Bring Social Innovation Camp to a country near you!
We’re looking for people who are interested in running their own Social Innovation Camps in countries across the globe.
Since we first created Social Innovation Camp in 2008, we’ve had over 300 ideas submitted to three Camps in the UK, helped build 20 prototypes and kick-started social start-ups such as MyPolice, the GoodGym and Enabled by Design.
We’ve also started to help other people run their own Social Innovation Camps in other parts of the world.
There have been four so far – in Slovakia, Australia, Georgia and South Korea – and a further two are planned in Azerbijan and the Czech Republic.
And we’re getting a lot of interest from many more people who want to get involved from across the globe.
So we thought it might be time to think about how we help people to run their own.
At the moment, there’s a simple ‘how to’ guide – the Social Innovation Camp Cookbook – for people who want to run their own Social Innovation Camps. But we’re finding that written instructions just don’t quite cut it.
So here’s the plan.
Working with SIX, a global network of social innovators based at the Young Foundation, we want to run a three-day workshop in early 2011 for people from around the world who’d like to help set up a Social Innovation Camp in their own country. The idea is that it’ll work a little bit like this:
Who should take part:
Anyone who’s interested in helping seed new ideas, projects and start-ups that use web or mobile tools to solve a social problem in their country. Those people might be part of software developer communities, entrepreneurial types or organisations (companies, non-profits, foundations, philanthropists, governments etc) who can provide funding or in-kind support to help.
How it works:
There are several different parts to running your own Social Innovation Camp: building a community, finding your ideas, and running the hack weekend. We estimate that once you’ve got your funding sorted, this is a full-time job for one person for around four months (or a very part-time job for a bunch of people working together). To run one, part of what you need is a simple step-by-step ‘how to’ guide, but running a successful Social Innovation Camp is more art than science: it’s all about finding great ideas and smart people, then helping them work together productively. We’ve learnt lots about how you do that, but we reckon it’s much easier to share what we know face-to-face.
So the workshop will be an opportunity to learn about the thinking behind Social Innovation Camp, see how it works and think practically about questions like: Where are the main social opportunities for web and mobile tools in my country? What does a good idea look like? How do I find good ideas? How do I shape a good idea? What do I look out for in a person and a team that makes them successful? How do I get people working together well? etc etc.
We’ll be sharing how we do this in the UK, but we also reckon there’ll be loads of culture- and country-specific experiences to bring into the mix.
What you’ll get:
The idea is that people who come to the workshop will leave with:
- A simple step-by-step ‘how-to’ guide to run your own Social Innovation Camp
- Tools and techniques to help you seek out and shape good ideas and bring them together with the right people to help create new socially innovative web and mobile-based projects
- New connections to others who want to run and support Social Innovation Camps globally
We’ll be working on this project over the next few months, but right now, we want to know who might be interested in joining us for the workshop and where they are in the world.
If you think you might be interested in getting involved, fill out our questionnaire and tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Image: A team from Social Innovation Camp South Korea, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sicamp36/
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