SiCamp Scotland ‘09 Idea
So Social Innovation Camp is coming to Scotland in June. If you haven’t heard of it, SiCamp is an intriguing concept, whereby people who have never met each other, come together over a weekend to develop a number of working webapps which address social needs (more).
After being introduced to the concept by SiCamper Katee Hui at a local web-dev meetup, I came up with the following idea which I have submitted to their call-for-ideas. Suggestions & comments are more than welcome.
Adopt-A-Gran [working title]
Idea:
Background:
I am probably not the only person who lives a long way away from his grandparents, or other elderly family members. Sadly this means that I very rarely get to see them. This causes me a sizeable amount of guilt, and it also means that I am rarely in touch with people from older generations, which can’t be good for my world view. Meanwhile my grandparents miss out on being in touch with a younger generation, and having someone seeing them frequently to help out around the home, and with their computer and so forth.
Solution:
My proposal (current working title: Adopt-A-Gran), is to use the internet to bring together people like me, who also live far away from their elders. The network would allow me to adopt elderly people who live near to me, and treat them like I would my grandparents, and in return someone who lives nearer my grandparents would do the same for them. This would ease my guilt, as I would be actively involved in something that would help both my grandparents, and somebody else’s. As well as bringing together generations, it would also build inter-family relationships across the country.
Stage of Development
1: I have discussed the idea with Katee from SICamp, and some of my peers. The response has been pretty positive.
What Can We Do For You?
In order of importance:
- Mentor - to help work out the social and legal difficulties of getting this up and running.
- Geek - I have reasonable web development skills, but someone with good design skills, and perhaps another experienced developer would be useful.
- Funding - Developing a prototype of the idea would probably be low cost. But if it was going to go nationwide, it would likely need funding to develop awareness, and to scale the application.
Depending on how things plays out I would be happy to own the idea, or hand it off to somebody else.
About Me:
- My day-job is in audio electronics at Wolfson Microelectronics in Edinburgh (www.wolfsonmicro.com).
- On the side I am a web designer/developer for an Edinburgh based video game magazine: www.square-go.com.
- In my spare time I climb, snowboard and code.
- Twitter is probably the best thing to happen to the web since Facebook.
Secrecy:
An idea shared is an idea improved. “Open” is just fine.
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