Social Innovation Camp 09

A couple of weekends ago (19th – 21st July) I was fortunate to be invited to take part in the third Social Innovation Camp. Hosted at the Saltire Centre in Glasgow, SICamp brought together 6 people with ideas for creating social change using the web and grouped them with a some of the most talented software developers in the UK to create some truely amazing projects.

For the weekend, I hung up my business hat and went along purely as a geek. I ended up working on an idea called Citipedia. Originally submitted by Dundee based designer Lyall Bruce, Citipedia was a platform for giving communities more information and ultimately power over the space around them.

I chose to work on this project because I loved the vision of creating a fun ’simcity like’ interface for people to explore how wasted space could be better used. My contribution to the project was a Flash based editor, that used googlemaps to display an real space which users could then add different terrain and features ontop of and estimate the total development costs and time - in the future we intended to add counters to additional measure the environmental and social impact.  

This editor formed part of a larger social networking platform allowing users to share their ideas and utimately create change. We should hopefully have the full application online at somepoint but until then you can >> Start Planning.