Simon’s Blog (the official one)

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.

I am still very much on a learning curve when it comes to Web 2.0. But when I was further down the curve and struggling for ways to track and aggregate things I wrote this post: Call Sign - Blog Sign?. The suggestion was that each blogger should have a unique-ish ‘tag’ and  then scan the internet (= set up RSS feeds) to aggregate everything using this tag. This way if Blogger A wanted to call his or her post to the attention of Blogger B, Blogger A would attach Blogger B’s tag to the post. I still think this is neat idea.

But anyway, the #hashtags initiative by the Downtown Cartel does something similar for groups of people using Twitter. This is how it works:

1. Think of a tag - eg ‘ruralnet’
2. Let everyone in the ruralnet group know you are using this tag for items that may be of interest to them
3. Get these people to ‘follow’ #hashtags on Twitter
4. As a ‘member’ of the ‘ruralnet’ group you can now include: #ruralnet in a Twitter item and it will pop up here: http://hashtags.org/tag/ruralnet/ together with all other Twitter items (irrespective of who posts them) containing the characters: #ruralnet

You can also take an RSS feed from http://hashtags.org/tag/ruralnet/ and pull this into your community website.

With all this in place the whole ‘ruralnet’ community can post interesting items to the ruralnet community website via Twitter. Cool.

See the #hashtags website for interesting ways in which this has been used to help coordinate disaster relief.

Photo credits: Drumchapel (left): Steve Wilson; Bearsden (right): James Fraser

Sir,

The consequences of running the lives of the poor are very much more serious even than Libby Purves points out (You’re poor. We’ll run your life for you. Mar 11). It’s more than patronising - it’s a matter of life or death. There are two housing estates on the outskirts of Glasgow: Drumchapel and Bearsden. In the early nineties, life expectancy in Drumchapel was 10 years less than in neighbouring Bearsden, Glasgow’s richest area. Today the Scottish Executive’s website says that the difference is 11 years. Both areas are served by the same health service and the same general hospital.

A striking difference between Drumchapel and Bearsden is that in Drumchapel you are likely to be poor and you have other people telling you what to do. You are not in control of your own destiny, you are disempowered and you die an average of 11 years younger.

But am I getting disempowerment mixed up with poverty? Well no, I don’t think I am. A study of male civil servants showed conclusively that those in the lower grade jobs (messengers, doorkeepers) had a three-fold higher mortality rate than men in the highest grade jobs.

This status-related risk factor was found to be more significant in determining death than smoking, high blood pressure, or cholesterol. None of those studied were living in poverty, and all had access to the National Health Service.

People in control, in the higher level jobs, ‘the empowered’, were healthier than the lower grade employees who had things done to them, who often had skills that were under-utilised, lacked clarity in tasks they were asked to do and had very little control or idea about what the future had in store for them.

So, for the individual, empowerment is the biggest gift that can be given: quite literally a matter of life or death. By patronising people you’re not just “making them feel lousy” you may literally be sending them to an early grave.

Simon Berry
Chief Executive
ruralnet|uk
Background and sources

[Well they aren't going to publish it, so I thought I'd publish it myself!]

Another week goes by and I’ve been asked at least twice about Open Innovation. Enquiries fall into two categories. Some are from people who are really interested in the process and others are very challenging. Here is an anonymised example of the latter:

Simon
I understand your objective here, but not why you are once again telling your competitors what we are up to on an open information exchange?
What other business develops new products in such an open way? When General Motors are developing a new car, employees are sworn to secrecy in case Ford find out and get to the market first.
A N Other

Receiving this email was like turning up for an exam to find that the exam paper contained all the questions you’d revised for.

Here are some of the points I made in my response:

The judgement you make when deciding to develop an idea, proposal or project in the open is that you will gain far more than you might lose because:

• exposing your ideas, proposals etc enables others to challenge them and improve them which leads to improved ideas and proposals
• it further enhances your reputation as a truly open and collaborative organisation/person
• it raises awareness of the fact that you are about to do something. So it’s a form of pre-marketing

In addition, the ‘value’ of what you do is not in the ‘ideas’ (I have 3 of these everyday before breakfast!) it’s in their realisation.

