Not quite as dramatic as it sounds, but still very exciting : half of the White October office went over to Bethnal Green this weekend to take part in Social Innovation Camp‘s JailBrake weekend. The event brought together social innovators and web development professionals, all donating their time to develop 6 ideas for online platforms that can make a difference to youth re-offending.
The White October and Nonsense team (with a few ringers) teamed up with Common Ground and Itamar Ferrer to develop FLIP. The idea behind FLIP evolved on the day, but put simply it is a Facebook application that gives friends the confidence to begin the process of identifying and developing their skills to find employment.
With about 12 hours in total to develop the application, we had our work cut out for us, particularly since none of us had ever developed a Facebook application before. But by 2:00pm on Sunday we had managed to create a functional Facebook application that allows friends to tell each other what they think they are good at, posting this to their wall, and encouraging them to begin to identify other skills.
Rating your friend's skills on Facebook
Facebook notification from FLIP
The FLIP facebook profile
An idea of what a profile page available to employers might look like.
We were lucky enough to be joined by Zoltan Ray and Matteo Menapace who, under the art direction of Itamar Ferrer put together the amazing designs above.
Much like 24 hour Startup the day ended with a lot of frantic coding from Rich, and fretful pacing from Dave. We then presented to a few hundred fellow JailBrakers and interested parties where, despite not winning the competition, we were met with overwhelming enthusiasm for our ideas, and astonishment from fellow developers at what we had achieved in such a short amount of time.
UPDATE : Here’s our presentation from the day:
The idea behind JailBrake was that the projects conceived over the weekend, would be taken forward by their owners and some might become fully fledged social enterprises in the future. With the rest of the FLIP team we’re going to be putting serious thought into how we can do this with our project which oozes potential whichever way you look at it.
2 Comments
It was awe-inspiring to see you guys (no women did I see) working as hard as you did last weekend and having that facebook application to show, having never written one before.
Commiserations, of course, if you are able to take them from me and the rest of the safeground team, who surprised ourselves by winning first-prize despite/ because we were much lower-tech. We still need tech assistance to reach our intended pilot site 5th May launch. (XHTML, Java, php, Flash for the victim-offender videos and probably some other skills wanted).
My web link http://www.additionalinfo.blogspot.com has my contact details. Thanks, Paul
What A brilliant Idea – I could certainly see something like this being very beneficial to society. Especially after watching recent episodes of Panorama and seeing the trouble people have having with finding jobs.