John F. Kennedy writes about the recession of the Irish economy
Enterprise and entrepreneurship are the antidote for unemployment and recession. Encourage people to use computers and broadband to beat the recession, they can work for anyone from anywhere. They can create businesses based on anything from selling stuff on eBay to using their intelligence to write, provide consultancy services or develop technology. This is the way out. Failure to provide them with the tools is economic sabotage. Let’s hope intelligence prevails.
Yes!
This sort of thinking is what Momentum and the Digital Circle[1] should be working on. It’s not necessarily about supporting the existing economy but by providing grass roots access to technology to take advantage of nascent knowledge workers.
I just don’t see us taking advantage of it. And we’d have to work hard to create value in this ‘credit crunch restricted’ world. That said, while the property market is in the doldrums, there are investors with cash in their portfolios looking for technologies to invest in.
To this end we need strategies like Co-Working Belfast or my as-yet-stillborn New Workspace to provide the most basic substrate for people to find places to work and collaborate. Just getting the space organised would make a big step – the rest is then up to the individuals with experienced mentors providing the introductions. How about a system of half a dozen mini-Ycombinators?
Anyway. You’re a taxpayer. Think about it.
[1] For a laugh, see digitalcircle.org without the www. Anyone see a problem?
I know you don’t like it but… that digital circle link is a total Apache Redirect FAIL 🙂 I love a good bit of those and I’m left pondering about the mystical the “L7WS1”.
So many local sites plain don’t work without the www, it’s not hard people c’mon!
I’m on board for helping move these lumbering bodies toward actually doing relevant stuff…
L7WS1 = Level Seven Web Server 1
One of the board of Digital Circle is a head honcho of Level Seven Creative. I hope the hosting/design was free.
As Darryl put it – if we don’t get the progress we want from these quasi-governmental bodies, then we’ll have to do it ourselves.
The one that made me laugh out loud was momentumni.org as http://www.momentumni.org is the ICT Federation for NI.
I’m now maintaining a site originally developed by Level Seven and ended up tweaking 28 .asp files after the site fell victim to the latest SQL injection attack doing the rounds…
Personally, I dislike the www prefix and as David mentioned, with Apache anyways, it’s trivial to get your server to listen on it: 1 extra line in your vhost definition.
I did some of the work for http://www.volunteernow.co.uk/ but nothing was done when I mentioned that it didn’t work without the www!