I’ve been working on designing and developing a platform for the Social Times that will embrace and support entrepreneurial communities. The more I think about the concept, the more I realize that the platform is ultimately open-source entrepreneurship. What do I mean by that? No single person can build an entrepreneurial community. Also, no single system can theoretically be designed by a group of two or three people that will effectively build the community.

For proof of that go read this PDF on “Building Entrepreneurial Communities: the Appropriate Role of Enterprise Development Activities.” This is a study that spanned twenty years, close to one thousand entrepreneurs and more than one hundred entrepreneurship assistance providers. I highly recommend taking the time to read it if you want to learn more about building these communities.

In the report, one paragraph stood out to me because I felt it most accurately described the flaw with having a centralized entrepreneurial platform.

We have repeatedly observed ambitious public entrepreneurs who take on these assignments with the primary goal of establishing model programs that would bring accolades to themselves and their sponsors. These initiatives then become competitions for attention, fueled by a talent for publicity, not performance. In these situations, such individuals act alone, under the belief that they can do it better than and without the help of anyone else in the community and under the need to do so in order to garner all the glory.

If anybody is concerned that this is what will result from the Social Times, I can assure you this won’t happen. The new tools that we will be adding to this site enables “the community” to build content that helps everybody. We will also be highlighting the community members and their content on a regular basis. It is our job to help find and support the superstars in the community and help them to leverage social technology to achieve success beyond our own.

We will also be creating programs that help to support those enterprising individuals that want to host events or create other programs that support the community. We want to help the community, not compete with it. We will start by adding a community directory as well as a business directory organized by metropolitan area. The first area will of course be D.C. but we will be expanding rapidly.

I hope to have these two directories up within a week but as you probably know, estimating when a project will be complete is more of an art then science. Is there anything that you would like to see us add to the site? Any other thoughts?

The future of D.C. technology meme has spread across all of the D.C. blogs and discussion is taking place in all the comments and on Twitter. One thing is for sure, there is a strong presence of social media professionals in D.C. I would argue that this segment will continue to grow naturally and doesn’t necessarily need management, unless of course you group it with the entrepreneurs which appears to have naturally occurred.

For those of you not in D.C. I’m sorry for continuing to talk about this so much but trust me when I say that it has future implications for your city as well. The supposed lack of funding and the inefficiently organized entrepreneurial community is something taking place around the country. If everybody was blogging and Twitter I think we’d all be good to go but unfortunately that’s not the way it is.

The Social Times will be launching a new platform over the coming weeks to enhance the community and help things grow. We have already seen a disconnected set of services online and events offline. What many have discussed is an “overreaching organization.” I don’t think this requires significant management by the participants, it simply requires one central location that can be referred to when anything is taking place.

Additionally, when entrepreneurs are in need of investors, or new startups are in need of lawyer or an number of other circumstances that take place in an entrepreneurial community, all the participants can reference one location. What I’d like to see happen is this D.C. technology meme end and we all simply become participants. Not just in D.C. but in entrepreneurial communities around the country. D.C. is just the first place where we prove that such a system can be developed.

Over the past few weeks I have been browsing around, calling people and attending events to find out what already exists in the community that we believe does not already exist. Additionally, I’ve been looking for services that actually don’t exist. What I found was a number of resources that most people simply didn’t know about. With this in mind I ended up revising the vision of the Social Times to “leveraging social technology to build local entrepreneurship communities.”

My theory is that most of the resources already exist we just need to make them more accessible to the community. That’s why I am working to build a platform that will help build this community. I’m hoping that others can help build it and benefit from it. My goal is not to promote our services but instead promote the members of the community. All for free. This will take place in a matter of weeks, not months.

I also believe that providing valuable media about leveraging social technology for entrepreneurship is important and as such we will continue to produce articles on a daily basis. You will see a number of new media channels on this site and new services to accomplish these goals. Media is no longer one-way, it is participatory and as such I believe the Social Times can succeed at accomplishing its goals.

I will give out details about the features of the platform in the near future but look for the services to be rolled out quickly. What features would you like to see? Is there something bigger that you think I’m missing here?