It’s now one month-minus-a-day since I launched the LDNbeta dingy into its big, open, blue ocean.
After pushing it a little this-way-and-that to see how the creative winds and currents move — I have a pretty good idea of what it is and what can be done with it. Ironically, those currents don’t seem to flow London’s way:
- response from within London has not been outstanding [clarification: but don't get me wrong, I've been delighted by each individual response -- big thanks to anyone who commented or retweeted -- sorry, I was in a too-analytical mode when I wrote this]
- actual participation from within London has fallen well short of what I was looking for
- but my own enthusiasm and interest for some of the topics (not necessarily as they apply to London) exceeds, by far, what I expected
Possibly it’s just that the timing isn’t right. Either way, I’ve been mulling over the possibility of ‘forking‘ it and running with a non London-specific version. I ultimately decided to do that after finding that most of the FeedBurner readers are not only not Londoners but not even Canadian.
I know those stats can be wonky, and I know it takes time to build something, but the more important fact is that I’m starting to find my creative sweet spot (as far as social entrepreneurship goes), and the closer I get to that — the more satisfied I am with the posts — the less popular it seems to be locally.
Then it occurred to me that I have the Open Conceptual domain kind of languishing for the time being, and the direction I now find myself going with LDNbeta looks exactly like what I’ve imagined for Open Conceptual but couldn’t quite grasp. (I’ve already forked that one to start BrianFrank.ca, which I forked into Thinking Alive.)
But I’m not abandoning LDNbeta. I’ll still post there — I just posted something new a few hours ago, I have more I want to do in the next few days as well — and I’ll still look for opportunities to foist it (or at least some of the ideas… fork it again) onto someone else. :)
Besides, it’s not like Open Conceptual won’t be relevant to London. It’s essentially going to be the same thing except it won’t be exclusively about London, and I won’t be trying to share ownership with everyone in the city.
I’ve also started using the FriendFeed bookmarklet to post links to London stuff that directly promotes local innovation, collaboration, and engagement. The FF bookmarklet is actually pretty slick. I think anyone who’s already posting a lot of links to Twitter should give it a try. You can still ‘cc’ your Twitter feed and this way it also gets aggregated into a more focused sort of chat room.
But beyond that, if I’m going to invest any more time and energy into it I’ll have to start looking at what it’s doing for me in return. I could certainly do more to promote it in London but I’m not even convinced I want to live here much longer (in fact, LDNbeta was partly an experiment to test the local waters), so putting so much energy into something I can’t “take with me” isn’t likely the best investment.
Of course it’s still open and the currents might change again. Keep in mind that if I came back to Open Conceptual (in a new and much more improved way) then I could almost certainly do the same for LDNbeta in the future.
