We took our post-it notes off to the Design Council the other week to meet members of the London Collaborative network.

They’re a group of people primarily from local councils, but also from healthcare services, the police, social housing providers and other public bodies. The London Collaborative aims to facilitate connections and collaboration between senior people involved in delivering, planning and researching public services in London.

We were invited along to help them come up with new ideas that used web-based tools to get local residents creating solutions to local problems themselves.

The event kicked off with London Collaborative members sharing some of the issues they thought their local areas faced. From the fifty-odd they came up with, we chose four where we thought the web might be used to help citizens provide services for themselves in partnership with the state. Then we asked everyone to split into teams around our four ideas and work them up into solutions. Teams had to answer four questions:

1.) What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?

2.) What technology are you going to use to solve it?

3.) How will you sustain your solution?

4.) How will you get people to use your product or service?

They had to give each idea a good name and then pitch their solution to the group.

And here’s what they came up with:

Snow-Go

With London’s cold spell in the forefront of everyone’s minds, how councils grit pavements in ice and snow was a popular theme. The Snow-Go team wanted to make clearing paths and gritting roads into a competition between local residents: you enter by clearing your path, uploading a photo with date and time to a site which ranks you on a leader board against people in your local area and across London. For every road cleared, the council would agree to pay for more grit bins. The Snow-Go site would also feature a UK-wide weather map, snowman competition, grit-bin map and aggregation of Twitter posts with the #snowuk hash-tag as a crowd-sourced early warning system for bad weather. Gumtree and Freecycle would be integrated into the site for purchasing, swapping or sharing of snow-clearing equipment.

Adopt An Older Person

An idea to match up lonely, isolated older people who face barriers to leaving their homes with volunteers who can run errands or keep them company. ‘Adopt an older person’ would use a web platform to make it easy for volunteers to sign up and then bring them together with third sector organisations or care providers who look after older, vulnerable individuals to match them with someone to help in their local area. A skills-swapping element might be introduced whereby volunteers and older participants could teach each other cooking, sewing or how to use a computer.

Safer Crossing

The ‘Safer Crossing’ team were tackling the problem of badly placed pedestrian crossings. They argued that roads are primarily designed around cars and that crowd-sourcing information about the use of roads, pavements and crossings from local citizens would help make urban planning better. Safer Crossing is a site where you can offer suggestions for new pedestrian crossings or map dangerous parts of the road and the information would be fed back to the local council.

Our Space

Our Space matches people who want to hold events with vacant buildings or unused plots of land; it’s a user-generated search engine for physical space. As someone who knows where free space is, a local authority or a building owner, you can plot on a map where the available area is, what it could be used for and under what terms. Your space is mapped on Google Earth for people who are looking for a venue or plot of land to browse. It’s all about unlocking the potential of our local areas and under-used assets.

Not bad for under two hours work! You can see all of the challenges London Collaborative members came up with here and find out more about the network here.

We were up in Manchester last Wednesday for the second of our Social Innovation Camp Express events with the Department of Health’s Dignity in Care network.

Once again, post-it notes to hand, we brought together a bunch of people who are passionate about care and set them the challenge of coming up with some simple ways to make care better using the web - from understanding the problem to thinking about the technology they’d use to help solve it.

Two hours later, here’s what they’d come up with:

Dying to know

Whether you’re facing making end of life choices for yourself or a loved one, death is a difficult subject to talk about.

‘Dying to know’ is an idea to make information and support easier to access by creating a space for people to support each other online.

It’s taking the formula used by Net Mums and ShiftMS to help people find others who are going through similar experiences, and share their stories about very personal subjects anonymously and openly.

NHS Factor

What happens if you’ve got a good idea for how to make care better but you need a bit of cash to get it going? NHS Factor is a web-based competition to get more people thinking about care and give them some resources to make it happen.

You write up an idea or make a short film explaining what you need to make it happen and how much money you’ll be asking for. Then post it to the NHS Factor site for others to comment and vote. NHS Factor will give you a set of tools to help you campaign for votes using simple social media tools and set a time period for voting. At the end, the ideas with the most votes get the cash to make them happen.

It’s a little bit like Show us a better way or Teach us a lesson, but it’s not just for software and it’s specifically aimed at enabling small changes in health and social care.

NHS Factor would rely on a pot of funding being available for projects. However another suggestion was to follow the Kickstarter model where, instead of getting individuals to vote on projects, they pledge a small amount of money to make it happen so the cash comes from lots of different people, rather than just a central funding pot.

Face it together

Choosing the type of care that’s best for you is hard when you don’t know what the options are. The idea behind ‘Face it together’ is to match up people who’ve used services - whether that’s a residential home, respite care or home help - with those who have to work out what they need. People who are one step ahead in the care system can then act as mentors and advisers to those who are only just beginning to seek help.

