The Social Camping Movement

Since we did the first Social Innovation Camp back in April I've stumbled across other interesting expressions of the social camp meme.

Evgeny Morozov was involved in the Riga BridgeCamp, which was set up to be a between the tech sector and NGOs.  As well as the camp, they planned to have roving tech support after the event (in a kind of erider-stylee): as Evgeny writes "Real results will be ensured by Support Laboratory: 'One day – one site'. It means, a programmer and a designer would visit a NGO (from all Latvia) and make a webpage for them."

The TransitCamp is a great example that has a specific social focus (improving Toronto's public transport system) and also manages to break away from having only web/tech ideas (e.g. proposing an 'Improve Your English Car' for their subway trains). I missed a recent chance to go to thinkpublic's Social Lab but they may be striving in a similar direction. Post-SICamp, I also heard rumours of interesting camping in Brazil, which would make sense given their strong open source movement and their stark social needs. 

Temporary Autonomy

For me, the far-reaching potential of social-camping comes when the aim is not just to improve the current system (whether that's charities or subways) but to develop something free of legacy constraints. The unfolding impact of the social web will come from the erosion of 19th century structures (such as charities and corporations) and the (re-)emergence of people-powered solutions. My German is way too limited to tell which way the Bremen SocialCamp leaned on this point, but there were obviously some interesting folk involved (hat tip to Christian Kreutz for that link).

Part of the creative energy for Social Innovation Camp came from freeing the participants from the expectations of their days jobs; the camp was a license to say 'all power to the imagination'. But how deep does this go - is it just the excitement of demob-happy designers, geeks & charity workers ignoring the fact that Monday morning will come again? Or does it prefigure some genuine social restructuring, which would make the camps a relative of Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone. After all, the "the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control" is also a neat summary of social media. It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds over the next months, and Social Innovation Camp will be pitching in now that we're back!

The Catalyst Awards ceremony on 24/7 has boosted the buzz around using social technology for community good. I'm happy with how it went, and I know it's already having a positive knock-on effect. But raising all that energy raises the question: where next?

It was a curious experience to curate the awards, because of the need to bend a top-down initiative in the direction of community innovators. Luckily it succeeded, and the awards day reflected this curious mashup as PM Gordon Brown and a bevy of ministers mingled with social activists and tech obsessives.

All the awards were well deserved, of course; but an awards ceremony only takes things so far. Yes, it delivered media coverage, starting with unexpectedly positive write-ups from The Sun and The Telegraph(!).But I think all the wondrously diverse shortlist deserve a boost - and beyond that, so do all the folk who had the oomph to enter in the first place. And I'm not just saying that because I'm a nice guy, but because IMHO we're not just picking shiny projects at random, we're seeking to spotlight the birth of a movement.

Whenever we got the shortlisted projects together, there was an immediate buzz. They're not working on the same social issues but they seem to recognise some commonality and were keen to share experiences, and even to form partnerships. This solidarity is great, and reflects the spirit of generosity of the social web. And I think there's a momentum building around this movement, a sense that web-enabled social change signals a new form of community action for the 21st century ("using the newest of technologies for the oldest of aims").

But how do we unlock this promise? How do we catalyse(!) more projects and help them grow once they've started? All the folk I met while doing the awards are taking an enterprising approach to developing their strange memes. They are social startups and need support that's as agile and experimental as they are. Developing that ecology of support is one key issure for Catalyst phase 2.

