Innovation, technology & a lot of caffeine

Posted by Brenton Caffin on 18 March 2010 | 2 Comments
Tags: social innovation, web, ASIX,

On the first weekend in March, a diverse and creative bunch of social change agents, techies and other interested people descended onto the City campus of UNSW to participate in Australia's first ever Social Innovation Camp, organised by the Australian Social Innovation Exchange (ASIX).

Over the course of 40 hours, eight teams burned the midnight oil to turn ideas for social innovation into functioning prototypes. Idea owners, who had been selected by the judging panel to participate following national meet-ups, an online discussion and voting on the ASIX website, kicked off proceedings with a brief pitch of their idea and a call for specific help they required to take the idea forward.

The pace was frenetic, the adrenalin flowing and energy levels were high, aided no doubt by the constant flow of caffeine. The objective was simple; be prepared to present your proposal, along with working demos if possible, by 2pm Sunday afternoon. Some teams spent the entire night developing their websites.

In the end, 1st, 2nd and 3rd places were awarded with follow-up assistance from a range of organisations being part of the prize. The winner was www.refugeebuddy.org, a website designed to make it easier for people to volunteer to help refugees in their settlement and integration process and to improve the matching by interest and location. Second was micro-volunteering site www.twobobsworth.org, while the third placed ISIS, or Interlocked Social Information Systems, ambitiously aims to merge and synthesise official data with bottom-up anecdotal data contributed by the public.

I think the weekend held a number of important lessons for me. Creating a sense of urgency and ensuring that the right people were on hand to lend support and guidance (and do the grunt work) provided an ideal hothouse environment to accelerate the development of an idea in a very short period of time. Some team leaders commented that, without the camp, it might have taken six months to have reached the same point of development. Participants were also able to share ideas, knowledge and tools across projects, so that the creative effort was enhanced by being brought together. It also applied the acid test to ideas, and some were found to require a rethink about some core assumptions. The ideas were all web-heavy and it would be interesting to see how the models fares with non-tech ideas.

An improvement to the camp process might be to ensure that team leaders have done the necessary research to clarify what else already exists and they are not merely duplicating existing approaches. For example, the team that set out on Friday to create a car-pooling database quickly realised that Australia didn't necessarily need another database, but instead it needed other tools to aggregate the use of existing sites.

The organisation of the camp by ASIX, and especially the tireless work of Raul Caceres, was excellent and participants agreed that the camp had added value to their ideas. TACSI looks forward to playing a role in future camps and seeing some of these ideas entered into the Bold Ideas, Better Lives Challenge.