The team behind this idea wanted to focus on how ‘Face it together’ might be of use to older people and so suggested that part of the project would have to involve helping this group access and learn how to use the web.

Where’s my bag?

Often, it’s the really small, simple things that make the biggest difference to care. This idea came from the simple need for clothes for patients who are leaving hospital and developed to focus on all the small but significant details a patient might want the staff caring for them to know - often a problem when people are admitted in an emergency and very little is known about their background or where they’re from.

‘Where’s my bag?’ is a site where you can upload a private profile with details about yourself that would be important for your care in hospital. This isn’t about your medical history, but rather details about what you like to eat, what you’d prefer to be called or who you’d like staff to contact on your behalf.

You can check out all the photos from both our Social Innovation Camp Express evenings in London and Manchester, together with a couple of short videos explaining some of these ideas here.

Last Wednesday saw the first of our two Social Innovation Camp Express events with the Department of Health’s Dignity in Care network.

We brought together a bunch of people who are passionate about care and set them the challenge of coming up with some simple ways to make care better using the web - right through from understanding the problem to thinking about the technology they’d use and how they’d sustain their idea.

Two hours later, here’s what they’d come up with:

Give us a break

There are around six million carers in the UK. Each and every one of those needs a break from time to time, yet getting a rest isn’t always easy. The idea behind ‘Give us a break’ is to match carers who need some time out with respite services for those they look after, as well as a nice B&B for them to stay in for a few days. It’s a simple idea to pinpoint hard-to-find resources and match them with localised, specialised demand - something the web does nicely.

How do I measure my recovery?

Data is a big issue in health care: who holds information about us, what would happen if we had more access to it and how is it used to keep us healthy? And it’s something that’s close to the heart of anyone interested in new technology that’s making it easier than ever before for us to gather, make sense of and share information about each other.

But it’s also useful for social care where tracking someone’s recovery, the progression of an illness or even simply keep an eye on the aging process can help ensure that an individual gets the support they need when they need it, rather than simply intervening at the point of crisis where need becomes apparent because it’s become acute.

Our team who asked ‘how do I measure my recovery?’ set about thinking how the web may offer ways to engage patients, families, carers and care providers in tracking care and sharing information collectively. Rather than focusing on getting care providers to release data they hold on those they can for, the team began thinking about how you could build your own record from scratch and share access with whoever you chose.

It’s a very similar idea to what Patients Like Me are doing in the US, where individuals can create their own health record, track their progress and compare it with similar patients.

I connect for you

Kind of like a dating site, but for your nan. As we age, we often become less mobile and more isolated. It becomes increasingly difficult to meet new people and make friends - especially if you’re in residential care and your family isn’t near by. This is a particular problem if you end up being cared for in a country where you don’t speak the language, as happens frequently in the UK where multilingual services aren’t always readily available.

So ‘I connect for you’ is an idea to match up people who are being cared for with others who have a shared background, language, interests or anything else that might be the beginnings of a friendship. The team wanted to get carers to upload the details of the people they care for - with their permission - using existing social networking software and assist in matching them with a friend to meet up with offline.

How does your garden grow?

The single most popular theme of the evening was the need to support staff within the care system. Poor management, recruitment and staff morale were all problems.

So who better to ask how to tackle this than the Dignity Champions we had in the room? Drawing on the idea that good practice can be grown from the grassroots upwards, they decided they wanted to create a series of hyper-local social networks using Ning and managed by care workers. The idea is to create a space for those who work in the care system - whether they’re staff in residential homes, doctors in hospitals or individuals caring for relatives - to talk to one another and share stories, as well as a way of organising to meet face to face. ‘How does your garden grow’ would ultimately aim to give individuals within the care system a voice and enabled them to create change for themselves.

Not bad for an evening’s work!

And we’re running the whole thing again on Wednesday 4th November from 6.30-8.30pm in Manchester at The King’s House Conference Centre, King’s Church, Sidney Road, M1 7HB

There are a few places left so get in touch if you’d like to come along.

One of the things that most inspires us at Social Innovation Camp is meeting people who’ve had personal experience of something they’d like to change.

So we’re pretty excited about two Social Innovation Camp Express evenings we’ve got coming up with the Dignity in Care Champions’ Network.

They’re a community of people who care about care: from those who work on the front line in hospitals and residential homes, to those who support friends and family members.

We want to know how the web can help make carers’ work easier, connect those being cared for and support their families.

Services like Patient Opinion, Shift MS and Enabled by Design are leading the way, but what will the future of care enabled by the web look like?

We want to take a bunch of people who know all about care, hear about their ideas, throw in some Social Innovation Camp magic and see what happens.

So we’ll be taking a really practical look at all this at two Social Innovation Camp Express evenings on the 28th October in London and the 4th November in Manchester.

All the details can be found in our upcoming events section.

Drop us a line if you fancy coming along.