The other day I drank rather a lot of coffee but had some great conversations with some very clever people. Chris (@jaggeree), Ben (@beng), Paul (@r4isstatic) and Vinay (@leashless).

By the end of the day I wanted to do about 20 things at once, but there was one idea that started to form when I was speaking with Chris and Ben and took a better form later on when talking with Paul.

We came up with or listed out loads of ideas on things that would be worth building or exploring. Things that we could learn from, maybe other elements of the community could learn from. Maybe the ideas are wrong or useless or maybe in the fluff there is the germ of a good idea.

What is needed is a space to share the idea, to ask a group of peers ‘I have this half baked idea, help’. Now you can publish your idea and link to it and hope that you garner the feedback that you want but because there is so much noise online and so many ideas you might well in a lot of cases whistle into the wind. You will not get the feedback or support you need because no one notices that in fact you need a bit of help baking your idea.

So we go back to an old construct on the internet, the mailing list. That self selected group of people who know or vaguely know each other and are willing to share and bounce ideas off each other. A group that can go ‘thats a good idea, I have a bit of code that can do that bit and…’

As long as there is no pressure on people, since the ideas and projects are all extra-curricular, then it should become a space to actually get things done. They do not have to be finished, they might be sketches but it becomes a space to try and discuss and play with ideas.

So, Paul and I came up with the concept of the ‘Reasonably Interested Community of Hackers’, Paul has done a very nice post about this already. If you think you want to be a part of this small-ish list then let us know. The interesting thing will be how it works getting things made.

Of course the rest of the day was filled with new ideas for conferences, how presentations should be made, what mischief could be performed online, especially to show up the moral vacuity of the Tory idea of Big Society and so there will be more posts on these oh so very soon.