The stuff looks good. Some nice design into the bargain.

There are probably loads of ways that we developers could help with this kind of stuff. And in actual fact the charity that I visited was looking for an application to allocate helpers to the people in need. Unfortunately this kind of thing is not as straightforward as the admin system that they were looking to replace – algorithmically it can actually get pretty complicated depending on what you are trying to optimize for. However, as it happens, this subject is closely related to the area I worked in as PhD student. Since I still maintain pretty close contact with the guys at Glasgow University that specialise in this, we are looking to propose something that can be done as part of a fourth year student project next year. So this just shows that open source is not the only way to make something like this work.

I hadn’t heard of that Social Innovation camp thing before. It looks very much like the idea they have in the US called Startup Weekends ( http://startupweekend.com )

I did something like this in order to try out Ruby on Rails and JQuery:
http://deargreenplace.org

We had loads of fun in the process and I got to speak at Scotland on Rails as a result (search for Glasgow):
http://www.rubyinside.com/scotland-on-rails-presentations-now-online-27-awesome-videos-1799.html

The other big event was Social Innovation camp Scotland earlier this year: http://scotland.sicamp.org/

I’m helping a charity from that event too. Though not all entries for sicamp were charities.