We are running an experiment over the next couple of months where we assign some time for everyone to work on their own ideas and develop new skills.  A number of our established services started life when someone said “wouldn’t it be cool if …”.  The wiki, IM service, inPictures, hungrybot and blogs to name a few.

Often it’s difficult to help people understand the value of new technologies, particularly when you can’t point to lots of examples in your own sector. Taking time to try new things, and most importantly being allowed to fail, means we can talk with authority about why we should pursue or quickly discard the idea.

One big gain that I expect to see is experience of mobile web development. The team have expressed an interest in looking at this, but with a huge site overhaul going on it will be a while before it’s a ‘project’.  It’s obvious that we can’t afford to ignore this area though.

There are a few rules about how this time is used:

• Every project or idea results in at least one blog post
• two people should see the value in your idea
• you can work alone or in groups
• every 4 weeks we do a team demo and retrospective
• you can call team demos at any time

Over the next couple of months you can expect to see posts about the work that is going on and thoughts about how successful the experiment has been.