Social Innovation Camp Comes to Tbilisi

An initiative known as Social Innovation Camp, or SI Camp, will be taking place in Tbilisi next month, with a particular focus on the Caucasus region.

Next month’s SI Camp follows a similar event in Bratislava in September 2009, which brought together designers, social needs experts, entrepreneurs, civil society members, and marketing, legal and advertising gurus who created web-based projects in just 48 hours.

The first SI Camp in the Caucasus will gather about 40 participants from Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia “to work on an idea of a potential social start-up that can make a change and compete for a prize,” according to the SI Camp Caucasus official website.

Social Innovation Camp is about "solving social challenges in new ways — by bringing together ideas and digital tools to create web-based innovations in just 48 hours,” reads the site.

The process begins with submitting an idea for a project. An international jury then votes for the best ideas which participants will work on in the 48 hours of the conference. Individuals can participate even if they don’t submit an idea or if their idea isn’t chosen. After all, social innovation begins with people, and the more, the merrier, to get ideas off the ground.

For more information, visit the website at http://sic-caucasus.net/

Photo: SICamp, CEE Trust Civil Society Forum, Bratislava, Slovak Republc  © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2009