Car-shaped bike rack in the Beta Area (Dublin City Council currently owns two of them)

Car-shaped bike rack in the Beta Area (Dublin City Council currently owns two of them), originally uploaded by infomatique.

What are ‘DCC Beta Projects’?
This is a new approach by Dublin City Council to experiment, innovate and quickly test ideas directly ‘on the street’…but above all, to ask you for your opinion!

We’re suggesting this as a new way of trialling ideas, away from the ‘realities’ or ‘pressures’ of a ‘real’ project. The trials could last days, weeks or months, but generally wouldn’t be longer than a year or so.

We’re also suggesting that we call these projects ‘Dublin City Council Beta Projects’ (adopting the computer language of ‘beta testing’).

Dublin City Council ‘trials’ ideas all the time, but generally as part of a real project (for example the LED lights in Smithfield). We guess the difference between a ‘trial’ and a ‘beta’ might be the headache-factor. If something has to be changed in a beta project it generally wouldn’t (read shouldn’t) cause a problem, whereas in a trial it still probably will.

Another main factor would be the public-feedback element, and the acknowledgement that it’s a ‘test’ – at the moment we say we’re doing trials, but we don’t highlight them as such, or ask for feedback (we assume we will source our own feedback internally within Dublin City Council), so aren’t they more so ‘real projects simply doing something new for the first time’?