Social Innovation (Camp) on Speed

This weekend OB was involved in Social Innovation Camp, which besides attempting to produce social innovation in less than 48 hours innovated on the Barcamp model by creating skills matching teams and a more structured workflow – which some called ‘bootcamp approach to coding and development’. Christian Heilman (Yahoo) summed it
up brilliantly:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3.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.