Social Ch@nge

What do you get when you squeeze hackers and social activists into a small space for a weekend, add competition and a large helping of idealism? The Social Innovation Camp!

The SIC is based on a style of gathering popular among hackers, coders and other geek-culture types: it’s related to Foo Camps and BarCamps, annual “unconferences” of hackers. A tangent: the social organization around these unconferences is phenomenal: it’s completely “open source”, in that the conference programme is determined by the attendees and is an organic thing that shifts as it moves along. And yet, huge numbers of people are able to attend, fantastic sessions are carried out. Although it goes against every traditional model of event management, it works.

So, back to the SIC, which is a little different: sponsored by the Young Foundation, it set a specific challenge to a group of programmers and social innovators: 48 hours to create web-based solutions to a range of social problems. It was, by all accounts, a sweat-filled, crazed race to the finish line. In the end, the winner walked away with a small pot of prize money but, of course, that wasn’t really the point.

It’s all about the process: from user-generated unconferences to pressure-cooker idea development competitions, there are some amazing social engineering techniques out there. Techniques that challenge the traditional assumptions around how groups of people share information and accomplish goals. However, this stuff is still essentially on the fringe: it’s in our society’s equivalent of “beta testing”. But once the experimental phase is over – could these approaches transform governments, schools, non-profits? Is your organization ready for something like this?