Simon’s Blog (the official one)

I’ve had the good fortune over the last couple of months to be working with some of the folk at the DTA on a pilot project where we are trialing the use of a virtual classroom to deliver training on income generation.

The project is the brain child of Jess Steele. The main trainer is Hugh Rolo and he has been supported by Mary Doyle, Neil Berry and others. We are all being helped by Josie Fraser who is an Elluminate specialist. The pilot is being funded by The Finance Hub.

We are being very ambitious in this project. Today, our second session with real trainees, we had 22 trainees and we used 4 breakout rooms during the session. Click on the image to see a screen shot of Elluminate in action. There is a lot going on! There’s a participant list, a chatroom, a whiteboard and a mic you pass around.

Although you login to Elluminate by putting an url into your browser it is actually a Java application and Java needs to installed all machines. But it works pretty well on PCs and Macs. All participants really have to use headsets otherwise you get dreadful feedback and/or echo if you decide to enable ’simultaneous’ talking. So, you need to install Java, you need to plug in a headset and get that working to hook into the system and then you’ve got to get used to the system itself. It sounded like a disaster waiting to happen to me. But, it’s been a surprise. Today we (Josie) resolved all the connection issues with one or two participants during the session so everyone (all 22) could participate. OK so there’s a bit of lag sometimes, especially in the audio, and you have to really concetrate but it’s OK.

So what have I learnt so far:

• Everybody needs to go through the Mic and Headphones check well before the session starts. Elluminate provide test routines for this.
• You need to understand what the system is good at and work to its strengths
• It’s all in the preparation. You need good planning and simple visuals all prepared and in place before the session starts
• Having pictures of people is really good (we are using mini profiles)
• Kick off with round-robin of introductions or ‘hello again’s to warm people up. We have come up with ways to make this a quick as possible.
• You need to establish clear protocols for the session eg so that people know how to ask for the mic (we ask them to put their virtual hand up); how to show approval or disapproval (we are using the voting feature - ‘give me a tick if you . . . ‘ )
• You need to get people involved and doing things (voting, putting their hands up, drawing on the whiteboard)
• You need good moderation. We are currently spliting this into two: 1) Josie is on general user care and helping resolve mic/headphone issues, and 2) I am getting the materials onto the system in advance and then during the flipping between slides at appropraite moments and moving people in and out of breakout rooms.
• Ideally you should also try and relate to participants as individuals . . . ‘Neil, you haven’t voted, what do you think?’
• Ideally you should monitor contributors and make an effort to involve those who haven’t said anything by asking them for their view in person (just like a good chairperson would do in an audio conference)

So is it the answer? Well it’s certainly part of it. I have been surprised that everyone has been able to get the technology working _relatively_ easily. It’s not a replacement for face-to-face BUT it reduces costs enormously. 24 people x (travel costs of

The planning for the development and launch of the next generation of ruralnet|online got off to a solid start this week using flipchart paper and post-it notes. Not a bit of IT in sight!

Our objective is to involve users, past, present and future, and the best brains in the Web 2.0 business, in the co-creation of ruralnet|online 2.0 and launch it to coincide with ruralnet|online’s 10th birthday on 10 April at our collaborate|2008 event.

We will be seeking to set up a focus group to meet face-to-face twice during this period and we will also be running an open consultation/ideas exchange online. We will model this on the Open innovation Exchange which brought me into contact with some fantastic innovators last year. We will work at pace and with a clear set of goals - just like before. We will seed this with a few ideas and concepts including these that have already been posted elsewhere:

- Ed Mitchell’s Three types of community
- Email’s broke . . . and it ain’t worth fixing
- Turning process into content
- Google Apps for Farmers
- Communities of Practice and Web 2.0
- Thoughts on the new ruralnet|online - Part 1 (of many!)
- Call Sign - Blog Sign?
- Turning the telescope the other way around
- Jane Berry’s Spiral of Engagement

We heard today that David Wilcox is available to help us out on this mission both online and offline. More details over the next few days.

About this time 10 years ago I was loading

The good thing about Christmas is that there’s generally a bit more time to have a proper chat with friends and you learn. A friend of mine, Julian (aka Bev - don’t ask), it transpires is heavily into Web 2.0 to promote his music and books. I explained how we had re-jigged our online services (Experts Online etc) and put them on a Web 2.0 platform to make them more accessible and easier for others to incorporate them into their own website. The basic thinking behind this is that we will have bigger impact (as a charity) if we can have a presence where people have already congregated online - on a local community website, on facebook or wherever.

