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
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!)
