This occurred to me last night when I was looking at some of the new Friend Connect gadgets. I wanted to try them but they don’t go along with what I do at brianfrank.ca very well. This site evolved from that.

I started thinking we need someplace to just try stuff. If it works, then great: we can replicate it on our own sites or even develop something more permanent, public, and professional. If it doesn’t work, then that’s ok too: without actually losing anything, we can cross-off a few ideas from the list and move forward to the next few –a little wiser and more experienced than we were before.

This whole idea is like that. It might turn out to be a complete dud. If that’s the case, then fine: on to the next thing.

We don’t know until we try. I’m a believer in the design philosophy, popularized by IDEO, of rapid prototyping:

Prototyping is problem solving. It’s a culture and a language. You can prototype just about anything—a new product or service,or a special promotion. What counts is moving the ball forward, achieving some part of your goal.

Not wasting time.

I’m curious about what can be done with things like WordPress MU and BuddyPress and whatever else is out there (or soon to come). It’s difficult to know until we try.

More importantly, something that worked (or didn’t work) a certain way for one community might turn out differently in London, in a different context, tweaked a little by incremental advances that happened since. 

It would be great to see #ldnbeta concept (or some other iteration) picked up and used to drive the conversation — not just here, but on people’s own blogs, on Twitter, face-to-face, everywhere  – exploring and advocating new opportunities for social media in London.  

Beyond that, it isn’t just about the web: more importantly it’s about what the web can do for civic and community life — offline. My own background is in political science, not IT. I wouldn’t be so energetic about this if I wasn’t convinced that democracy itself is evolving and projects like this are crucial. 

I’m thinking along the same lines as Don Tapscott, writing here on “Democracy 2.0“:

For far too long, we’ve been living in what I’ve called a broadcast democracy. Voters only count during election time. They have little or no influence in between elections, when the lawmakers and influencers are in charge and citizenry is inert. The “you vote, I rule” model was all that was possible, until recently.

What the system has lacked until now are mechanisms enabling government to benefit from the wisdom and insight that a nation can collectively offer — on an ongoing basis. I’m not proposing some kind of direct democracy, where citizens can vote every night on the evening news or Web sites. That would be tantamount to a digital mob.

What I am proposing is a way to allow citizens to contribute ideas to the decision-making process — to get them engaged in public life. When citizens become active, good things can happen. We all learn from each other. Initiatives get catalyzed. People become active in improving their communities, country and the world. This is long overdue. These days, the policy specialists and advisers on the public-sector payroll can barely keep pace with defining the problems, let alone craft the solutions. Government can’t begin to amass the in-house expertise to deal with the myriad challenges that arise. Governments need to create opportunities for sustained dialogue between voters and the elected.

But maybe we’ll leave that grand stuff off to the side for the first little while. We need more practice, we need more experience, we need better tools and platforms, we need more expertise, we need models and prototypes to build from. That’s what I hope to help push.

And remember, technological progress isn’t always good, which is precisely why we need to have an ongoing conversation about how it should or shouldn’t be used — an informed and open conversation.

To sum up, this isn’t the venue for complaining about road repairs and garbage collection. This is for exploring ways to make our blogs and the social media scene in London better… so when you complain about roads and garbage on your own blog it’ll be more effective.

If you see something cool somewhere and you want to try it, but don’t want to risk messing up your own blog — or maybe your blog isn’t the best place to try it (like mine isn’t right for a lot of things), or maybe you don’t know how to make it work (again, like me with almost anything) — leave a comment hear, or mention it in Twitter (#ldnbeta) or FriendFeed via the LdnBeta room and we’ll figure something out together.

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