We'll be announcing the phase 2 plan at Chain Reaction which leaves a couple of months to pull the strands together. I'm keen to hear other people's ideas about the best way to pull together initiatives like Social Innovation Camp, 2gether08 and Channel 4's 4IP. In the mean time, Davd Wilcox did a social report of the awards, including an interview with me where he asked a lot of the same questions;

With a little more than 48 hours before we announce the Catalyst Awards winners, I want to pay tribute to all of the shortlist. I said in Strange Memes & Community Innovation that "the exciting part about running the Catalyst Awards is that we don’t really know what we're going to find. The web is a place where unexpected social experiments can have far reaching consequences". IMHO the shortlist lives up to these hopes, as it includes:

• The world’s first disability nightclub in Second Life
• Social networking for young gypsy travellers, for carers of aged parents and for users & designers of disability living aids
• The use of wikis - for young refugees and asylum seekers, and for enterprise policy makers
• Web 2.0 sites connecting young people with politicians, the NHS with patients and carers, residents with those in power
• X-factor voting technology being used for community decision making and consultation
• The use of cool wireless technology (like biomapping) by socially excluded young people

There's still time to cast your vote for the People's Choice award. In the mean time, here's the Eden Project's Tim Smit (of the one of the judges) explaining that several of the projects are going to be "genuinely world changing":

See videos from many of the projects on our Catalyst Youtube channel.

Listening to plans for the Darzi review of the 60 year old NHS I was struck by the parallel between the user stories surfaced by Patient Opinion and the user stories that drive Agile software development.

Like a lot of memes that start in tech space, Agile development is breaking out of it's pure software background and being applied in other ways, which is why I asked Rob Purdie to do an Agile workshop for Make Your Mark. In Agile, the user stories have the form "As a [Type of User], [Function to Perform] so that [Business Value]".

At the same time, bottom-up initiatives like Patient Opinion are aggregating the stories of NHS users. As it says on the site: "People tell us that the most important thing for them is that their story is used to make services better for other people".

The Darzi review of the NHS makes great play of patient's views, without really explaining how these will gain traction within a top-down bureaucratic structure. The scaleability of the social web has the potential to push patient stories through the force-field of institutional inertia. May the good old NHS become more agile at 60.

A motley mix of social web heads (inc. yours truly) mingled with UK Gov types at yesterdays workshop on the Empowerment White Paper. I respect the intent of the day's main question; "How can we best use digital media to get public services to where people are going to be in five years time?". Some UK Gov insiders genuinely care about getting services to people and aren't blind to the importance of the digital public.

But for me it misses the most exciting bit; that people are going to start generating their own services in response to their needs, using widely available digital tools and the collaboration they enable. Then the question becomes 'How can government support this?".

Here's a good example. Estonia is one of Europe's most wired democracies; e-government is the norm and most urban areas are giant free wifi clouds. But there was a huge problem with waste being dumped in the wilds and the government wasn't tackling it effectively. At the workshop on Crowdsourcing for transparency in Central & Eastern Europe an Estonian participant told me about Let's Do It! (Teeme Ara in Estonian) where 50,000 volunteers cleared 10,000 tons of illegal waste from the fields, forests and riverbanks in the space of a day. Granted, it was catalysed by a couple of very web-savvy guys (including Ahti Heinla, one of the founders of Skype), but the tools they used to map and take images of illegal garbage dumps across the country (like Google Earth and mobile phones with GPS) are easily accessible these days.

E-government by itself doesn't make for social innovation, but the alchemy of web plus community can catalyse something unexpected. I think normal government responses will seem like Flatland compared to the digitally-enabled citizen initiatives that are going to pop up.

How will we spot the difference? As someone said at the workshop, these new solutions will be based on assets rather than deficits i.e. they'll aggregate what people have to offer, rather than seeing us as a set of atomistic needs that only government can address.

And there's the question of empowerment itself. Someone else said that the idea of an Empowerment White Paper made them queasy, because empowerment isn't something that's handed down by the government but comes from communities themselves. Fair point, only we know how disempowered people feel right now.

On the opening night Social Innovation Camp, the Young Foundation's Simon Tucker told me the buzz was different to a normal gathering of social entrepreneurs. There was more positivity, more sense of being able to make stuff happen. Interesting, isn't it, that the digital can act as the trigger for a sense of empowerment. And maybe this comes from it's ability to aggregate people with a shared passion. The Estonian forests weren't cleaned up by GIS software but by people who cared and found out that a lot of other people did too.

