I participated in the first Social Innovation Camp in April 2008 – http://www.sicamp.org/ A great idea for a collaborative and action based process, that really worked! I was there on 2 counts, partly because I was interested to see if the collaborative method would work, and also as a Designer & Entrepreneur to help on one of the teams. I chose the Prison Visits idea because I felt it was an area within public services that innovation had tended to leave in the shadows. I worked alongside Peter Brownell and Mori Sugimoto from  Code Positive, Marc D’eath from Sustained Magazine, Jeremy Gould from The Ministry of Justice, Patricia Somerset and Alison Beck from PACT, Alice Reese, John Bywater from Appropriate Software, Huey Nhan from Digital Outlook and Julie Caulier-Grice from the Young Foundation.

We were very fortunate to have Alison and Patricia on our team as they brought real user-insights to help us design our first prototype, and our idea came in as runner up! This initial funding is currently being used to formalise a more developed proposal to be used for seeking out further collaborators as well as more substantial funding.

It has been an interesting experience trying to take this forward, as a group of people who had never met prior to the weekend, and all of whom work full-time in their respective professions, and there are now only 6 of us remaining fully involved. My main role in the team recently has been to go out and listen to and capture the stories and experiences of people visiting loved ones. I have been to Belmarsh and Wandsworth prisons initially, trying to ensure that what we are proposing will be useful and also to try and encourage families to get involved in our proposal.

My experience of doing this has engaged me even deeper into wanting to help this happen. There IS a real need for visitor’s experiences to be better and more supported.

For further detail about this piece of work and how you can get involved in helping us drive it forward we have a Wiki: http://visits.sicamp.org/wiki