Social Innovation

“I am too short to grab a handle in the subway. I need a lower handle”. This is one of the ideas that was turned into reality as a result of the Seoul Ideas Bank. Image courtesy of the Hope Institute.

I'd like to put out there a call for ideas on changes you'd like to see to Southend High Street. If you had the choice, what would you like to see changed, added, removed to make the space better? What's your favourite and least favourite aspects of the High Street? Maybe lots of people have the same ideas and if we can pool them all together on here maybe something might happen?!
This kind of initiative is happening all over the world because of the internet.
One great initiative I've been researching is the Social Innovation Camp - a weekend of idea generation bringing together software developers and web designers with social innovators to bring about social change using the web as a tool to do just that. Read more...
President Obama has created an office for social innovation in the White House. President Barroso of the European Union has signalled the importance of social innovation for the future of Europe and recently we've heard lots from David Cameron about creating a "Big Society". It's all very interesting - I wonder how far such social innovations can go...? The Social Innovation Camp do it all for free and that takes people who are motivated and have the time to spare. However, once these things get up and runing they're there to stay. Some famous web-based social innovations are Freecycle and Wikipedia - both extremely successful models of open source, collaborative web tools that have made a big difference.