Watch for more examples emerging from initiatives like the Catalyst Awards and the 2gether Festival .  

What happens when social need collides head on with the social web? How are widespread and easy-to-use technologies being used to benefit communities?

The UK Catalyst Awards are an experiment in surfacing social tech innovation. The bet is that social activists across the UK are using technology to benefit communities in lots of different ways. The awards aim to shine a spotlight on these projects, big or small, as a way to boost those projects and also to spread the inspiration.

The closing date is June 16th so there's still time to enter! You can enter yourself or nominate someone you know, either as individuals or as part of a business, charity or community group. We’re looking for examples of people creating new social technologies as well as using existing channels in a different way. More details on the UK Catalyst Entry Form.

For me, the exciting part about running the Catalyst Awards is that we don’t really know what we're going to find. The web is a place where unexpected social experiments can have far reaching consequences - who could have predicted Wikipedia? So what new forms of community action will emerge when strange internet memes like Crowdsourcing and The Long Tail are applied to social impact?

Projects like Liftshare and Patient Opinion tell us that the web can pack a social punch, and Social Innovation Camp proved that there are loads more great ideas ready for that dash of tech magic to bring them to life. And it's not just the web; mobile and gaming technologies are also being turned to socially positive ends.

There are nine Catalyst awards - Community Awards for Social Technology - up for grabs. The entrants can have created their own social technology or used existing channels innovatively. Our categories expect the unexpected - they include:

• The Shock for Good Award: for something that shocked people into doing something good
• The Revolutionary Award: for something that makes people in power more aware of the need for change
• The Self-Help Award: For something that helps the creator to help themselves
• The Chalk & Cheese Award: for something that brings two different groups of people together
• The David and Goliath Award: for something little that made a difference to a something big and powerful

The Catalyst Awards are also proud partners of the 2gether Festival and we'll be presenting the shortlisted projects at a special preview session. We'll also be opening a discussion about Catalyst Phase 2; how to incubate and grow digital social projects to a scale where they can have significant social impact.

And thanks to DK of the rather excellent Mediasnackers you can watch a vodcast of me explaining why the Catalyst Awards are only the start...

I was very disturbed to read about the recent attacks on Roma camps in Italy . The report says:

"Young Neapolitans who threw Molotov cocktails into a Naples Gypsy camp this week, after a girl was accused of trying to abduct a baby, bragged that they were undertaking "ethnic cleansing". A UN spokeswoman compared the scenes to the forced migration of Gypsies from the Balkans. "We never thought we'd see such images in Italy," said Laura Boldrini."

I'm pretty obsessed with how the web and digital technologies can advance human rights , and whether they can prevent gross violations and genicode, so I started wondering how useful they could be in this situation.

I remember the launch of the Roma Information Project (RIP) back in 2002, a great project using the erider model to support Roma groups in Central & Eastern Europe. But there's also potential for defending Roma rights using social web & mobile technologies through cloud campaigning. Obviously, the communities are going to be using mobiles to coordinate their self-defence. But maybe there's a role for using mobile to report human rights abuses in the way that Fahamu tried with Rural women in KwaZulu Natal. And mobile video can be uploaded to the Witness Hub (a “YouTube for human rights”) which allows people to create campaigns around them by adding context and joining discussion groups.

I think the other critical point is the influence of culture on whether human rights are defended or abused. The digital space is a cultural space and racism towards Roma & travellers online will affect what happens in real life. And likewise, a healthy online culture would respond with outrage to the kind of attacks that happened in Italy.

One pioneering project that's trying to create a positive cultural space online is Savvy Chavvy where young Gypsies and Travellers in South East England are being trained in podcasting and video blogging skills ('Chavvy' is a Romany word for a young person). Many of the participants report having been abused on other social networks so the Ning network is just for Gypsies and Travellers and there's a strong debate within it about the presence of 'Gorjas' (non-Travellers). One of the public videos produced by the young people is called 'You've been logged', a story which challenges schools to think about how they deal with bullying, specifically the bullying of young travellers.

