Simon’s Blog (the official one)

The Tweeters amongst you will already know that I have been offered (and accepted) a secondment to Communities and Local Government (the Department of) as ‘Policy adviser: new technologies & online tools’ in the Community Empowerment Directorate. Grateful thanks go to Jonathan Adams who emailed me 6 hours before the application deadline saying:

Dear Simon
I saw this and thought of RuralNet. You may well know of this, but I
would not want it to pass by unnoticed.
Very short notice, but I have seen it only this evening.
Yours,
Jonathan

I’m very excited about this as it is a real opportunity to influence government policy with a White Paper due in the summer.

I’ll be using all the trusted open innovation principles on this one. I’d be a bit daunted if I didn’t know that my ‘pop-up’ support network will do just that once I get started. The job description follows. More at the beginning of next week.

(more…)

My sister-in-law lives in what must be one of the remotest spots in England. When we visit we leave our car on a grassy knoll and switch to a very old 4×4 for the last couple of miles of the journey which takes about 20 minutes.

Life for her is hard. She has a telephone thanks to the ‘Universal Service Obligation‘ but when this goes wrong it’s often out of order for several weeks. There is no mobile phone signal. TV comes in by satellite.

Internet access is over the dodgy telephone line. She can only get dial-up access so it’s slow and the telephone line is (obviously) engaged when she is online.

My sister-in-law visited us last week and I helped her setup a new laptop. The one she has is more that 6 years old and was beginning to struggle a bit. We got the laptop home and started to set it up. It came with Windows Vista. The first thing you realise is that, to set up a laptop these days, you need an internet connection. We have broadband. The first thing to do was to install virus protection. This involved dowloading an update to the program supplied and the latest data files. Once this was done, Vista needed updating too: 37 updates were required - nearly 100 Mbytes.

This whole process would have been practically impossible over a dial-up connection.

When you add to this the fact that more and more essential public services are only available online you start to feel very uncomfortable (or at least you should) that a significant cohort of the UK’s population, mostly rural, do not yet have broadband access.

While she was with us, I also set my sister-in-law up with an account on Twitter. Which she seems to appreciate (see image). At least there are still some services that work over a dodgy dial-up connection.

All the insights gathered in the co-design exercise that we have conducted here - www.ruralnetonline.org.uk - have been pulled together to produce a prototype for ruralnet|online 2.0. This prototype is a fully working system for the Rural Community Carbon Network and is live here: www.communitycarbon.net. It was launched at collaborate|2008 on 10/4/08. Click on the image above to view an annotated screenshot which describes each area of the ‘root’ page.

The Community Carbon Network is truly innovative and draws on the ideas expressed here over the last 3 months. The key factors that guided this implementation are:

1. - a recognition that in any interest area (such as rural development) there is already lots of activity going on that is being carried out by individuals and organisations;
2. one cannot expect the online elements of this activity to stop or move to another online place;
3. there has always been a lack of ‘joining up’ within any interest area but Web 2.0 technology provides new opportunities to greatly improve this situation;
4. As well as linking existing activity up, we have a role, a duty even, to provide the ‘means of production’ to anyone or any organisation who wishes to contribute to an interest area that we support. The means of production include the technical tools and online space but also the awareness and skills to participate effectively;
5. Web 2.0 technology empowers the individual and small organisation. It is very accessible, easy to learn and disentangles content from the way that content can be used and delivered to users. Joining with others into groups or coalitions is no longer a pre-requisite to taking effective action. Increasingly there is trend for groups to form in an ad hoc fashion based on the ability, that Web 2.0 provides, to identify and aggregate people, ideas, services and information based on what individuals and small organisations are actually _doing_ at any particular moment in time.
6. Providing web space and the essential tools to those who need them now costs very little once systems are in place to largely automate the whole user registration process. So we should continue to focus on:

• the delivery of online services not online systems (such as Experts Online, xPRESS Digest, Active Brokerage etc)
• the empowerment of individuals, groups and organisations so that they can participate in the new online world through awareness raising, training and ‘as required’ support services

So, what does the Community Carbon Network (CCN) look like and what does it do?

We have pulled together various bits of technology and techniques to create the CCN. This same set of technology and techniques will form the basis of ruralnet|online 2.0 and we are able to replicate this for any other network. Each network will have its own domain name and branding and will share the services and other resources. This continues the ‘Networks Online‘ philosophy established in 1998.

At the heart of CCN is Wordpress Multi-User (WPMU) running on servers we manage and backup. Each network has a ‘root’ site at: www.owndomainname. Then you can set up as many sub-sites/blogs at userid.owndomainname as you need (up to 20,000).

At the time of writing the CCN has: www.communitycarbon.net as the ‘root’ site:

and we have one sub-site configured as an individual’s blog at: lowcarbondiary.communitycarbon.net

and one sub-site configured as website: rccn.communitycarbon.net

All sub-sites operate in their own right and the owners have complete control of all aspects of them. They are likely to be marketed using their own sub-domain name url. Sub-sites will also be abl;e to incorporate shared services eg direct feeds from xPRESS Digest or access and/or registration for the Experts Online service.

