Digital Scotland Debate: Next event on the starting blocks

The Sunday Herald's events team finally succeeded in nailing me to a chair for long enough this week to get the ball rolling on the next stage of our campaign to create a national technology strategy for Scotland.

The first event revealed broad agreement that any such strategy should be broken down into three distinct areas: Innovation, Infrastructure & Education. In light of this the next debate - scheduled for April 24 at Glasgow's Lighthouse - will focus on the category of innovation.

It's a broad title, and one that could encompass anything: Encouraging innovation amongst entrepreneurs, fostering technical invention, marketing Caledonia as a top rank location for business & investment or simply coming up with innovative ways to implement, nurture and sustain such strategies.

To avoid turning our campaign into yet another pointless talking shop, the plan for this round of events is to invite both an expert panel and audience members to submit proposals for inclusion in our putative strategy document. On the day itself, we'll debate as many of these as time allows.

Using transcripts of the debate, I will then attempt to lace together a draft strategy paper. This will be presented online for a period of consultation and wiki-style peer review which, though fraught with possible complications, should produce something approaching a representative document.

The jury's out on what to do after that and I'm open to suggestions, but when all three events have been completed we should have a trio of documents drawn from the best minds in the business and, hopefully, some form of popular technology mandate for putting them in front of the Scottish Government.

That's the plan so far, but I'm calling upon the entire geek diaspora to pitch in and tell me where I'm going wrong or what could be done better. Although ambitious, I believe this is a campaign that could ultimately actually achieve something, but only if we work together.