I spent last weekend 26-28th March with a bunch of really amazing people prototyping an idea that proposes a solution to reduce re-offending rates amongst young offenders. This was the brief set this year at Jailbrake, the Social Innovation Camp, supported by NESTA.
The Social Innovation Camp goes on every six months and takes a set of ideas for web-based tools that will create social change and develops them over one weekend. Working with a diverse range of people, participants organise themselves into teams and help make a back-of-the-envelop idea into a working prototype – complete with working software – in just two days.
This year, from 50 ideas submitted, six were shortlisted and prototyped. One of those ideas was FLIP. The online community-powered employment tool for young offenders. FLIP’s creation was triggered by the fact that unemployment is the single most factor for re-offending. As well as being 8 times harder to get a job if you have a criminal record. (Source: Chartered Institute of personnel & development.)
Jailbrake was an amazing opportunity to experience participatory co-development of an idea. The idea of FLIP was proposed by Common Ground social design agency (Vincenzo Di Maria, Bruno Taylor). I served as Project lead & creative direction. The amazing team: Rob Mosley from Nonsense London (User journey), Dave Fletcher from White October (application management), Rich Sage, Andy Kilner, Nathan Reed, Kevin Carmody (application developers) , Matteo Menapace (Interface wireframes) & Zoltan Ray (website design).
We must thank Cheyanne and Keisha, two young girls that we met during the weekend for this valuable insight, which helped shape the project. So, FLIP became a service that can help young people identify and communicate their skills in order to help them find employment. We developed a Facebook app that kick starts the process when your friends rate you on how good you are at something. This starts building on people’s transferable skills lists to an employable skills list in the form of a CV.
FLIP has lots of potential and we are all looking within the team to take the idea forward. I’ll keep you updated as we go. Watch this space!