Julian is in a different situation and has used Web 2.0 slightly differently. He has distributed his content all over the place: Flickr, YouTube, Typepad, Wordpress etc etc. This gives him a presence in many places and makes it more likely people will find him, his music and books. Then he uses his website as an aggregator of all this distributed content. Interesting.

It was good to talk Julian!

8/1/08
PS: Now also see: Joining Dots on the Internet

This post is prompted by a comment by Ed Mitchell on one of my recent posts. Ed said:

2. The key has to be the ongoing
aggregation of our distributed thoughts on our blogs by
interest/practice focused hubs which gather our thoughts and then, when
neccesary, we can come to the communal knowledge watering hole and kick
off in small focused bursts around specific issues…

This gives us the independence we want when we want it and the communal many brains focus when we need it…

We must start using effective keywords and experimenting properly between ourselves!

Focussing on the last sentence. When you are granted a CB Radio licence you get a Call Sign which is unique to you. What if we all had a ‘Blog Sign’ that was unique to us? Then we could use each other’s Blog Signs to tag things that we think particular people would be interested in. Then we could aggregate on our Blog Sign. Have I just reinvented email? Is this built into blogs already and I haven’t noticed?

Let’s see if I can start a trend. My Blog Sign is s1m0nb3rry.

Before going offline for a well deserved break (although I say it myself!). Can I leave these thoughts with you?

Yesterday I was hauled before the ruralnet|uk team in a Dragons’ Den-type scenario to explain what I meant buy a ‘web 2.0 version of ruralnet|online‘. David Wilcox was there as a critical friend too.

Over the last 12 months we have been moving our online services on to a Web 2.0 platform. See, for example, Experts Online, xPRESS Digest and Inforurale. We are now deploying these as independent services or as part of the services others are offering using widgets (see Essex Rural Partnership for example - the Experts Online widget is at the bottom left of the page). Oh, and it’s here too.

We now need to lash these services together and add a networking function (a forum?) and re-launch this as ‘ruralnet|online 2.0′ to coincide with ruralnet|online’s 10th birthday in March.

The question is, what does a ‘forum’ look like in the Web 2.0 world? The presentation below is my initial thinking on this. Please dive in with any comments you have. Are we on the right track here or have we fallen off?

| View | Upload your own

The animations are lost in the above slidecast so you might want download the original from here

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It is inconceivable to think now that just 5 years ago rural Britain faced the prospect of no access to broadband. The visionaries of the time, who mostly ended up playing an active part in the Community Broadband Network (established by ruralnet|uk and The Phone Co-op) and the Access to Broadband Campaign (ABC), could see that this would be a complete disaster for rural areas. They were right weren’t they? Anyone disagree? I thought not.

With the internet becoming a major delivery channel for nearly everything, including Government and other public services, how would the Government have coped with a group of people equivalent in size to a major city who were excluded from such services?

But it’s OK now. Virtually everyone has access to broadband. Or do they?

The trouble with broadband is that it is a rapidly evolving technology. It’s not like electricity or gas. Supply people with that and they’ve got it for life. With broadband, today’s broadband is tomorrow’s narrowband.

When I was project manager of the WREN Telecottage in the early 90s we were a trial site for ISDN and when the internet arrived and we hooked up an ISDN router, we thought we’d died and gone to heaven! Web pages loaded in an instant, just as fast, it seemed, as the stuff from our own server located 6 feet away. But you try ISDN today. You’d be VERY disappointed. Things have moved on.

We have a situation a bit like the deadly tryst that exists between hardware and software producers – faster machines beget more demanding software which demands faster hardware and so it goes on. In the same way, as ‘broadband’ gets faster so online service providers produce services which demand faster broadband speeds.

So what should happen in rural areas when the ADSL systems they have been provided with prove totally inadequate? Should organisations like the Regional Development Agencies meddle in the market again and fill in with whatever the next generation of broadband is? I don’t think so.

The trouble with ‘market meddling’ is that is screws things up. All those rural communities who have been provided with ADSL in places where there was market failure are probably stuck with it for sometime as those who have invested will need to see a return on their investment, and that takes time.

So, should we just leave these rural communities to miss out the THE economic and social development driver of our time? No we shouldn’t and we should meddle in the market again but this time we need to do it properly and give these communities a lot more than the market is prepared to deliver at the time.

