Friday, February 27, 2009

I suppose I need to start talking about We20.

We20 is the new name for a discussion group that started at #amp2008 last year, under the name "Bretton Woods 2.0". The main aim was to discuss the role of social software in the context of the economic crisis. To begin with, there were a couple people who were interested and wanted to keep talking. Over the last six weeks or so, we've been meeting up fairly regularly and thrashing out what this is supposed to be about.

I'm also one of the volunteers working on developing the web-site. But We20 isn't really an online event. At heart it's about encouraging and supporting small real-life meetups of people to discuss their response to the crisis : what affects them and what they'd like to see done about it.

And then there's some interesting - to me, anyway, - features of the site that allow good proposals to bubble up and get noticed.

Obviously, this presses a lot of the right buttons for me. It's encouraging wider participation (and education) in the debate about the economy; it's about experimenting with web-tools to organize "purposeful communities" (and, yeah, I'm definitely trying to learn from StackOverflow); it's about meeting interesting people in the London web community; it's even about doing some real-world Django etc.

We're deep in coding at the moment, but the site should be going live within the next week or so.

I'll keep you all posted.

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