Last night was the Chinwag FreeConomics session, on the panel were:

Nic Brisbourne – Partner, DFJ Esprit (Chair and impromptu panel member)

Azeem Azhar – Managing Partner, Open Capital Partners

Bruce Daisley – Industry Leader, YouTube

Victo…

If I could further refine our emerging experience it is something like this:

- design in redundancy – we use fixed line and 3G access to the ‘net for example, and although fixed line is used 90%+ of the time, its useful to have the backup.

- for the more critical applications (like hosting), pay for them – most are not onerously priced, and the risk of the freebies is that the provider is more concerned about pleasing its funders / advertisers than customers.

- always keep a copy of all data on your own systems (and a backup in a 3rd place for critical data), so you can carry on working when the cloud is down.

- similarly, its a good idea to keep local instances of any application – or a similar application – as well as cloud based applications. So for example use Google Docs by all means, but be sure to at least have something like Open Office on your machine.

It’d be interesting to do some sort of survey of what everyone uses, and how they rate its usefulness and ease of use. Skype is probably our heaviest used webservice.

I’ve found these issues get talked about in The Tuttle Club an other gatherings of social media practicioners.

I’ve also collated a few ideas in a post about lightweight structures for social innovation startups.