This is an interesting quote:

"Share your rough notes, meeting minutes and preliminary results as soon as you can. Sure, there’s always the risk that someone else might come along and nick your ideas but, unless you’re publishing plans for a nuclear reprocessing plant, it’s a lot more likely some helpful soul will pitch in with a helpful comment, pass you a link or contact, or tell you you’ve got it just plain wrong before you spend too much time and effort on the idea."
Source: Robin Hamman (Senior Broadcast Journalist/Producer at the BBC)

General Motors may keep their ideas to themselves and so did Lego. Lego don’t any longer. The story goes that a few years ago Lego released a long awaited product that enabled their users to build computer-controlled robotic models. This product took them years to develop in-house and in secret and then bring to the market. Within weeks of the release, the product had been completely reverse engineered by their user community and brought back together in the form of a highly superior product. Lego now do things more openly and have a mechanism for involving (and rewarding) users in all new product development. See this recent presentation by Prof Eric von Hippel, MIT at the launch of NESTA Connect.  (You need to be patient - this video takes a while to start - if the video is too slow you can click the audio tab and just listen to that). Thanks to David Wilcox for bringing this to my attention.

Wikipedia has a good definition of open innovation in the private sector. Someone needs to do one for the not-for-profit sector . . . . may be we could do it between us here . . . A NFP definition would not talk about patents but of Creative Commons Licensing but there are many parallels.

The Wikipedia definition makes the point that Open innovation needs a different mindset and company culture to traditional or closed innovation. It also includes the following table which I think is really enlightening. Again a NFP version of this would be useful.

PS: The image at the top of this post is of the front cover of the proposal to run the Innovation Exchange that we developed in the open here. Click on the image to enlarge it and count the number of authors!

PPS: We are using the same open process to co-design the next version of our ruralnet|online service here. Please feel free to join in or just browse.

This is an experiment in online social networking. If you are Jack Thurston of ‘The Bike Show from Resonance FM‘ fame please leave a comment.

It’s also an interesting case study, particularly for those who are struggling to figure this stuff out and grasp the relevance of it for them or their organisations.

The hypothesis behind this experiment is that social networking is a powerful tool and is very effective at joining people up with similar interests even though they are ‘doing their own thing in their own way in their own (online) places’.

A comment from Jack on this diary post will help confirm this hypothsis. Let’s see what happens.

Why Jack?
Last night I was listening to a podcast by Jon Winston from Bikescape using iTunes. Coincidentally, I had the Last.FM program running. This told me that 323 Last.FM users had also listened to this podcast while running Last.FM. It told me that it knew nothing about the ‘artist’ (Jon Winston). It also told me that there were two ‘Similar artists’: Jack Thurston and Scott Alumbaugh.

Last.FM knows nothing about Jack Thurston either, so I do a Google search and find his blog. At this point I realise that I have come across Jack before. He also does a podcast with a cycling theme*.

I read on and realise that we don’t just share an interest in cycling but there is also a rural thread in common. I then remember that my colleague, Paul Henderson, highlighted one of Jack’s projects to me about two week’s ago: www.farmsubsidy.org This amazing (and very clever) project uses modern law (freedom of information) and technology to bring together data on farm subsidies. It shows who gets what. David Henke of the Guardian wrote about here.

And finally, I see that Jack has a general interest in technology and attended the ‘BarCamp‘ that many of the people who got involved in the Open Innovation Exchange went to.

The chances are that Jack will find this post because he (or someone who knows him) will have his/her RSS Reader set up to scan for people writing about The Bike Show or farmsubsidy.org

Anyway, if Jack does comment here, it will demonstrate that the latest internet technology joins people up even though they don’t know each other and they are operating in different places. Will it work… how long will it take…? As the saying goes, watch this space.

Previous entries:

Thoughts on the new ruralnet|online - Part 1 (of many!)

