What’s the logic of this project?
Money isn’t everything. We can help you meet a few entreprenneurial investors if you like? But politicians and senior civil servants can often help you find the support that you really need – the political buy-in that can make good ideas fly.
We’d like to help every ‘innovator’ that submits a suitable idea to this site to meet a suitable group of politicians and senior civil servants at events we organise. They will be able to ask for introductions, connections, endorsements, publicity – and perhaps even help in changing legislation in order to support their idea.
These ideas are ones that can enable politics to adapt to the 21st Century – helping politicians, political parties, the media and activists to back out of many of the cul-de-sacsand Prisoner’s Dilemmas that they find themselves in.
In many cases, these ideas are likely to be ones that appeal to all sides of the political spectrum. Many of us who believe that interactive technologies hold out rich opportunities for positive change find ourselves more in agreement with members of other parties than we do with a lot of our partisan comrades. For this reason, we’re looking for ideas that will attract positive feedback from all sides of the political ballpark.
If you have one in mind that you’d like to promote, we’d like to hear from you, and we’d like to see if we can help you realise your idea. Our process may put you in touch with others who can help move things along.
We’ve already organised a series of regional events during late 2010 (London, Belfast, Edinburgh) in which the opportunities for political innovation were discussed. We are working with a number of the UK’s leading serious political blogs including the Daily Telegraph blogs, Left Foot Forward, and Lib-Dem Voice among others.
We are looking to identify at least ten essayists who can provide short focused postings outlining an opportunity for political innovation. We are asking these essayists to write them for a bi-partisan audience. The ideas must have a cross-cutting appeal and be sufficiently persuasive to readers of every blog that they run on.
We’re seeking sponsorship only to cover our costs, and this is an attempt at bipartisan open-source policymaking.
