Simon’s Blog (the official one)

I am very pleased about this. Another first for a rural development conference in the UK. This will get the face-to-face networking at this year’s event off to a flying start.

We invite anyone to come and join us on the ruralnet|2008 crowdvine and invite your friends. It only takes a few moments to sign up and you can build your own network of friends, message them or comment on their profile, ask them questions - there’s already a car sharing conversation going on.

Please join us whether you’re coming to the conference or not.

I was pleased to be invited to the launch of the Commission for Rural Communities’ (CRC’s) 10th Annual ‘State of the Countryside’ report at the RSA on Wednesday.

The CRC had taken an interesting approach to the launch by inviting people from outside the rural sector to give short presentations. These were:

• Tony Travers, Director of the London School of Economics
• Joe Saxton, nfpSynergy
• Anthony Walker, CEO, Broadband Stakeholders Group

I know Joe and Anthony and both gave very interesting presentations. But it was Anthony’s remarks about ‘next generation broadband’ that really struck and chord.

He spoke using ‘average statistics’ and indicated that ‘things weren’t too bad’ in rural areas with respect to access to ADSL. And this is true but it’s very unfortunate if you are one of the ‘have nots’ like my Sister-in-Law.

Anthony also mentioned BT’s recent announcement (15/7/08) regarding the ‘UK’s largest ever investment in Super-Fast Broadband‘. Anthony said that he thought that the only hope for rural areas if it is to keep up and not get left behind, is collective community action. I couldn’t agree more.

But we have been here before. In 2002 ruralnet|uk and the Phone Co-op were the joint founders of the ‘Community Broadband Network‘ (CBN) this joined up amazing, community-led initiatives that were taking a DIY approach to internet access. This community action was triggered by the statement from BT at the time that they were not going to upgrade many exchanges in rural areas. CBN was growing fast and was not only providing a broadband service in their communities but also triggering all sorts of other community activity . . . shelters for young people, local history projects, community websites, community TV and so on.

However on 27/4/04 BT announced it was going to enable the majority of rural exchanges after all. Although this was probably good news at the time for most rural residents it completely undermined the community broadband projects. Only the very strongest of them survived. This was a huge loss. The sad thing is that these communities were delivering the broadband of the future (ADSL through telephone exchanges was always a stop-gap measure, a mechanism to keep BT relevant in the broadband market).

Now it looks like the only way rural areas are going to keep up is if they mobilise yet again and help themselves. Many will be reluctant given recent experience.

BT’s announcement of huge investments in Super-Fast Broadband is conditional and I quote: “Plans dependent on regulatory regime and certainty“. Well I think community mobilisation should be conditional too.

We need a clear strategy so that organisations like ruralnet|uk can mobilise and support communities with some certainty that the rug is not going to be pulled from under their feet (again).

Related articles:

The villagers of Vindeln, in remote northern Sweden, are digging up their own roads to lay fiber so that every resident can have broadband access.

Other broadband related articles in this blog.

When I met up with David Wilcox (designingforcivilsociety and socialreporter) last week he spoke enthusiastically about his work programme this week which included providing a live and online dimension to face to face events. He coined the phrase ‘the online plugin for events’ which I thought was a neat way of summing it up.

So yesterday, David teamed up with Dave Briggs and they added the live and online dimension to the Digital Inclusion conference and they sum up the experience here:

Dave has documented the process here.

It’s great that they used our new Networks Online technologies and techniques as a foundation for this and integrated Twitter Feeds using Hashtags, live Video using Qik and more. As one of the people who couldn’t be there, it was great to catch the mood of the event and hear people talking about Experts Online (and seeing the banners in place). It was also good to see old friends like Dave Carter of Manchester City Council. See the whole plugin here: dc10plus.socialreporter.net.  This is what Peter Farell and Julie Mitchell of UK online centres said about their work (note the Experts Online mention).

Today David is providing a ‘plugin’ for Innovation Exchange event. And again it’s on Networks Online here: inex.socialreporter.net.

collaborate|2008 had a real buzz about it but it’s still reassuring to see some sort of official analysis. Here is the data. Thanks to everyone who took part. We’ll be doing it again next year. Next year we will be asking people to contribute to the venue costs . . . unless we can find a sponsor.