I think I am right in saying that a system of ‘fibre to the street’ (or village centre) and very very high speed wireless links from there is about as good as it can get, as far as broad band is concerned, for the foreseeable future.

So next time we meddle in the market let’s not do it reluctantly. Let’s do it with real enthusiasm and properly.

Related information:

• I have written about rural broad band before here: my 2004 posting.
• The book pictured, written by one of the rural broadband warriors, Lindsey Annison, can be purchased here as a paperback or download.
• Read more about South Witham Broadband and the Community Broadband Network.

See also:

• BBC: Broadband digital divide looms.

Did you vote in the people’s 50 million? Don’t worry if you didn’t, it’s too late now. Sustrans won which is great. I voted even though I’m rather sceptical about these things (can’t think why!).

Sustrans was up against a project in Sherwood, an extension to the Eden project and a Black Country regeneration project - all very worthy initiatives - but it was a national project concerned with sustainable transport that won.

So, we’ll get a few more walkways and cycleways and some bridges which will make walking and cycling places possible again and enable people to cross ‘car-only’ routes once more. But is that all? Or is this a national vote in favour of sustainable transport - I’d love to think so.

I start this posting knowing that someone will read it and say "Where has this guy been? We all worked that out years ago." Despite this I am going to continue because if I’ve only just worked it out, there will be others like me who might find this interesting!

Those of us who have tried to support ‘Communities of Practice’ online will know that it is not easy, especially if it’s got nothing to do with ICT or making lots of money or organising a sports team.

Why is it so difficult? A key issue is that, on many issues, it is difficult to get to enough people interested in the same thing to the same extent for long enough to sustain an online group. Like most people, I am interested in lots of things and could belong to loads of communities of practice. But in real life I end up on the periphery of all of them. My interest in any particular thing waxes and wanes. This is captured brilliantly in Jane Berry’s* spiral of engagement (pictured) which she produced as part of the work on the Open Innovation Exchange.

OK, so how does Web 2.0 help? Well, on the one hand it would appear not to. Web 2.0 is very empowering for individuals and these days it is just as difficult to get Web 2.0 literate people to participate in an online group as it is to get the digitally excluded involved. The ‘literates’ are all doing their own thing in there own online spaces thanks very much. Why should they come and join your group?

But what Web 2.0 gives us is tags (keywords) and in the Web 2.0 world it is these tags that bring us together, or can potentially bring us together, in virtual online groups. So an alternative, to bringing people together and then expecting them to interact in a shared space, is to encourage individuals to write their own ideas in their own space (like I’m doing here) and to tag it. The tags then identify de facto communities of practice and draw the attention of individuals to the work of other individuals doing, and writing, about similar things.

"But," I hear you say, "I don’t want make contact with people who just write about stuff. I want contact with people who are actually doing stuff." I agree. That’s why we need to use the internet as our collective ‘workbench’ like Beth Kanter does so well over here.

* I have to express (great) interest here . . . Jane is my wife!

My colleagues at ruralnet|uk, Robert Mannion and Angela Brankley, had a good week this week dragging ‘digitally excluded’ farmers into the world of email, the internet and aggregation using RSS!

The Warwickshire Rural Hub now have 1000 members and evidence suggests that only about half of them use email. Many don’t even have a connection to the internet, some won’t have access to broadband even if they wanted it.

The hub was established after the 2001 Foot & Mouth (FMD) outbreak to support farmers and enable them to support themselves. Analyses of the way in which farmers coped during the FMD outbreak have showed that those with access to email and the internet coped better. So there is a really bit return for getting rurally isolated farmers online.

But how should you go about doing this? Is a training course the answer? Although this is what we’d been asked for, experience has told us that running a simple training course in these circumstances would have been next to useless. Time for some creative experimentation.

We decided we needed to set them up with their own email account, show them how to use it and how to use Google - quite a tall order for someone who has to use two hands to control a mouse . . .

It was also relevant that these farmers were part of a group.

We used Google Apps for Your Domain which:

• provided them all with gMail @warkshub.net
• aggregated key information from a range of relevant sources onto a single page: newsfeeds (inc a filtered feed from our own xPRESS Digest service), weather, access to their gMail account, shared calendars of farmers markets and other events in the West Midlands and more
• provided the network facilitators with a mechanism to communicate with the whole group.

My colleague Rob said:

The group can now receive timely and relevant information from the worldwide web delivered straight to their desktop.  They have effectively