InnovationCamp Rules

InnovationCamp draws its inspiration from BarCamp, which is an ad-hoc gathering of people interested in exploring ideas and possible solutions regarding technology, organization, society, business, etc.  InnovationCamp is focused specifically on innovation, which, following IDEO's Tom Kelley, can be defined as people generating value through the implementation of new ideas.  What is innovation to you?  How is it important in your work?  These are the types of questions we want to explore.  While it is usually not possible to actually implement solutions for organizations in a one-day event, we see InnovationCamp as an experiment in collaborating to produce realistic (and thus 'implementable') new ideas that can bring value to the organizations (big and small) that participants represent.  We are inviting independent designers and creatives as well as people from large firms, small firms, government organizations, universities, high schools, law and architectural firms, artists groups, consulting firms, and the sustainable agricultural community.

Types of Sessions

There are no keynote speakers or 'specialists' at InnovationCamp.  Participants are the presenters.  Like BarCamp, participants will post sessions they would like to run and others will have a period of time to indicate which sessions they want to attend.  We will take a count of which session-ideas receive the most votes and those will run first.

There will be two distinct types of sessions.  The first will be presentation sessions, where a person (or people) will present on some topic related to innovation, and the group attending will explore that topic in conversation.  These will be roughly one hour. 

The second type of session is a problem->solution session that will follow a design methodology.  These sessions will aim to have the group actually produce some sort of rough prototypes, mock-ups, drawings, sketches, user scenarios, etc, that might actually be able to address the problem that the presenter(s) poses at the beginning of the session.  These sessions will be two hours, and will loosely follow a design methodology:

1. Statement of the problem, constraints, past attempts, etc.

2. Open Brainstorming

3. Break into small groups to attempt at prototypes (scenarios, drawings, sketches, mock-ups)

4. Each group shares prototypes with the presenter

5. Presenter responds

6. Summary conversations

Rules

In the BarCamp spirit, InnovationCamp rules are soft rules.  Some are more important than others.

1.  Participate! The idea behind BarCamp is for everyone to present.  This might be intimidating for some attendees, but please speak up, interact, and get involved.  This is not for tourists!

2.  If you want to present you must write a short intro/abstract of the concept on the clearly marked whiteboards (marked 'Presentation Sign-up')

3. Be kind and understanding with attendees who have not been to BarCampy sorts of social gatherings before.  InnovationCamp is explicitly designed to include new groups of people from    different backgrounds, and we are dependent on veterans being very kind!

4. Please be respectful and do not talk during presentations.  This is simple, but important!

5. Document, document, document!  Please document (film, video, drawings, etc) as much of your experience as possible.

On Documentation

Our goal is to have a rich gallery of artifacts that participants create at InnovationCamp.  We want all of the drawings, mock-ups, and sketches (in pictures), as well as the process of their creation (in video) captured for posterity.  These are the takeaways from InnovationCamp, and hopefully this will encourage others in other cities to host their own InnovationCamps soon.  Clear instructions about how these can be loaded to the wiki and blog will be posted at the wiki.

Release

In the spirit of open collaboration, materials loaded onto the wiki will be in the public domain, and so uploading those things will be available for any and all to see, download, and use, etc.  If you are not cool with this, then you don't have to upload anything.  End legalese here...