thinks that it "will make a big difference in the way that we think about doing good stuff with new stuff".

A full narrative from Bobbie Johnson, our embedded Media Guardian blogger:

• Kicking off
• Coding and barcoding
• Future me
• Designer - solve my problem!
• Help me work!
• I've got it, you want it
• Breakaway
• Show and tell
• And the winner is¦

A view from partners The Yahoo Developers Network.

Enthusiasm from a sponsor (which is nice!) at Accelerating Social Innovation: lessons from SiCamp where Roland Harwood says "On of the big lessons for me of the weekend was how limited organisation can unleash ideas, which is counter-intuitive for many".

"Teamwork, Quick!" by participant Huey Nhan

Photos on Flickr.

Videoclips and mini-interviews by David Wilcox at Qik

YouTube videos tagged with sicamp and sicamp08 (mostly by The People Speak team)

All the feeds from our backnetwork (warning: includes tweets!)

Amazing amount of buzz at today's Social Innovation Camp. A diverse bunch of dedicated folk has alighted at the Young Foundation ; and Simon Tucker 's welcome last night made it clear we're continuing Michael Young's tradition of disruptive social innovation.

Prison visits and creative tensions

Working with the Prison visits team (I like my projects to be gritty :) was fascinating. For me, it surfaced some of the tensions implicit in the Social Innovation Camp mission, as we discussed our way passed the idea of creating a better information site or helping NGOs to coordinate better. And there's some merit in asking whether nonprofits, designers, and techies can talk to each other . (The answer, by the way, is yes).

Benign Ruthlessness

There's also a creative tension between the breadth of the social mission and the endless possibilities of technology versus the need to produce a working prototype in less than 2 days. Time to apply Michael Young's principle of "benign ruthlessness". With a bit of prompting from Greenman we settled on a simple user review system as our technical nugget. As Jeremy Gould pointed out, we can emulate MySociety projects by offering users more opportunites to get involved as later steps. And since the potential for big vision advocacy relies on building the community, we wanted an easy and useful hook to get it all started.

photo of prison visits team by jeremy gould

Campaigning by doing

As someone complained that the Government should be doing this stuff anyway, I remembered one of my personal aims for setting up Social Innovation Camp; a notion I'd call 'campaigning by doing'. As our friends from the Prison Advice & Care Trust pointed out, prisoner's advocates can argue till they're blue in the face without any response from The System. But with the low barrier power of the social web, we can do something small right now to tackle a problem by tapping in to the experiences of those who are affected. And if that snowballs, like Patient Opinion, it becomes something that institutions have to take notice of.

Adapt or die: the accelerated historicity of the Camp

As I wandered around all the projects I was struck by the different approaches; from an attic of half-a-dozen geeks to a discussion circle of eighteen worrying about trust, from massively detailed user stories to balloon metaphors. It seems to me that the Social Innovation Camp is a laboratory, fast-tracking the kind of fall-out that startups experience, and raiding the recent history of the social web (from wikipedia to netmums) in search of conceptual templates. I'm sure that Aleksi Aaltonen will have more to say post-Camp about the patterns of co-creation that emerged.

Lines and Circle

When Mikey from The People Speak was interviewing me about the Camp he reported his observation that the geeks tended to sit in straight lines. And I saw plenty of discussions happening in circles. Should lines and circles be the new logo of Social Innovation Camp?