From 26th-28th March 2010, over sixty people joined us for the Jailbrake weekend to help turn six ideas into prototype projects.

The People Speak came along to capture all the action for our Jailbrake film – enjoy!

Three months in the making, six ideas, 48 hours, 60-odd participants and more cups of coffee than we can count, the Jailbrake weekend finished on Sunday 28th March with a dash to finish presentations followed by a fantastic Show and Tell pitching competition where our Jailbrakers demonstrated what they’d built.

We’ll be posting further details of our six projects built over the weekend in the next few days, but for now, here’s a taster:

Spill: starting out life as Phone a Friend, Spill became a phone-based peer-to-peer mentoring system built using Ribbit for young people who are at risk of getting caught up in the criminal justice system.

FLIP: a Facebook app for young people to tell their friends what their skills and talents are, which can be turned into a professional CV linking into job support.

Myfirstweek.org: originally called Service Signposter, this is a tool for helping match young offenders as they leave custody directly with housing providers with available accommodation.

Safe Ground: awarded first prize by the judges, Safe Ground is a platform to support a facilitated mediation process between victim and offender. They began the weekend as Common Ground.

Lost and Found: a mobile-based service providing young people at risk directly with crisis information they need about relevant local services such as accommodation or health care – and with a working demo tested live on the Show and Tell audience. The Lost and Found team were awarded second place by the judges.

Nudge Me: a text-based reminder service for young people on supervision orders to help them keep track of where they’re meant to be, when – complete with a demo tested on our Jailbrake judges at the end of the weekend. They started out life as MyPA and won an honorable mention at the Show and Tell.

Some thank you-s

This weekend was only made possible thanks to fantastic support from some great people who we’d like to say thank you to, including, but by no means only:

Alice Casey from Nesta for all her support; the Young Foundation and School for Social Entrepreneurs for their building and space; Dave O’Dywer for his trouble-shooting tech support; Unboxed Consulting, White October, Nonsense and Ribbit for helping to bring along some of our very hard working coders; the People Speak for their incurable curiosity; and our judges, Michael Chuter from the Foyer Federation, Penelope Gibbs from the Prison Reform Trust, Nick Keane from the National Police Improvement Agency and Adam Mooney from the Youth Justice Board.

But most of all, to all the young people who gave up their weekends for us including Cheyanne, Keisha, Sharna and Daniel from Islington Football Development, together with Yannick and Karl and the Young Advisors.

And, of course, last but by no means least, huge thanks to all the participants who came along and shared their skills, knowledge and passion.

But Jailbrake doesn’t end here. We’re hoping that we’ve kick-started some new teams who want to continue to grow their ideas.

So watch this space!

We started bright and early at 9am this morning for the second day of the Jailbrake weekend.

The morning kicked off with a good breakfast and overview of what the next day and a half was going to hold. Then each of our six ideas hunkered down around the Young Foundation and set to work.

It’s been a day full of exciting conversations, meeting new people and building some – hopefully – Jailbraking ideas.

Check out some of the photos here and watch the commentary here.

Twelve hours later, they’re only just drifting home.

And we’ll be back again first thing tomorrow – an hour earlier thanks to Daylight Savings – and our teams will have until just 2pm on Sunday afternoon to finish their projects and prepare their pitches for the Show and Tell.

If you’d like to join us to see what they’ve created, make your way to the Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, just by Bethnal Green Tube at 2pm, Sunday 28th March.

The Jailbrake weekend kicked off this evening at the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green, East London.

We had a crowd of software developers and designers, as well as people who work in central and local government, service designers and service users join us to start a weekend of intense activity to take our six back of the envelope ideas to break the cycle of youth offending and turn them into real projects – all in just 48 hours.

This evening was about conversation: talking to the people behind the ideas and figuring out who wants to work with who. But tomorrow morning the real action starts bright and early!

There are just three days left before the Jailbrake weekend and it’s shaping up nicely.

We’re really looking forward to welcoming an incredibly diverse group of people this Friday to Sunday at the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green; from young people working with Young Advisors and Access to Sports, to people from the organisations who support them, ranging from the Foyer Federation to the Police Cadets.

We’ve got service designers from Design Against Crime and participants who work at Learning Launchpad and the New Economics Foundation, alongside a whole range of people who know all about what it’s like to work in youth offending teams and with local and central government.

And then there are all the people coming with the technical knowledge to help us build the tools powering our ideas. We’ll be joined by people from Unboxed Consulting and Nonsense, together with freelance software developers and designers.

And we’ve still got a few places left.

So if you work with young people, or you’re a brilliant designer or software developer and you think you’ve got something to contribute to our six ideas, sign up to come!

It’s been two months in the making, but finally the Jailbrake weekend is just two weeks away.

From our call for ideas, we’ve chosen six early-stage projects we’re going to be helping to make a reality in just one weekend from 6.30pm, Friday 26th March to 4pm, Sunday 28th March at the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green, London.

So now we’re looking for people who want to join us for the weekend and help build them.

Do you work with young people and know all about how the youth justice system works? Have you seen restorative justice in action? Have you worked to help resettle young ex-offenders?

Or perhaps are you a great software developer or designer? Or you might have service design, business, legal or other expertise that could be needed to get an idea off the ground.

Want to come and help build one of these ideas?

We’re looking for all sorts of talented people to get involved and come for the Jailbrake weekend: right through from people who have first hand experience of working with young people and the youth justice system, to those who can build some software and people who can work out how to sustain an idea in the long-run.

