On Wednesday night, I was at the London edition of the Digital Britain Unconference, a grassroots response to Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, set up by Bill Thompson, Kathryn Corrick & others. Digital Britain is mostly concerned with preserving existing industries and interests and fails to address many of the issues those of us who live & work in the online space – free software, free content, social media & user-generated content, net neutrality, privacy, government transparency and so on.

Truth be told, I was tired, had a terrible headache and was a rubbish contributor – I didn’t say much of any worth or interest. My only decent contribution was during a session on skills & training; I pointed out that people who needed help to cross the digital divide could get as much training as they liked, but if the OS on their computers keeps crashing or the websites they use had unusable interfaces, it would be for naught; sadly, I don’t know what the answer is – but it lies with educating & incentivising the elite (i.e. us geeks), training & research into UX design and government leading by example is perhaps a pathway. It’s not all about the people at the bottom of the ladder.

I agreed with much of the stuff being said; some of it was a little woolly and wishy-washy, but that’s to be expected at these things, while consensus is still being sought. Encouraging the digitally excluded to take up technology and give them the confidence not just to surf the web but to express themselves was one key point; fostering digital entrepreneurship and risk-taking and allowing startups to experiment more stuck with me even more.

That has triggered the question: if we do let a thousand startups bloom and all corners of the population participating & creating, producing all this content, all this code, all these ideas. What happens next?

The worst thing that could possibly happen is that it goes to waste. That someone comes up with a great piece of code as proof of concept but hasn’t the time to bring it to production level. Or a frustrated web user has a great idea for a piece of UX design but none of the coding skills to bring it about. Or a startup has a great idea two years too early and goes bust, and whoever tries following in their footsteps has to start from scratch again. Reinventing the wheel costs time and money and given the abundance of digital and the interconnectedness of people online, really shouldn’t happen.

Mechanisms such as open source and free content licensing (GPL, Creative Commons etc.) are great means to make sure others’ work gets improved upon, but are still just a mechanism; getting people to coalesce around the work and support it is a separate challenge, which itself relies on making them aware of a project’s existence and encouraging & rewarding participation. For these means of doing to properly work, social and technical systems need to be set up for this to happen – Sourceforge does it for code, Wikipedia for knowledge.

But still, software projects die, data gets created and then wasted. To take an example in government – the ONS is busy creating a more accurate postcode geodata resource for the 2011 Census, which it is promptly going to destroy after it’s finished. Closer to home, I created an election map of the UK for the 2001 & 2005 elections, but I haven’t got the time or coding capability to extend it to 2010 (when there are new boundaries). I’d be happy to pass it on to someone else – if anyone’s a willing taker – but it’s hard finding places other than this blog to advertise the fact.

To make the most of the ideas and data coming out of a more Digital Britain and prevent waste, might it be necessary to be a bit more proactive? Recently I’ve been reading about the great work the Archive Team do, and their recent efforts to preserve Geocities, and it’s been both interesting and inspiring. So here’s an idea: a library of lost ideas and data, with a dedicated staff to curate it. They spend time going over submissions, wrapping them up with good metadata, categorising, rating, and promoting to make it easy for visitors to find.

At the same time, better government legislation on freeing up data collected there so it can be added in. Perhaps we should take look into data produced by failed and liquidated startups can can be collected into this resource as well (assuming it couldn’t be sold on the open market, which may be hard if its future worth is hard to ascertain).

Not only would the library take submissions but the team would actively go out and seek takers, sharing submissions with their audience and ‘matchmake’ to find people to take on projects others have passed on or left, asking “would anyone else like to take this on?”

Admittedly, there are more questions than answers. It may be a good idea to separate out data from ideas, to be honest. There are a lot of IP & copyright questions that I haven’t even begun to answer. It may not be possible to prove it can be a good return on taxpayers’ money, so maybe it’s best to run it under Lottery funding, as a creative experiment. And a lot of the best knowledge is tacit, in people’s heads, not written down anywhere – not to mention that knowing who is who is so important when trying to matchmake. So you’ll probably need a social networking function bolted on too to take care of that.

And of course, someone might have already done this, and this entire post is just reinventing the wheel itself. But I’ll leave the idea out there (most of it hurriedly written before I forgot it on Wednesday night) and see what you think…