Social technology awards: SSE Fellows meet Gordon Brown

The winners of the UK Catalyst Awards were announced this morning on 24/7 (see what they did there?), for the best uses of technology for social benefit. Check out the full list here. Congratulations in particular to two SSE Fellows:

- Nathalie McDermott (of OnRoadMedia), who was heavily involved in the successful SavvyChavvy project

- Andy Gibson, co-founder of School Of Everything, which also won an award

Gordon Brown turned up to give a speech, and was on good form: he made self-deprecating reference to this exciting area "which you all know more about than me", and made passing reference to the campaigner who glued his arm to the Prime Minister earlier this week ("supporting campaigners...even when they campaign against the government"; the sticky incident happened at the Sheila McKechnie awards, which our CEO Alastair was in attendance to see). And a few decent soundbites as well: "there's nothing in the worst of Britain which can't be solved and tackled by the best of Britain" (or something like that).

Despite needing a couple of cups of coffee to get going for such a breakfast event, I managed to engage a few people in (hopefully worthwhile) conversation; sadly couldn't stay for the focused networking after 10am, but an interesting event and, most of all, was good to see that this was technology as a tool to deliver social impact on the ground, not as an end in itself. Congrats to all.