Go London Social Innovation Competition

We headed to City Hall on Friday to participate in the Go London Social Innovation competition held by NHS and Future Gov. As one of five finalists in the contest we spent the day working with a team of experts in various fields to refine our idea.

The view from the top of City Hall is quite nice and the 9th floor conference room was gorgeous. It's great to see how Boris lives (at one point during the morning there were unsubstantiated rumours that he was making a phone call on the terrace).

Mei Searches for Boris

Amidst all the splendour we had an idea: run a series of Go Games for the public to help encourage physical activity and promote the NHS goals of 30 minutes of activity 5 days a week. With our panel of experts in tech, media, health and interactivity we added on the idea of creating open-ended games that were not location specific so that people could log in to play any time.

I ended up confusing people with my term of 'non location-specific location-based challenges', but the idea was to incorporate the everyday tasks (say, walking to the post office) and educate participants(check out this new leisure centre) whilst they played the game. The missions would be delivered on a mobile phone, the computer or from packs that could be picked up in public places like libraries.

That may sound confusing, but we wrote all of our ideas down...as Mei demonstrates:

Fun tip: demonstrate the legitimacy of ideas with Post It Notes

In the end we had 7 minutes to pitch our idea to a swelling room that included 9 judges. These guys evaluated us dragons-style and asked the tough questions. Luckily, thanks to our fantastic team, we were prepared for everything they threw at us.

Sadly, we didn't win, but there was free booze. Plus the idea the judges selected is phenomenal. In fact, they decided to combine two of the ideas to form a hybrid even more fierce than a liger.

The winning idea is the combined brainchild of Danielle Ramsey's 10,000 steps plan and Ingrid Bergson's Pop-Up Fitness applet. The plan is to encourage teams of people to walk 10,000 steps in the workplace. Participants will be reminded to exercise via a pop-up on their computers that will suggest activities and provide feedback. Danielle and Ingrid will receive support from NHS, M&C Saatchi and a host of other business leaders.

Here we are saying goodbye to our day of big timing at City Hall. Good luck to the everyone who participated!

UPDATE: The official Go London blog has been updated with more info about the day...check it out!