This weekend I was lucky enough to be part of the second Social Innovation Camp.

Like the first SI Camp back in April, the idea was to get geeks and social innovators together for an intense couple of days to work in small teams to prototype some socially-beneficial web tools.

It was a huge amount of fun and an opportunity to work on some really worthy concepts and meet loads of terrific people.

I was part of a team working on a slightly wacky idea called The Good Gym, that aimed to help connect joggers needing motivation with potentially isolated old people. Each jogger would be paired with an older person living a suitable distance away and would commit to regular runs to the older person’s house to take them a newspaper and check up on them. In return, the older person would help make sure the jogger kept to their training plan and could impart their accumulated wisdom.

After a very productive (and, unlike last year, surprisingly calm) day-and-a-half of designing, coding, video interviewing and Powerpoint wizardry, we were all set for the judging panel. Here’s our slideshow:

The teams put together some amazing stuff over the weekend. It was incredible to see again what could be achieved in such a short time with good people and a lot of enthusiasm.

One of my personal favourites was AccessCity, but all the projects were extremely worthy and I really hope that at list some will live on beyond the weekend itself to start making an impact in the real world.

As for GoodGym, the social innovation gods must have been looking kindly upon us yesterday because we were awarded 1st prize. Great work, team!

I had the pleasure of attending Social Innovation Camp this weekend. It was a chance to meet some great people, all with an interest in making the world a better place by using web technology as the basis for social ventures of one sort or another. A little like Startup Weekend, the idea was to get a bunch of strangers together for a couple of days and put together some kind of website. In this case (unlike Startup Weekend) the goal was to come up with something to meet some kind of social need.

Some fantastic projects were launched over the weekend, including Stuffshare and Barcode Wikipedia, both of which, if they take off, I can see having great potential. All the projects looked really promising, though, and I’m looking forward to some exciting developments with them over the next few months.

I was part of the team working on ‘Enabled by Design‘ – a website to allow people to share solutions to everyday problems faced by people with disabilities (see here for an example). We were fortunate enough to have a team of volunteers with a good mix of skills and backgrounds and we made some solid progress over the weekend. Our hard work really paid off when, much to our surprise, we were awarded first prize in today’s closing ceremony. Nice work, everyone! It was a real pleasure working with you over the weekend and I’m looking forward to working together again soon to take things further. Everyone pitched in to make it all happen and I don’t think we could have wished for a better team spirit. You all deserve a very well-earned rest!