The people over at Social Innovation Camp have selected the ideas to be developed at their camp next month. Ideas include something to sort out junk mail, a way to find out who’s on holiday and where, so you can get them to do useful stuff like finding a plumber to fix the drains at an orphanage (I can’t even begin to explain how unlikely that could be of any use to any of the orphanages I’ve seen), a site to help you navigate your way around places with consideration to ability needs or escorting young children, an idea to get people out jogging to drop in and visit elderly people and run errands for them (seriously!), and an online marketplace for people who grow local produce. Also potentially shortlisted is something to include staff in making their company carbon neutral, a (ridiculous) idea to make setting up a social enterprise a one click process, an online system to help you make preparations for your death, and a scheme to help people join together to share the costs of investing in renewable energy.

Of all of them its the vegetable marketplace idea (called Vegsy) that I can see some real use for although getting enough people signed up to make it useful seems highly ambitious.

For most of the others I’m bemused as to what the perceived social benefit will be or how realistic it is that they can actually be of use. What I took from the last Social Innovation Camp was that to be successful you need a very simple idea. The last winner was Enabled by Design which aims to link the needs of people who use adapted equipment with designers – technically its the sort of thing that could be put together in just a few days, getting it used of course is a harder challenge and I assume that’s what has taken it so long to develop since. The idea I took along was far too ambitious – it took the whole weekend just to develop the concept let alone consider how to go about technically achieving it!

I say the idea of a ‘one click social enterprise’ is ridiculous (in the context of social benefit), because I don’t see what benefit that is going to have besides providing the same service that lots of sites already offer to buy a company formation online (that benefit being profit for not much work). Its already very simple to set up a social enterprise – keeping it running as I know all too well is far from simple and I would strongly advise anyone to put a considerable amount of thought into planning, including a very detailed look at the format you choose and what’s written in your governing documents.

The idea of making your preparations to die online raises some ethical issues such as what happens if you attract young people considering suicide? (and the potential for some very bad publicity if you get linked to anything like that). More to the point though don’t you just encourage people to draw up a Living Will that includes details of how they want their organs dealt with etc. – is there a need to be ‘innovative’ when a very good system already exists?!

I do like the idea of supporting people to plan accessible routes (called AccessCity). This is already possible on the brilliant Transport for London site and I assume they’re intending to build on that and maybe that’s the reason for choosing to develop it for London first? Otherwise why you’d choose the biggest city in the country to pilot an idea seems odd – why not a small town, or one of the smaller cities like Worcester, York or Exeter? (who I’m sure would appreciate it much more than London).

It’ll be interesting to follow how the various ideas get developed over the next few weeks. I already have my own idea for the next Social Innovation Camp, this is to develop a system that allows the final ideas for future Social Innovation Camps to be selected by the public! The notion that a small group of people are more suitable to select from a broad range of ideas is very old fashioned. I don’t suggest this ‘idea’ sarcastically – I can understand why a public voting system hasn’t been used – it would just be a popularity contest won by whoever has the biggest online social network (or most friends in London), so I really do think it would be a project in itself to develop a fair system that does allow future selections to be done in the open.

You can see the full list of shortlisted ideas here

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