NLab Social Networks Conference 2008 – Andrea Saveri from IOCT on Vimeo.

At e-mint last night WordFrame’s David Terrar reminded me that next week NESTA is interviewing people who’ve entered proposals to be the learning partner for ‘Amplified City Leicester’. What’s Amplified City Leicester I hear you say? Watch the video above to get a conceptual idea, then read below…

In terms of an overall project overview here’s what I’ve extracted from the ITT:

Amplified City is a city-wide experiment designed to grow the innovation capacity of Leicester by networking
key connectors across the city’s disparate and diverse communities in an incentivised participatory project,
enabled by social media:
• To develop a transferable model for amplifying a diverse city’s grassroots innovation capacity through
connecting diverse communities through key individuals
• To generate practical examples of how collaborative technologies can be exploited in a city context

It clearly has a lot of potential in a city which is set to be the first city in Europe where the BME population is 50% or higher:

Informed by research conducted by the Institute for the Future; de Montfort’s Institute of Creative Technologies’s work on transliteracy; the NLab regional social media network and the IOCT’s visiting professor Howard Rheingold, the project will build on the participants’ existing understanding of their working styles, motivations and expertise.

The aim will be to create new structures and processes that bypass traditional constraints and stimulate innovation for social and commercial benefit across the city.

Watch this space Leicester!

PS: Talking of amplification it’s great to see plans for a new music project, ‘Lock 42‘, to open in a Victorian Mill on Frog Island in Leicester in October, out of the ashes of the famous Princess Charlotte, where I saw the Dandy Warhols play.