The Australian Social Innovation Exchange (ASIX)- www.asix.org.au - is part of a global community; a ‘network of networks’ bringing together thinkers and practitioners in social innovation. Meeting online and in person, the aim is to get connected. In July 2009, the Global Social Innovation Summer Camp was held in Lisbon.
Open Forum is really excited to be a part of the ASIX network and we’re particularly looking forward to being a part of
Australian Social Innovation Camp (SI Camp).
SI Camps are going on all over the world. Take a look at what happened at SI Camps in
Glasgow (Scotland),
Wellington (New Zealand) and
Bratislava (Slovakia) to get a taste of what to expect.
The exact location, dates, official website and other details for SI Camp Sydney are still being finalised, but in the true spirit of ASIX we wanted to jump in and get started with this forum anyway. What we can tell you is that it will be happening in March 2010, for more details about who's involved check in at
www.asix.org.au regularly.
UPDATE: SI CAMP will be held 5-7 March 2010. See www.asix.org.au for details.
Soon, submissions will open for you to pitch your great ideas for SI Camp Sydney. Wanted are ideas which have the power to enact social innovation in one of the three key areas of:
- Skills and Employment
- Independent and healthy ageing
- Making our cities more liveable and sustainable
All the ideas will be open for discussion and voting. Following which the ASIX board will choose the four to six best ideas to be developed at SI Camp Sydney.
UPDATE: The 8 best ideas have been selected & teams are assembled! See www.asix.org.au for details.
The best ideas will:
- Invent a capability that didn’t exist before
- Demonstrate an entrepreneurial capacity to deeply understand a problem identify an unexpected solution
- Cleverly exploit social networking or other technological capabilities as part of the solution
- Betray a knack for connecting and collaborating
- Start from the premise that change has to be sustainable and create new opportunity
- Break the mould of what is possible
- Benefit the wider community by creating positive social change
SI Camp Sydney will be an intensive weekend bringing together a wide array of different perspectives: service users, citizens, potential investors, software engineers and other tech specialists, policy people from different levels of government, designers, project managers and other innovative people.
In collaboration, SI Camp participants will work to turn the selected ideas into prototype solutions with a strong technology dimension, draft project plans and create business models. After the weekend is over our community is about creating a pathway for ‘next steps’ of development and helping the project teams to keep working on their plans.
ASIX want to spawn success stories like
Enabled by Design, a fabulous online business which grew out of a UK SI Camp.
So if you have a great idea to share, or would like to come along and donate your time and skills, then go to ASIX (www.asix.org.au) and sign up, contact SI Camp Project Manager Raul, raul.caceres@asix.org.au, or leave a comment or blog post on this forum.
Everybody who's been a part of the Global Social Innovation Network ans internation SI Camps seems to rave about it, yet it's difficult to get a straight answer to the question what is social innovation? If you’ve been a part of an SI Camp overseas or are working in the area of social innovation please send us a blog and help us spread the love!
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