* Listen to Jack’s account of the Dunwick Dynamo if you’re into intersting cycling challenges

I’ve just listened to a really interesting podcast from Jon Winston’s Bikescape (Episode 47, 20/10/07). It includes an interview, about 19 mins in, with Dave Snyder, Transportation Policy Director San Francisco Planning and Research and on the Board of ‘Liveable City’ in San Francisco. They talk about what happens when parking is unrestrained in a city. Note ‘Transit’ means ‘Public Transport, cycling etc’.

In San Francisco a one bedroom flat costs $2,000 a month but you can park your car (if you have one) for free in many places. This is referred to as a ‘market distorting subsidy’. The space occupied by cars could be occupied by accommodation and this would bring the price of accommodation down. Dave makes the point that if you do want to subsidise car use in this way then that’s fine but you should not pretend it’s not a subsidy. And you must recognise that if you spend public money doing this there will be less for other things like drug treatment centres etc.

Consider the supermarket in this country. Supermarkets are required by planning law to provide parking for their customers and this is generally free. But it’s not really. The high value space the cars occupy isn’t free. It costs money to provide and the opportunity cost is big. This cost is recouped by the prices charged for the stuff in the supermarket. OK so far. But we all pay the same prices for goods in the supermarket even if we walked there or cycled. So, when we go to the supermarket in the car we are being subsidised to do so. As a car user we are not paying the true cost of our action.

In the jargon, the true cost of using a car is ‘externalised’. It is not being paid for in total by the car user. The car users are being subsidised by the non car users who use the same supermarket and pay the same supermarket prices.

On this basis, would you pay for parking at your local supermarket on the basis that what they sold would be slightly cheaper?

Thanks to the generosity of many, the ruralnet|online co-design exercise is gathering steam over here. Please join in if you can, just visit to pick up insights for your own projects.

Here are some recent exchanges

The feature list!

What is ruralnet|online for?

This web 2.0 malarky really does work well

Thanks James and David

Following a lot of frantic activity over the last week, yesterday saw the launch of the first step towards the re-design of ruralnet|online - a mechanism to involve our users, past, present and potential, in the whole re-design process. Please get involved over here: www.ruralnetonline.org.uk.

Why should you get involved? What’s in it for you? How can you engage?

You can ‘engage’ as an anonymous browser. We are putting all our ideas up in the open and some of these ideas have been informed by some of the best brains in the internet world. So at the very least the content will be interesting and you might learn something which could help you.

You can comment anonymously. If you think we are barking up the wrong tree, please tell us! If you have an insight, we’d like to hear that too.

You can register (it only takes a couple of minutes and it’s free) and when you do you get your own blog to write whatever you like. When you’re logged in your comments get attributed to you too.

Some of the highlights on ruralnet|online so far:

- Adding value to networks and services - automatically
- how net:gain helped with the re-alignment of our ICT Strategy
- the ruralnet|uk communications strategy
- an ICT Strategy on a single page
- ideas on what forums (communities of interest/practice) might look like in the future

Please consider getting involved >>

I had a big, cheesy grin on my face as I took my headphones off my aching ears after 3.5 hours. I’d been helping to setup and moderate an Elluminate virtual classroom session run by the DTA. So why the cheesy grin? Well, the feedback was incredibly positive.

Each participant was asked what they thought of the pilot where we’d run three training sessions on income generation using the Elluminate virtual classroom system. Now the success was largely due to the content (which was good!) but we’d worked hard on the moderation too and the evaluation was really good.

Now I know, that when people are in a group situation, even a virtual group situation, they will be polite about another person (eg a trainer). But, in my experience, even in a group situation, they will not hold back when it comes to the criticism of technology. "It was great but the technology let us down" would be a typical response . . . . Well listen to this (there quite long gaps between contributions . . . we are still learning!):

We are on to something here . . . . cheesy grin fades . . .

Added on 10/3/08
There is now a transcript of this audio available here.

It was a good day today. Lots happening. The highlight (after the Elluminate session :-)) was a glimpse at the site that Paul and Duncan (mostly Paul!) have put together to support the consultation and co-creation exercise we are soon to embark on that I first reported here. As usual the guys have ‘over-delivered’ - why isn’t ‘good’ not good enough for some people?

I am banned from letting you know where this site is located but all will be revealed shortly - "When it’s ready". Can’t wait.