I was genuinely impressed with the passion and creativity of the seven Social Innovation Camp finalists who presented this weekend. Jemima Kiss covered the final presentations, and winners in her Guardian PDA blog.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurajo/3087500358/)

I really like the model of this event, so well done Anna, Paul, Dan, Christian, Katherine, The Young Foundation, NESTA and all the others who were involved in it. I found it personally inspiring (and very refreshing after a year of bubble startups and Facebook valuations) to see so much well-intended energy and social action. Yes we can indeed! It is great to see initiatives like SICamp and Battlefront that are all about human energy and passion, rather than more innovation theory. I was one of the judges this year, and I have to say the decision making process was scary and I wish I had been wearing a ski mask, to be honest, it was that tough a call. I submitted some numbers in sequence, and these contributed to an aggregate decision. Them's the breaks.

AccessCity produced an excellent demo site during the two days - really impressive - that should quite simply be taken up by Boris or the LDA as a service in support of their Olympic commitment to making London accessible. I cannot help but be biased. Dominic is brilliant - an amazing energy source. And the idea is close to my heart in more ways than one. If indeed it is true that a better service does not already exist in London, then there is no reason why this should not become an important resource for improving our city. It has my total support.

The Carbon Co-op had the idea of forming purchasing groups for expensive green tech for homes to lower the price and persuade people to save carbon, starting out around Manchester, where they are from. A nice idea, but as Simon Cowell Umair Haque pointed out, you can achieve a small degree of discounting at 10,000 units, but a lot more at 1m units. What would Carbon Co-op do if Asda stocked the products at a far lower price? In fact, why not talk to such retailers and offer to help support the sales of green tech products?

PostPost is another project that adds a social layer to solving annoying (but not impossible) problems that we all mostly share. Compared to the existing telephone and marketing preference services, this project offers a super simple interface to register user preferences, and will then take on the nagging work of making sure the companies sending junk mail comply. A very simple and elegant solution, and one which could work very well if combined with other services. On recommendation I would make, based on the way PostPost reports carbon savings via the AMEE API, is that PostPost talk to Greenthing (Andy Hobsbawm was at SICamp so this may indeed have happened already) and see if they can do an anti-junk mail thing together. Well done to my colleague Felix for helping to put an impressive demo site together over the weekend. Great project, and very well presented in my view.

We-need.org was in many ways my favourite project to be brought to SICamp this year, and I really think it needs to happen, however hard it might seem to get going. They managed to get a basic prototype of a mapping service built during the weekend, but I think this is only one aspect of the project, and in many ways the easiest. The way I see their project, it seeks to apply the idea of VRM to surfacing real needs in social care within a given locality. Part of the rationale for this is to improve the supply side targeting of existing services, starting from the premise that it is better to allow real people to talk about their needs in everyday terms, rather than rely on formal assessments within the context of very limited interventions by social care professionals. But another benefit of doing this would be to make it easier for non-government agencies, community groups and charities to pick up some unfulfilled demand for the simpler aspects of social care. Having worked with social care organisations trying to apply social tools to service improvement, I think there is huge scope for better, cheaper and more human, less process-driven service delivery. Also, with social care set to suffer its biggest funding cut since the 1970's within a year, it is imperative that social care providers work with people such as We-Need's Craig Griffin who have the imagination to break out of the failing bureaucratic models that currently dominate the system. I really do think that finding a human-scale way for people to express their needs (or their 'intent') is the best place to start for shaping and improving the supply side of social care. I expect this project to succeed, and would be happy to help make it happen.

Another project I thought had a lot of potential was Useful Visitors, which eventually emerged as the runner-up in the competition. This project is about using slices of time from visitors (both foreign and originally local) to developing countries and making it easy for these people to spend a little time doing something useful. As Jemima Kiss mentioned, this is a bit like couch-surfing for international volunteers. Sounds good, of course, but when you dig a little deeper, this approach to solving problems of poverty or under-development is actually flawed in many ways when applied to 'random' volunteering, especially if that includes travelling businesspeople. However, the concept of mostly diaspora networks is one that really interests me in many ways, including how highly motivated social networking can give both sides something valuable: a sense of meaningful engagement, belonging and identity for the time donor and resources and skills for the recipient. In fact, that is wholly the wrong terminology - they are both recipients.

Here's how I would slightly twist this concept, if I were them. Make it super easy, through Dopplr and other services, for people to find out how they can help a little in a particular town or area, as Useful Visitors already intend to do. At the same time, make it super easy for local people and organisations to run online social networks about their place, with the aim of connecting with and informing 'buddies' from other places. Mostly, they should target diaspora networks in places like London to share local news and find contributors. These should be used to surface 'need' (see We-need.org above) and make it easy for people outside to give or loan (like Kiva.org) money to local development projects or businesses. Sure, sometimes they will visit and they can chop a log, paint a nursery or have a party; but, for the most part, they serve as a remote support and funding network. It's not all about the visitoring thing ;-) As I mentioned at the event, there is a conspiracy of politeness that over-values random foreign input above real solutions like money, politics, corruption, debt or the international trade system. I am optimistic about the industry and innovation of people-like-us in many countries around the world, and I am sure they could do well at running online social networks - indeed they are already doing so. Also, I think they should talk to Wahome, who was the business model guy for PostPost, who has some good ideas about doing something like this in Africa.

Next up, the deserved winner, The Good Gym, with such a sweet idea for a distributed gym that gets people to run to old peoples' houses and have a chat or do some lifting. Led by Ivo Gormley, who directed the film UsNow, this was a smart play on the old idea of friending schemes, and I think it has great potential as a brand. Ivo's presentation was great. I really hope they succeed, and hey - as if by magic - this is the project that "won" 10 days of time to play with people at Headshift, not that I think they need it. It would be great to see Ivo's project succeed.

Last but not least, Vegsy was about small ad-hoc networks of growers (they estimate 1m people might grow their own fruit of veg in the UK) selling local produce through their own homes or informal distribution points. Umair made the logical suggestion that they try to co-opt high street retailers as distribution point to give the a genuinely local offering and greater footfall for the product. Their presentation involved role play and exuberance for extra points. They built perhaps the most visual of the demo sites over the weekend. I don't see why this could not work.

That's seven good ideas right there. I sincerely wish the best of luck to all of the projects, and I am sure some will go on to become useful online public services in their own right. Well done to all involved, and in particular to my colleagues who chipped in rather than just turning up at the end as I did.

I thought there were two themes that some of these projects shared.

First, the idea that joining up people and asking them to take responsibility for improving society is cheaper, ore effective and more 'real' than the models of impersonal, failed industrialised services we read about in the press every week. There is currently a golden opportunity for civil society to show government the way to invest small amounts in new online services and service improvement projects that leverage the direct, disintermediated empowering potential of the net to deliver outcomes at far lower cost and higher quality than the dominant process-driven, impersonal model of public services. Now is really the last chance to invest in such efficiencies before the end of the current cycle.

Second, may of these projects depend on a different attitude to trust, risk and acceptable losses. It is impossible to guarantee that none of these projects could be 'gamed' by a bad person to exploit the trust people place in them. How do we establish enough trust to keep these projects going, and what new risks (if any) do they bring with them for vulnerable people? Also, are we ready to be grown up about failure, cheating and other inevitable wrinkles in human systems? It's an area full of interesting questions.

Can't wait for next year.