Good topic for my first ‘real’ blog post. I’ve just got home from an inspiring afternoon at Google HQ in London, watching the presentations at the end of Young Rewired State.  Photos are saved in flickr, where I hope I matched the right teams with projects!

To paraphrase one of the judges – amazing that a group of 15 year olds in London could make 25 year olds in Silicon Valley look like amateurs.

Another commented that it was great that the teams were focusing on trying to solve problems, not put forward business cases. If you come up with a good enough solution, the cash will follow.

I just kept pinching myself that groups of people, many of whom met for the first time on Saturday morning, by Sunday afternoon had come up with working versions of some ingenious ideas, and then presented them to an audience – with confidence, and in many cases humour.

Public Strategy has blogged the teams and their ideas in detail, and I’m sure that links to the actual apps will appear on the main website soon (I’m pretty sure thats how the first Rewired State event worked). My interest is in how social media tools have worked around this event – first to find the young people who took part (who says teens dont twitter?) but also during and now after.  It was twitter that meant many people who couldn’t be there could keep up with progress, and flickr that has made those tweets real. Via twitter I was made aware of the blog post above, and will be able to keep an eye over the next couple of days as others add their thoughts. I’ve also seen an interesting exchange as one tweeter made someone who wasn’t at the event aware of an interesting project – and that person is now interested in talking with the young developers.

Finally, small piece of anecdotal evidence for my own input – shortly after tweeting that I’d published my photos, they had been looked at 26 times – with a comment from one of the lads confirming I’d got his team and project right. Instant feedback!

I echo public strategy’s final point “There are lots of smart people desperate to do smart things.  The rest of us have a huge interest in finding ways of letting them.”

update 28/8: DCSF made a short video overview of the day – worth watching