Social Innovation Camp was a rollercoaster! From the very first evening, when the delegates gathered at the Young Foundation in London, there was a perceptible buzz in the air…

The crowd was a heady mixture of web developers, designers, entrepreneurs and people with all sorts of skills. Although coming from different angles, everyone seemed to have a driven passion for using the web to help solve the problems of society.

The Projects

Six projects had been chosen for the weekend, from over 70 submitted ideas (one of which was my dream for “Social Compost)”:

• Barcode Wikipedia – community-driven database of product information
• Enabled by Design – product advice and support for disabilities
• On The Up – personal development tracking for youth
• Rate Your Prison – accountability for prison visiting conditions
• Rate My CV – support for marginalised workers
• Stuff Share – community network for sharing possessions

Stuff Share

I was working in the Stuff Share team. Our goal was to create a website to facilitate the sharing of possessions – tents, books, power drills, baby gear and all those other bits and pieces we accumulate but hardly ever use – in order to reduce consumerism and increase community. The idea was that pre-existing trusted groups, such as one’s workplace, neighbourhood, hobby group or children’s school, could become a hub for sharing.

We identified a number of hurdles that we’d need to overcome in order to create a successful site – such as how to support trusted relationships between users and how to get people starting to share as easily as possible. The strict time limit dictated that we decide which set of problems to tackle for the first release – and then the build was on…

The Climax

We worked hard until 2pm Sunday, when each group had to give a presentation of their project. A panel of judges then awarded prizes of £2000 and £1000 to help take the most impressive projects forward.

Here is Tom and Seth‘s presentation of the Stuff Share project:

(video permalink)

The Prizes

Alas, Stuff Share wasn’t a prizewinner, but big congratulations to Enabled By Design, who came first, and Rate Your Prison, who were runners-up.

Work is continuing on Stuff Share and is hoped to be launched at stuffshare.com some time in the near future…

I’ve submitted “Social Compost” as a project proposal to Social Innovation Camp.

SI Camp is a grassroots conference, where social entrepreneurs and web developers get together to help each other out. A number of great ideas have been submitted, a few of which will be selected for the event. My idea is to connect local people who produce kitchen scraps with those who produce compost.

I’ve moved home twice in the last 6 months, and both times to a top floor flat with no garden. We get a weekly delivery of fruit and veg (from Pulse) and quickly turn it into a whole heap of peelings. How could we just throw that juicy waste away… to slowly fester in a plastic bag on some landfill site?

And so, we have scoured both of these new neighbourhoods, looking for someone with a compost bin to take our scraps (thank you Toni, Jon and Anna). There must be a better way….

From the Social Compost proposal:

‘Social Compost’ would be a drop-dead simple website, based around an interactive map. There would be an option to add yourself to the map and to offer either kitchen peelings or mature compost. You could use the map to find others who are offering either peelings or compost.

Have you ever been in a situation like mine? What did you do? And how might such a website help you?