Main Provocation Page
From London Remade
Welcome to the debate! Here we will be publishing short, provocative essays intended to foster debate and discussion about the strategic resource issues facing London.
This is the most innovative part of our new website. We are using ‘wiki’ technology to do this.
If you are already familiar with wiki pages, or are a regular visitor to our site, you can leap straight in via the essay links below. If you want some guidance on how it all works, we have put some introductory guidance a little further down this page.
If we were to design, from scratch, a sustainable waste management system for London suitable for the twenty first century, what would it look like?
- Open Essay - Share your ideas on sustainable waste management and contribute to our open essay.
For some visitors wiki technology will be familiar. For many, however, we suspect that wiki will be a relatively new, perhaps even confusing type of web page.
Essentially, a wiki page enables users – that is, you – to edit, comment upon and make changes directly to the contents of a page. The idea is that, over time, a collective piece of text emerges that is better than any one individual could have produced. The most famous example is, of course, Wikipedia.
It can be quite unsettling at first. Most of us are used to reading text on a page and, if we want to leave a comment, you fill in a little box somewhere at the bottom or to the side of the page. Your comment is submitted and appears in due course.
In the case of wiki texts, you can simply change the text on the screen, directly. You can, in principle, type anything you like. You can ‘preview’ your proposed amendments and, when you are happy, save the page. This page of text will now be the page that anyone else visiting the page will see.
The system keeps a record of all the changes made. If you have not signed in, the system keeps details of your IP address; if you have signed in (and we would prefer you to do this) your user name will appear next to the details of the changes you have made.
An email about the changes is also sent to the two site editors. This lets us know, obviously, that someone is participating in the debate; but it also enables us to maintain the site’s security.
This is as innovative for us as it is for you. We do not yet know how many people will choose to interact with the text, nor what scale of changes users might choose to make. We hope that this will become clearer over the weeks and months ahead. If for any reason we have to change the operation of the system will notify users on this page. For now, however, we have built the system to be as open as possible.
To participate, just click on one of the essays below. If you wish simply to read it, you can. If you wish to make some changes, click on the ‘edit’ button and make your changes. Use ‘preview’ to check your changes and then save the page using the button provided.
If you do not feel comfortable making edits, or would prefer to contribute to the debate in some other way, there are two further options:
• you can leave a comment – at the bottom of each essay is a ‘Leave a comment’ option. Simply click on this and you will be taken to a comment page. Leave your comment (and/or edit the comments of others!), then preview and save, as before.
• you can write your own essay – at the bottom of our provocations, below, is the option to write or contribute to an ‘Open Essay’. The same editorial rules apply: go to the page, type your contribution directly into the page, preview your contribution, then save. Beware – your contribution is in a wiki space! The next visitor to the ‘Open Essay’ page will be able to edit your work, just like the four other essays.
There are various buttons and options on the wiki page that you will be able to use as you become more experienced, but our hope is that this brief introduction will enable you to get going. We hope you find this as exciting as we do, and we look forward to the debate ahead.
Finally, we are conscious that some users may wish to have access to the original essays on our first topic: “If we were to design, from scratch, a sustainable waste management system for London suitable for the twenty first century, what would it look like?” These are available on the 'Debate' page of the main site.