Simon’s Blog (the official one)

Back at the beginning of the year we noticed that there were two conferences with a rural theme planned to take place in Yorkshire in the autumn, ours and Action for Market Towns‘ Convention. I contacted our friends at AMT and suggested that we try and link the events up in some way.

Working with AMT was not going to be difficult as we had an ongoing relationship and many common goals. We’ve been talking for a while about how we could deliver our Experts Online service to AMT members and we are currently working on the new AMT website which will move AMT into the Web 2.0 world and empower each person within the AMT team and enable them to take control of their part of AMT’s online presence.

So, with the blessing of our partners, Yorkshire Forward, we moved ruralnet|2008 back a week so that it could run back-to-back with AMT’s convention over three days in the market town of Skipton. This provided the opportunity for a ‘Town Meets Country’ slot in the middle where the two conferences could overlap.

Well. One thing leads to another. As we have developed our own events it has become increasingly clear that it would be sensible to merge the events by compressing the content of both events into two days and not spread it across three. Many people were interested in the content of both events but were unable to commit to three days. Now AMT members will have access to additional workshops on local energy, local food and local retail. ruralnet|uk delegates will be able to participate in AMT’s study tours. All delegates will be able to be a part of my participative Rural Britain 2020 session. The full programme is here.

This development means we can put more investment into the online element of the event which will enable those who can’t afford the conference fee to participate completely free of charge. The online element of ‘Future Choices - Live and Local’ is already in place and is open to everybody and the networking and knowledge transfer has already started. You are invited to get involved. We have exciting plans for the online element of the event including a Q&A session with Matthew Taylor on the ‘Taylor Report’ and more.