This weekend I was lucky enough to be part of the second Social Innovation Camp.
Like the first SI Camp back in April, the idea was to get geeks and social innovators together for an intense couple of days to work in small teams to prototype some socially-beneficial web tools.
It was a huge amount of fun and an opportunity to work on some really worthy concepts and meet loads of terrific people.
I was part of a team working on a slightly wacky idea called The Good Gym, that aimed to help connect joggers needing motivation with potentially isolated old people. Each jogger would be paired with an older person living a suitable distance away and would commit to regular runs to the older person’s house to take them a newspaper and check up on them. In return, the older person would help make sure the jogger kept to their training plan and could impart their accumulated wisdom.
After a very productive (and, unlike last year, surprisingly calm) day-and-a-half of designing, coding, video interviewing and Powerpoint wizardry, we were all set for the judging panel. Here’s our slideshow:
The teams put together some amazing stuff over the weekend. It was incredible to see again what could be achieved in such a short time with good people and a lot of enthusiasm.
One of my personal favourites was AccessCity, but all the projects were extremely worthy and I really hope that at list some will live on beyond the weekend itself to start making an impact in the real world.
As for GoodGym, the social innovation gods must have been looking kindly upon us yesterday because we were awarded 1st prize. Great work, team!
Leave a Reply