Unlike other unconferences and hack days the Social Innovation camp expected more than just a technical showcase of the participating teams. The criteria the different entries were judged by were their social need, the technical implementation, the PR ideas, their sustainability and what next steps the teams had planned.

The rationale of the organizers was that there is an immediate social problem to be solved which meant that the products started or accelerated at the camp have to come to fruition afterwards. Of the 70 submitted projects the team of judges chose six that had the highest potential to be delivered to a sensible stage over the course of a weekend.

The first thing that struck me when I arrived on the scene on Sunday was that the idea of creating teams for "hacks" was absolutely brilliant. The place was covered in whiteboards with brainstorming tracks, storyboards and paper prototypes and you saw that each team had done a great job distributing the business, technical and creative tasks of the respective product to experts in the team. The outcome of this two day "war room"-like approach to project development was impressive to say the least.

The projects in detail:

On the Up (formerly known as personal development reports) is a web project that allows young people to start a plan for themselves to become more than they are now. For example they would want to become a world class footballer. The system then allows the young person to keep track of all the steps on the way and to give feedback as to how it went. The system would create graphs of all the participants of these self-improvement projects that would allow a mentor or a council sponsor to see the results of their work in a measurable format.

StuffShare is a web product and social network that allows you to lend stuff to and from other people. During the presentation the team showed that the average use time of a drill is 20 minutes, yet everybody buys their own instead of asking their neighbour to borrow one. This is what StuffShare wants to change. By enabling people to search or offer things to borrow, have a rating system for each user (ebay style but less bloated) and building on existing social networks, it will make sure less products are bought without a real need for them and people talk more to each other.

Rate your Prison (formerly known as prison visits) is a review site and information network about prisons in the UK. The team showed in video interviews with partners of inmates and prison workers that there is a need for making it easier for outside family members to visit people in jail and get a platform to talk about their experiences. The main example was a lady who had to wait three weeks before being able to see her brother in jail for the first time. The system is based loosely on a similar and very successful system in the UK that allows patients to rate their hospital stay.

Enabled by Design is a review site and social network that revolves around "living aids" - bespoke furniture and daily utensils that are accessible for people with disabilities and make their live easier. The main message of the product will be that these aids should be useful and pretty - nobody with a disability should be forced to live in an environment that looks like a cheap hospital. The idea is to allow for design showcases, ask for solutions for different use cases ("how can I cut vegetables when I infrequently get spasm in my hand") and allow people to design their solution and try to find a company that'll implement it.

Wibi.it (formerly known as Barcode Wikipedia) is a system that allows you to take a photo of a barcode of any product (or type the barcode in) and shows you a wiki entry for the product. The main goal was to allow people to get information about a product while they are in the supermarket as to how "green" the product really is or how much it should go for. Easily the geekiest entry it was quite interesting to see how you can try to bridge real live tactile experiences (like shopping) and "crowdsourced" information on the web. Even if you have to cheat "slightly" to make the technology work out :-).

CV LifeLine (formerly known as rate my CV) is a web application that allows you to create an online CV by entering experiences and certifications on a timeline interface. You can create different CVs according to who you'd like to send it to and can get mentoring and professional review and advice. It is a bit like LinkedIn, but with a much more agile and easier interface. The social aspect is that it is targeted to people that move to the UK and have a high qualification in their originating country. Most of these will not get the same jobs but much lesser valuable jobs because they didn't sell themselves the right way on their CVs.

Glue (working name) was a "rebel project" that emerged on the weekend as a collaboration of several people who didn't find a spot in the other teams. The idea of this web application is to make it easy for family members to take care of their elderly parents, even when they are geographically scattered around the country or even the globe. The idea is to keep up a "dad page" or "mom page" with all the contacts in their area you can call up in case of emergencies, keep track of their medical history and prescriptions and find people with parents in the same area to exchange experiences.

The winners

All in all there was an amazing amount of great work done on the weekend, and I am sure that all of the projects will go their merry way towards going live and changing the social life of a lot of people. The judges' decision on who the first and second winners were (who both got some starting capital to get them going further) wasn't easy but surprisingly unison: The first price went to "Enabled by Design" and the second to "Rate my Prison".

The organizers will follow up on the success and progression of the different projects and we will follow up with some more in-depth coverage at a later stage.

Summary

I am particularly pleased to see that the Social Innovation Camp managed to cross boundaries in the developer world. It is easy to get geeks coding (just give me a task and my mac), but it is hard to make them find solutions to problems other than those that only exist in their world. By taking real-life issues to solve the geek energy was used for good and exposed people who have to deal with human problems to the principles that drive the social web. In other words, our little world of geekiness with all its drive and ideals was opened to those who really need some positive vibes in their work arena.

I was very happy to have been part of this as a judge as the Social Innovation camp showed how the energy of the mashup and social web movement can work wonders. I am sure that some of the developers on the day got a bit de-geeked and some of the non-web-savvy learnt that there is much to be found by collaborating with the geeks and letting them have a go at solving a certain issue. An interesting aspect for the techie in me is that almost every project was built on the open source community platform Drupal. Maybe we should take a closer look at that one.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network