SI Camp Asia: Initiating Social Change Through Technology [Interview]

I’m a big fan of civic tech startups, or young companies with aspirations to use new technologies for public good. When a friend of mine in the US started using Google Analytics to help discover and report on homicides in Washington DC, it made me put food photo apps in perspective with regards to how we are taking advantage of all this new technology. I thought that perhaps Asia was lacking in such socially-minded projects, but to my surprise (now that I’ve started really looking) I’ve been seeing more and more people getting involved in social entrepreneurship over the past few months.

I recently had a chance to speak with Andrew Tan who is based in Malaysia. He’s in the process of preparing for Asia’s first SI Camp (or Social Innovations Camp) in Kuala Lumpur, which is scheduled to be held on November 9th and 10th. The event is calling for ideas until October 19. These ideas could be from the local community or NGOs, or anyone who sees a social issue that could be tackled with technology. From there, six ideas are chosen for the two-day event, and teams of developers, designers, and business people come together around each one to develop solutions. And after the event, there will be a month-long SI immersion in Singapore at the Eden Strategy Institute office.

Globally, there have already been 25 SI Camps in 16 countries, so it’s certainly high time that we saw one spring up in Asia! Hopefully we can see some Asia success stories added to the list of standouts which have already emerged from global events.

In addition to that general overview of the SI Camp Asia, I wanted to ask Andrew about his thoughts on social innovations in general in the region, and he was kind enough to oblige.

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When so many others in the Asia region are doing Startup Weekend events, why have you chosen to do an SI Camp event?

Andrew Tan: We are actually really grateful for those who have and are still organizing Startup weekend/Hackathon type events. These are the pioneers who have helped paved the way towards a more vibrant tech scene and without them I do not believe that we would have been able to get the response we are getting for SI Camp Asia. In fact I believe that there is still space for more of these Hackathon type events in this region since I see them as an important piece that helps build a vibrant tech startup ecosystem.

For us, we also see SI Camp as another piece of the puzzle in the ecosystem building process, but potentially fulfilling a different gap compared to other Hackathon type events. We have chosen to focus on this type of event mainly because of our belief that the web and mobile hold huge potential as drivers of positive social change.

We have already seen how the web has had a huge impact on the way we live our lives: it has changed how we communicate, how we entertain ourselves, our friendships and the way we work. Now it is going to change how we access our health care, how we educate our children and how we provide for the most vulnerable in our communities. However we feel that the use of web/mobile for positive social change is lagging especially in this region.

So what’s holding us back?

We think there’s a mismatch between what the technology supplies and what society needs.