Social Innovation Camp happened this weekend, and it rocked.
Inspired by a mashup of netsquared, barcamps and seedcamp, it brought together a diverse bunch of hackers & social change activists to cook up prototype projects over the space of a weekend.
And it worked. People brought dedication, passion and skill. They had some fun. They went without much sleep.
Two things stood out for me; first, it proved (again) that the social web is a generative platform for social impact; and second, that it's possible to do events that go beyond talk and lead to real projects and social businesses. But of course, that's the business of netsquared as well :)
Our small organising collective is now recovering, er, aiming to help the projects sustain and grow. There'l be a lot of write-ups, inteviews, videos etc coming out of the camp - more of this later. In the mean time here's a flavour;
Posts by Bobbie Johnson, our embedded Media Guardian blogger:
My late-night half-way analysis; Live from Social Innovation Camp, the laboratory of buzz
A view from Yahoo Developers Network.
All the feeds from our backnetwork (warning: includes tweets!)
Photos on Flickr.
Videoclips and mini-interviews by David Wilcox at Qik
YouTube videos tagged with “sicamp” and “sicamp08“ (mostly by The People Speak team)
"Teamwork, Quick!" by participant Huey Nhan
Enthusiasm from a sponsor (which is nice!) at Accelerating Social Innovation: lessons from SiCamp where Roland Harwood says "On of the big lessons for me of the weekend was how limited organisation can unleash ideas, which is counter-intuitive for many".