SICamp Scotland ... Blogpost 1/?

I spent the last 48 hours completely immersed in Social Innovation Camp-ness .. no wait, that didn't come out quite right ;) Still, the sentiment holds if not the expression. Unless it was Twittered to #sicamp I have no idea what happened outside of The Saltire Centre for the last 2 days.

Like the most convoluted of film plots I am going to start with the end, skip to the beginning and see if the middle sorts itself out in the interim, so bearing that in mind ... let me introduce FlockLocal.

FlockLocal was born in the spirit of the SICamp pseudo-mantra "using the online world to change the offline world." Using this idea we elected to create ClusterFlock...,. FlockYourCommunity... FlockLocal, which is a website and collection of associated apps & plugins to allow people to flash mob for social good. That is, to allow people who identify a social need to quickly mobilise volunteers to fill it.

Let me illustrate. We started to think about this idea in the pub on Friday night. By Saturday morning we had a fairly good idea of the user scenario. By 11am we decided we'd like to aim to actually hold a flash mob (henceforth to be known as 'organising a flock') 2 hours later (now 1pm) we had found the wonderful Glasgow Wood Recycling who were due to be reclaiming wood from a theatre set at Gilmorehill which needed loading into a van, driving across town and unloading into their community garden (which itself needed some painting and weeding). By 12noon the next day we'd assembled 15 people, done the job, and headed off for the afternoon.

Hence our tagline FlockLocal "Do Good. Fast"

But it wasn't just us!
The 5 other fabulous teams created the following:


Wee Day Out - A mapping tool for locating & rating disabled toilet facilities.

Fix the Freakin Buses (a.k.a "Hitch 'n' Bitch !!) – A SMS text platform for accessing live bus data.

AngelFish - Hyperlocal Micro-finace for community startups and business growth.

MyPolice.org – Allowing the public to give positive and negative feedback on the police.

Citipedia-An online public town planning tool.


.....and we'll hear more about them shortly.. in part 2 ... after I get some sleep!

but just before the zzZ 's hit, let me say a massive thanks to all at SICamp for working so hard to support all our hard work. We all really appreciate it!

Stay tuned for part 2.

Footnote: Glasgow Wood Recycling is an amazing organisation run by Peter Levelle to whom FlockLocal are very grateful and I will be blogging more about Glasgow Wood Recycling very shortly!