Web, Technology, Social Innovation and Events
A fun evening of smart people workshopping some interesting ideas around social innovation and change to benefit the community, hosted by the Australian Social Innovation Exchange, Pia Waugh and Senator Kate Lundy.
Raul and Steve from the Australian Social Innovation Exchange (ASIX) hosted the first Ideas Generation Meetup this evening in Canberra at Parliament House courtesy of the Pia Waugh and Senator Kate Lundy.
Thirteen people attended the event including Raul and Steve – a modest turnout, nonetheless we had a great, fun evening working through some interesting ideas of how we can leverage the web for social change and good.
Steve started the evening by talking about ASIX and their mission to initiate and support different ways of doing innovation that’s not focussed on technology. He talked through ASIX’s principles of openness and sharing, involvement and participation, diversity as one of the richest sources of innovation and the importance of collaboration; that all citizens have a role to play in innovation.
Steve emphasised the role of systematic learning and growth, that we should aim for less hit and miss and that many issues are global issues not just local so we should consider the big picture and referred to President Obama’s newly announced Office of Social Innovation.
He talked about how ASIX is engaged in two projects – one, to embed consultants in organisations who will help with seeding and facilitating innovation and two, to run these Social Innovation Ideas Generation Meetups and Camps.
This evening’s Meetup was one of many happening around the country. They are the precursor to the Camp which will be held from a Friday evening till a Sunday afternoon next March. Ideas generated and discussed at each Meetup will then be advanced to the next round to be culled down to 6-8 ideas in preparation for the Camp in March where people will come together to make those ideas reality.
The format of the evening was divided into three phases:
In the first phase, people mingled and had to find out things about other people’s interest and skills and tag them by putting a label on them with something they found out about that person. The idea was for everyone to get four tags or labels stuck on them basically describing what they could do and what they wanted to be involved with according to other people’s understanding of them. Unfortunately there were not enough labels to go around but I was tagged with “open democracy”, “e-government apps” and “user experience design”.
Pia had a question for Steve regarding the principles of the process and whether ASIX intended providing any guidance about how ideas should be progressed and more specifically any features they would require actualised ideas to have; for example open data. I don’t think Steve really answered Pia’s question – but we did agree that we would work on this more on a wiki out of session.
A few ideas were put on the table for consideration by Craig, Lauren, Pia, Clare and myself – although my idea was somewhat related to Clare’s.
After ideas were presented to the group as a whole, everyone could nominate an idea they wanted to continue discussing so we ended up splitting into three groups to discuss three of the five ideas tabled.
I nominated to progress Clare’s idea and worked with Clare, Craig, Steve and Senator Lundy discussing a web technology-centric solution that would help small business get more involved in environmental sustainability. We talked about how small business could incorporate utility usage into their book-keeping to get better intelligence on how for example the water consumption part of their monthly expenses related to actual consumption and then measure the cost savings made through adopting water-saving measures. This was then expanded to include the idea of data aggregation to benchmark against other businesses and their energy, water, gas etc usage. My contribution to the problem was more about residential/household water consumption at the lack of available useful information – as I have posted about previously.
Each of the discussions followed a basic framework of four phases: Frame the problem, sketch a solution, make it sustainable and figure out how to attract users.
So we spent about half an hour working through each of the ideas in our groups and then in the last ten minutes of the Meetup each group presented their proposed solution and marketing to everyone else.
An interesting evening, some great discussion – I look forward to participating in the Social Innovation Camp next March!
// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