You can come along for all or part of the weekend and you can get involved in one particular idea or help out several different projects – just let us know when you’d like to come and how you can help by signing up here.

But be quick! Places are going fast and space is limited.

So the six ideas that we’d like to help build at the Jailbrake weekend 26th-28th March 2010 are:

MyPA

An automated reminder service using text messages to help young people keep track of order restrictions, meetings, appointments and other commitments. MyPA would help a young person manage their time with YOTs or other people supporting them and could offer tailored ‘nudges’ (for example reminders of appointments the night before) and also more detailed advice (perhaps public transport information). For young people with chaotic lives, it could help them manage their time, commitments and relationships with supporting services.

We loved MyPA because, whilst text messages are used in some areas already to help remind young people of appointments and commitments, this idea could create a white-label tool that could be customised by young people and those who support them to suit lots of different situations and localities.

Phone a friend

A mobile-based system for providing peer-to-peer crisis support for vulnerable young people who want help getting out of situations where they feel they might caught up in criminal behaviour and don’t feel they have anyone else they can talk to. The service will be staffed by young people who have a history of contact with the criminal justice system.

Phone a friend caught our eye because peer-to-peer solutions are really effective. But it’s also a kind of panic button focused on the moment of crisis.

Lost and Found

A mobile text system to connect young people to services and support. Users are asked “What have you lost?” and can respond with pre-set answers covering different issues e.g. “I’ve lost my head” (mental health) and “I’ve lost my job” (employment & training). Users input part of their postcode and get a customised Google-map of all the relevant services around them with information on opening hours, contact details and so forth.

Lost and Found is a neat – and different – solution to the problem of connecting support services to young people. We also thought the idea that users could post feedback and rate services was an interesting one. It’s a little bit like 118 118 tailored to meet the needs of a particular group of services and service users.

Common Ground

This is an idea to provide a safe secure space online for offenders and victims of crime to engage in dialogue in a restorative fashion. These discussions would also give the perspective of both parties to the wider public, transforming their perceptions of young people in trouble with the law. The web-based system would aid existing restorative justice processes or all cases where the victim and the offender want to have a channel of communication. For instance, case workers in YOTs would encourage both parties to write to a page about the reasons for the violation, their experience of it, what they could do to amend, as well as their own backgrounds and life stories. The participants can choose to make their stories available, under appropriate levels of anonymity, to the broader public.

Service Signposter

Finding accommodation for ex-offenders is particularly challenging. Service Signposter is a tool to help young ex-offenders find a place to live by better matching up housing providers with those supporting a young person through a web-based platform. We’re thinking Service Signposter could do for accommodation what the Princes Trust’s brilliant Gate Mate project is doing for mentoring. It could be a place for housing providers to post details of availability and suitability of accommodation and for the people supporting an ex-offender to look up a suitable place for them to stay. There could even be a way for young people to rate the accommodation and provide feedback.

FLIP

An application that helps ex-offenders identify and communicate their talents and skills beyond those gained from formal qualifications, creating an online profile or CV that enables them to access a pool of job opportunities. The interface is designed using familiar social network language such as “create a profile”, “applications” and “quiz” to engage the user. The system takes this information and translates it into a list of skills and abilities in a language that can be used to write a personal profile (compatible with traditional careers planning). We’re excited to see how FLIP can also bring potential employers to the table and create a tool that really matches up young people with potential opportunities.

So what happens next?

Well Jailbrake is all about matching great ideas with the people they need to grow. Now we’ve got our six back-of-the-envelope ideas brimming with potential, we’re looking for people who are interested in helping make them a reality who we can invite along to the Jailbrake weekend to help make them happen.

You can read more about how the weekend works here.

If you think you’ve got the talent, skills, experience or know-how to help us build one of these ideas, get in touch and let us know how you’d like to get involved.

After six weeks of seeking out the best ideas to break the cycle of youth offending from across the UK, the Jailbrake call for ideas has closed.

We’ve had a grand total of 50 fantastic entries and we’re busy reading all of the ideas and running them past the eyes of expert judges.

We’ll be announcing the ones we’ll be helping to build at the Jailbrake weekend 26th-28th March 2010 during the afternoon of Tuesday 9th March.

So watch this space….

We’ve had a busy few weeks at Jailbrake scouring the UK for great ideas to break the cycle of youth offending.

We’ve talked with youth workers, local councils, charities, campaigners, the police and prison governors to name just a few of the front line staff and service users we’ve been reaching out to.

And tonight, we’re looking forward to running an ideas evening with over 60 of you who want to learn more about the competition.

So we’ve decided to extend our call for ideas right up to the day our judges choose the best to be developed at the Jailbrake weekend – which means you’ve got until midday on Friday 5th March to submit yours.

And there are a few extra tickets available to join us tonight (Monday 22nd February 2010) for our ideas evening too – you can sign up here.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seretuaccidente/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

We’re running an ideas evening for anyone interested in finding out more about Jailbrake.

So whether you’re thinking of entering an idea or you’re just curious, join us for an evening of exploring new ideas to break the cycle of youth offending:

Where: Nesta, 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE

When: 5.30-7.30pm, Monday 22nd February 2010

What: We’ll be explaining how the Jailbrake competition works and coming up with some new ideas to break the cycle of youth offending.

Sign up to come along at http://jailbrake.eventbrite.com/