I read somewhere that the defining characteristics of social innovators are optimism, creativity and democracy. It's a powerful cocktail. And it's on show, in spades, at the Social Innovation Camp going on right now in Sydney. It's Australia's first try at the Camp model, which the Australian Social Innovation Exchange picked up from its global network, in this case from the UK and Europe. With the generous help of the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW, we're trying out this approach to finding, and rapidly developing, promising ideas for social change.

When the Camp opened last night, I reiterated a comment I'd made in an earlier blog here that the Camp was already a success before it had even started. So why do I think that, and why was I prepared to make such a bold claim?

I think there are three reasons why the Camp is such an important milestone in Australia's search for better ways to find and implement new thinking for social change:

1 The first is that we're pioneering a new tool or method for social innovators. The Camp process is all about an open search for ideas that are at the earliest stages of development, often only a spark of inspiration or aspiration by one or two people, but without any real idea of how to move forward. Then, over a weekend, we bring together lots of different people with different skills and perspectives - IT people, web designers, marketing specialists, designers, policy people, people who have set up businesses - and put them into a short, intense process of work over a weekend.

There are plenty of ways to adapt the method and make it work in all sorts of different contexts and for all sorts of different reasons. But now that we've run the first one, we'll know how to run the second and third and fourth...or as many Camps as there are people willing to use the tool for their needs. And each time the process will get better and will be even more effective.

So one important measure of our success is that we have introduced a new method for social innovators which can now become part of the tool box they can dip into as a way of speeding up the process of finding and developing new ideas.

2 The second reason the Camp will succeed is the 8 ideas themselves being developed over this weekend. By tomorrow, they will all have reached slightly different stages of readiness. They will all doubtless need more work and more support. But they will all have advanced from the clever idea from which they started to the stage where they can expect to make the idea actually happen. That will be 8 more ideas than we had when we started on Friday night to add to our stock of potential solutions to some of the social challenges we confront.

3 And the third reason the Camp is a success is because it's a living, breathing illustration of what it takes not just to energise the search for solutions to complex social challenges but to refresh and renew the underlying instincts for self-governance and democracy at the same time.

It goes back to those great values I mentioned at the start - optimism, creativity and democracy. The camp, and the rising interest in a new practice of social innovation of which it is a part, is exciting precisely because it speaks of that optimism and creativity which in the end is the lifeblood of any successful human endeavour. Practical, purposeful optimism, not blind faith or unrealistic hope. The sort of thing that philosopher and Internet guru David Weinberger wrote about recently when he said, at the end of an essay in "State of the eUnion":

"A hyperlinked, transparent ecology thus reminds us of democracy's
essential truth: We are each individuals with our own needs, perspectives
and limitations. We only have ourselves. There is no hope
except through engagement in our own process of governance, but
with that engagement, there is every hope."

This weekend in Sydney, a bunch of smart, passionate people are doing something intensely practical to give that insight some real life. It's exciting and it's infectious.

(If you are interested, the book is "State of the eUnion:Government 2.0 and Onwards" edited by John Gotze and Christian Pedersen. Weinberger's essay is titled "Objectivity, Transparency and Engagement with Democracy". And if you haven't already found it, check out "The Cluetrain Manifesto", http://www.cluetrain.com/...written all the way back in 1999 and still one of the most powerful statements of the full potential of the Internet...)