'Bosun: Same here but pressing myself hard to focus. I have been talking about Useful Visitors all morning with colleagues and they all seems interested and looking forward to using the website. It was a great weekend...nice meeting and working with you guys. 'Bosun

Jon Worth: Sorry to be a bit slow with it, but the presentation can now be downloaded at: http://www.jonworth.eu/downloads/usefulvisitors.ppt (3mb) There's also a file with all the PSD files, CSS etc.: http://www.jonworth.eu/downloads/usefulvisitors.zip (15mb) Jon

James: Thanks everyone! I really enjoyed the weekend, apart from the nastly flu virus I picked up there on the last day and which knocked me out for most of last week! Lee Bryant, who is from Headshift and was one of the judges of SI Camp 08, has posted some interesting thoughts and comments about all the projects at www.headshift.com/blog/2008/12/social-innovation-camp-what-a.php Here's the extract of what he had to say about Useful Visitors: "...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." I like this idea of extending Useful Visitors beyond just visits, and extending it to a broader support and funding network. What do others think?

Craig: Hi - since the meetup on 19 Nov, we've had a heap of mails in support of we-need.org - thanks guys .... although it does put the pressure on us to deliver over the weekend! Last week we were busy trawling our contacts for real data for us to use (don't worry Katherine - promise we haven't started making things yet) - Birmingham and (hopefully) Cumbria local authorities are helping out which is excellent news. Looking forward to meeting everyone on Friday. Best wishes Craig www.fresh-voice.com

Craig: just to note that we-need.org was called Visualising Community Need - which is what it does!

Craig: What a great weekend. There's now: - a much more powerful story for we-need.org - a core team and a number of other people who are interested in the project. Thanks to James, Dominik, Vincenzo, Carrie, Mark, Michele, Patrick, Dave, Bruno, Andrew & the SICamp team for making it happen. The Good Gym was excellent - good luck to them and the other great ideas. I agree with Jemima on the Comment is Free Blog in that, perhaps for us, the weekend was more of an ideas hack than an apps hack - I think our basic ideas are sound (but then I would) and the developer team, and the service design team were amazing at taking in so much in such a short space of time and turning out something that worked. I would have liked to have spent more time with the developer team making stuff. Since there isn't a feely available application that someone who is likely to be eligible for social care support can use to self-assess, and then check to see whether they can get help, and there is no easy way of seeing how many people there are with similar needs in their community, then we-need.org is worth doing. If we build it and get it into the right hands then good things will happen. We're working to find a way to do that.

Joel: Anyone checked out this website: http://www.landshare.net JP

Charlie Tims: yup - i signed up about a month ago, but i haven't heard anything back from them. this is probably neither the time nor the place, but presumably could also be extended to skips, as in skipshare. see you later

Iain Henderson: Great idea with a number of routes into it..and a few rat holes. Doing better than current set up with Mail Preference Service should be easy enough - that's built by and for the direct marketing industry to try to avoid legislation.

Tim Diggins: I love this idea. Have you ever seen the tiny book called "ExitWise" which is a humorous artistic project to document (at that point in time, but obviously this sort of thing changes quite quickly) which end of a tube is the best one to get onto at a particular journey in order to be nearest the exit/interchange. This site could transform an artistic whimsically idea like that into something very practical...