Building the RSA Networks Prototype

Hello openrsa readers.

I'm going to blog our progress on the RSA Networks Prototype here so we can benefit from even more of your comments and guidance.

After collating a huge mass of material, ideas and suggestions over the last week, we finally fixed on some simple first steps and put our noses firmly to the grindstone.

When I say 'we' - I should introduce the rest of the development team (as David did such a nice job of introducing Andy and myself on this blog): Liz Turner on design and user interface and Peter Brownell (left, with loud hailer) on code and architecture. This is the same team that I put together to develop nm-x.com - RSA Fellow Neil Johnston's initiative to network creative businesses in West London.

But enough preliminaries - you are probably all eager to hear what we're actually going to do.

The most important function of the Network Prototype by all accounts is to foster online and offline discussion and development of new projects amongst the RSA fellowship. There are many other functions that can be added later, but these are the ones we are focusing on for the prototype.

To explain how we are going to do this, allow me to introduce more new faces: Norah, Simon, and Trevor - our hypothetical group of RSA fellows.

The idea here is that ideas are contributed by fellows, and through discussion (online as blog posts and comments) and offline (as events) they are refined and developed into projects.

Of course there will be a lot more to this process than we are outlining here, but this is the very basic flow between idea, discussion and project.

We also have some key principles that we are going to use in the development process that will inform how we achieve this:

• We are using Drupal, an Open Source toolkit as our starting point.
• We will be building this fast, explaining what we are doing (here) and releasing our results and trying to do two or three micro-iterations by the 22nd November.
• We don't want to re-invent the Web(2.0) or create a walled garden for fellows (facebook style), so we will be using a lot of RSS aggregation to pull in discussions and media from other sites (such as flickr, youtube, technorati, blogger etc.) and show them alongside relevant projects.
  

I hope that gives you some indication as to what direction we're going in with this.

Please do give feedback and ask any questions you have about what we're doing - here or to saul@theps.net, and I'll try to pry myself out of the process for long enough to respond!

Until tomorrow then...