As a truly transnational cultural community, the Roma are well placed to leverage the international nature of the net despite all the obvious obstacles of access and tech skills. In fact, the conjunction of the internet (international, low barriers to access, relative freedom) and the transnational experience could make them one of the demographics of innovation. And (given that necessity is the mother of invention) this could first kick-in in the defence of their rights, in the same way as for other diasporic communities. Check out another Savvy Chavvy video called A Better Life In Gravesend where young Slovakian Roma students in Gravesend describe why they fled Slovakia (and the moment where the very young boy says "my house back home - broken windows...")

At the crowdsourcing & transparency training in Prague I met a very tech savvy Roma from romacenter.ro and I really hope the Roma will get it together with digital activism. But what about the rest of us? I don't want to pick on Italy because racism and fascism lurk everywhere, but the stuff that happened there a couple of weeks ago is a clear precursor to some really bad human rights violations. We'll know that there's a human rights culture online when the digital space is plastered with responses to attacks. It was some comfort to read katrinskaya's tweets from South Africa about the first demonstrations against the xenophobic attacks on immigrants there. It's tricky to report a whole demo in 160 character snippets, but she reported a speaker paraphrasing Niemoller ; "First they came for the Zimbabweans, but i did nothing, because I am not Zimbabwean"...

Cloud Campaigning. A term I came up with when struggling to get across the campaigning potential of the social web to NGOs in Central & Eastern Europe . I needed a quick image to shift the focus from the organizational website to the Oort cloud of possibilities represented by the blogosphere, the videosphere, the social networks and the game-worlds. These are the places where people already are; these are the places where campaigning can scale and touch people who wouldn't normally go near an activist website.

It's also an idea that extends the notion of cloud computing, as neatly summarised by the Guardian's Bobbie Johnson :

"The cloud, that huge bank of online power that lives somewhere and everywhere, is fast becoming the lifeblood of the internet economy. Web services let small dotcoms outsource what they're not good at - plumbing - and focus on what they really do. The result is that startups no longer need to worry about server loads, file hosting or coping with traffic: they can just stick everything in the cloud and let somebody else handle the tough stuff."

I think the social web offers the same leg up to online campaigners. No need to build a global video streaming infrastructure - someone's already done that, and anyone can use it for free! [see note 1]. Like the startups, the challenge isn't to set up infrastructure but to generate ecampaigning ideas that will benefit from web 2.0 .

Of course, cloud campaigning is an experimental art, and for most organisations it'll reinforce rather than replace the well-established principals of traditional ecampaigning . But the final message I wanted to get across in Prague was "Don't think like an NGO". In my experience, approaching the social web through the lens of the NGO limits the potential for social innovation. So the image of the cloud is also a statement about the cause; whether it's human rights or youth enterprise, the cause isn't owned by any one organization but is present across the universe of particular and individual passions that are now becoming visible across the social web.

[note 1]I surely know that YouTube is free as in beer not as in open source ;)

geeKyoto is the latest eclectic social-impact event with it's roots in London's digerati. Inspired by TED and last year's Interesting2007 event, Mark Simpkins and Ben Hammersley have taken the DIY approach to curating a cross-discipline event to discuss the future and how we'll live in it.

I had a great chat with Mark about the event, and I'm sure it will really rock. How can you not love an event who's rallying cry is 'We broke the world. Now what?'. geeKyoto is on Saturday 17th May 2008 at Conway Hall in
London (a venue with a noble history of supporting free thought). Tickets are a modest £20 and available at http://www.geekyoto.com/ where you can also find a listing of the groovy speakers.

As David Wilcox has pointed out there's a growing buzz in London about what happens when the social web meets social need, of which our social innovation camp was one flowering. Something's cooking. Steve Moore, the arch (un)organizer, is bringing together social entrepreurs, innovators , software dvelopers and other social media types for the 2gether Festival (July 2 and 3rd, backed by Channel4). Maybe that'll be the ignition point for some serious stuff at scale.