The Social Innovation Camp starts with a big, open call for ideas followed by an intense weekend of activity. Here’s how the whole process works:
1. Think of an idea
You don’t need to be technically skilled – you just need to know about a social need that you’ve either encountered in your personal or professional life where the web might be able to help. You can use examples and Social Innovation Camp blog for inspiration. Our ideas criteria will tell you more about what we are looking for.
2. Tell us about your idea
Anyone can enter an idea for a web-based social innovation. Send your idea to the Social Innovation Camp team. Your idea can be ‘private’, in which case we won’t share it with anyone, or ‘public’ and we will post it online for you or others to add comments.
3. Ideas are selected by Social Innovation Camp judges
From the ideas submitted, a panel of judges will select 4-6 ideas which they think have the greatest potential to create a social change and will benefit most from coming to the Social Innovation Camp weekend. All selected ideas will be published online. First place winner will get $3000 to implement the project and the second-place winner gets $1500.
4. Get involved
If your idea doesn’t get picked, or if you don’t want to submit an idea in the first place, you can still get involved. We need the help from software developers, business experts, digital media lawyers, people with expertise in the problems we’re trying to solve, to help make the selected ideas a reality. You can still come along for the weekend, but you have to tell us what you’re interested in and what your skills are (geek, social innovator, entrepreneur etc) and we’ll help you get the most out of the weekend.
5. Camp!
The Social Innovation Camp weekend starts on April 8 evening, bringing together the people behind the selected ideas, software developers and designers, those with business and marketing skills, as well as individuals with expert knowledge of social need. From the first evening participants are asked to organise themselves into teams around the selected ideas work until the end of the Camp. You can find out more about how the weekend works from Social Innovation Camp page here.
6. Show and Tell
The event will close with a Show and Tell pitching competition which will include some prizes for the winning ideas which demonstrate the greatest potential to create real change. You will present what you’ve created over the past 48 hours to the Judges and the larger audience of “Social Media for Social Change” conference participants.
7. Start your venture!
Social Innovation Camp is all about creating the relationships needed to start new projects and we hope your ideas won’t end with the weekend. The Social Innovation Camp team aims to give you support after the Camp to build on what you’ve created.
