I should have been asleep an hour ago, but I’m on a kick.
In September of last year, I was a delegate at The Summit on Citizenship in Virginia: Renewing Civic Life in the Commonwealth, an event up in Leesburg put on by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. It was a great event for a bunch of reasons, but there was one idea in particular that really stuck with me. It was a result of conversation with a bunch of wicked smart people there, an idea for a web-based system that could serve as an equalizer for citizens and a method of breaking down barriers of communcation that result from socioeconomic barriers that exist in community. I knew that it wasn’t a fully-formed idea, so I decided to ruminate on it.
About a month ago, this finally jelled into something useful, a plan of action that I could apply to Charlottesville. I ran it by a few dozen people who uniformly loved it. Tonight, I started working on the code for it, after setting up a test server on my home network on which to let it safely roam about. It’s essentially a cross between lists.waldo.net and cvillenews.com, only with the potential to be much better than those two systems combined. I’ll need somebody to run it — I really can’t take on any more commitments right now — and, of course, I’ll need to test it out for a few weeks to see if it has the potential that I think it does.
Amber and I are going to Blacksburg in the morning to figure out the lay of the land and talk to some folks at VPI. In two months, I should be residing in a new abode down south.