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The Catalyst Awards - unexpected community innovation
What happens when social need collides head on with the social web? How are widespread and easy-to-use technologies being used to benefit communities?
The UK Catalyst Awards are a bold experiment to answer these questions. Announced at the same time as the Prime Minister’s Council on Social Action, the bet is that social activists across the UK are using technology to benefit communities in lots of different ways. We want to shine a spotlight on these projects, big or small, as a way to boost those projects and also to spread the inspiration.
The closing date is June 16th so there’s still time to enter! You can enter yourself or nominate someone you know, either as individuals or as part of a business, charity or community group. We’re looking for examples of people creating new social technologies as well as using existing channels in a different way. More details on the UK Catalyst Entry Form.
You can watch Minister for the Third Sector Phil Hope on Youtube explaining why the Government are excited to be backing the awards (followed by organizer Dan McQuillan talking at high speed about scale & social impact 
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The exciting part about Catalyst is that we don’t really know what we’re going to find. The web is a place where unexpected social experiments can have far reaching consequences - who could have predicted Wikipedia? So what new forms of community action will emerge when strange internet memes like Crowdsourcing and The Long Tail are applied to social impact?
Projects like Liftshare and Patient Opinion tell us that the web can pack a social punch, and Social Innovation Camp proved that there are loads more great ideas ready for that dash of tech magic to bring them to life. And it’s not just the web; mobile and gaming technologies are also being turned to socially positive ends.
There are nine Catalyst awards - Community Awards for Social Technology - up for grabs. The entrants can have created their own social technology or used existing channels innovatively. Our categories expect the unexpected - they include:
- The Shock for Good Award: for something that shocked people into doing something good
- The Revolutionary Award: for something that makes people in power more aware of the need for change
- The Self-Help Award: For something that helps the creator to help themselves
- The Chalk & Cheese Award: for something that brings two different groups of people together
- The David and Goliath Award: for something little that made a difference to a something big and powerful
The Catalyst Awards are proud to be partners of the 2gether Festival and we’ll be presenting the shortlisted projects at a special preview session. We’ll also be opening a discussion about Catalyst Phase 2; how to incubate and grow digital social projects to a scale where they can have significant social impact. See you there!
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Social technologies needs to be defined if you are to make these awards transparent, or at least, more accessible.
Thanks for your comment. On the catalyst site we define it in this way:
“Social technology means any internet, mobile or gaming software that lets you connect and communicate with other people. Examples are text messaging, social networking (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Bebo), blogging, and so on”.
A far from perfect definition, of course. Social media are evolving so fast it can be hard to pin them down. Have you tried defining Twitter recently ?