A Green Bar helps tie all the sites within the network together. This contains a link to the ‘root’ site; a drop down lists all the sub-sites and a link to the latest posting over the whole of the network in contained in the Green Bar.

The ‘root’ site is controlled by the network manager. It is an ‘aggregator’. It is setup to pull together the latest activity from all the sub-sites (blogs and websites). It also pulls in other relevant activity going on elsewhere. For example, Twitter users can place insights, thoughts, hints and tips straight on to the aggregator page from ‘within’ Twitter. The aggregator page for CCN also pulls in relevant news from xPRESS Digest and answers from Experts Online.

Root pages for any network will morph and evolve organically according to network needs and the success (or not) of specific external feeds. The external feeds used and the filters applied will be modified as the network grows.

Finally, the root page includes a custom search. At present this is based on the Google Custom Search which is configured to search all of the sub-sites/blogs associated with the network, Experts Online, xPRESS Digest and selected, key external sites. Again the scope of this search will modified according to the needs of the specific network.

For more details on how the system works or to explore how this methodology could be applied to your network please contact Rob Mannion on 0845 1300 411 or r[dot]mannion[at]ruralnet.org.uk

Thanks to everyone who has contributed so generously to this co-design process. We have invented something new that wasn’t there before!

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.

Here is my presentation of the new version of ruralnet|online delivered at collaborate|2008 on 10/4/08. Sorry that the audio is a but stuttery . . . I need more practice. but anyway I think it is still helpful.

[Addendum: at one point I say we had 40,000 users. I should have said 4,000 users and this is the number on the slide.]

If the slide transitions don’t work automatically for you, you will have to advance them yourself. Or, you can go to slideshare and watch it there.

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This is a transcript of the audio recording first published here.

Jess. This is about your feedback on the Elluminate sessions, what do you think you’ve learned from them, what was your favourite part of them, and particularly lessons for the pilots

Annie. I’ve enjoyed both my sessions. It’s been interesting to discuss in this arena with other specialists comign from both the vol sector and the business sector. I’d like to see more of this type of thing. It’s useful for busy people who are not always office-based but may be working from home or other locations. We can all find time to log in.

Rebecca. Sorry, I was clicking away thinking it was, but the microphone wasn’t turning on then. I’ve particularly enjoyed getting to grips with using the Balanced Scorecard and then Dragon’s Den exercise was great. It would be useful to see all four Dragon’s Den presentations and then choose one or be given one to feed back on. Platform was really accessible once we got used to it. Really good to be able to sit here miles away from everyone else and be able to discuss things. Need more of this. I’m coming from the voluntary sector learning more about business thinking. Teaching us to pitch ideas in a business environment would be incredibly useful.

Stefanie. I didn’t pick up the microsphone I was just speaking away! This method of learning, online, I think it’s brilliant. It feel it’s the way I’d like in future to participate in learning instead of going to training courses! The main thing I’ve got out of it is to shift from focus on social return (that grant funding emphasises). It’s really helped me balance and look at the other side. But I’m nowhere near there yet, I’d like to see a model pitch, develop more business skills, use Balanced Scorecard properly. But it’s been a very good experience.

Joe. It’s been really interesting, especially this session today with the DVD to go with it. The amount of preparation previously was a lot of work. I was very busy and to get through that was really hard. My other favourite part is the Balanced Scorecard - very useful, I’ve never done that before.

Christine. I found the sessions really interesting. I feel that I’ve learnt an awful lot. Would like to develop my knowledge with regards to businesses. It was interesting to hear other people’s point of view. I’d like more sessions. Would love to have seen all the Dragon’s Den presentations. Done online before but it was just typing in the chat space – rather tiring. This has been very good to sit and speak and develop a flow. It would be good if this information could be cascaded to groups so they could see how to develop business ideas. It’s great and I’ve really enjoyed it and I hope it continues.

Paul. Sincere apologies for not being involved in last week’s session. I was travelling in Israel and the hotel I was staying in had a terrible wireless connection so the technology didn’t work. Also, only got back at the weekend so didn’t have time to do the homework, so I’ve been mainly listening this week. I found overall process very useful. I wish there was something like the DTA in Northern Ireland because many organisations need to be going through this process at the moment. We’ve had a period of relatively large amounts of funding and that has definitely come to an end so all organisations need to be looking at their sustainability. So I’ve learnt a lot from the process and I’m looking forward to the residential.

Heidi. I’ve found it tremendously helpful. It’s given me access to a whole range of skills that I’m really not sure where I would have found them from had I not been involved in this project. I’m in two minds about online versus face-to-face but the aspect of it being over a number of weeks and being able to comtemplate and build up between the sessions has been valuable so I’m more skewed towards the online learning. In relation to my own practice, having been asked to consider and be critical about other people’s proposals, will definitely be reflected in the way I take this organisation forwards. The Balanced Scorecard is a tremendously useful tool. Overall I feel very positive about it.

Brian. I found the process really interesting. I’ve shared in the first and third sessions. Struggling a bit to feed back. I hope at the residential we can look at overall programme objectives and what we’re expecting from the pilot and would be interested to help in planning for the future. Hoped I could use this locally, not sure now that it is, but I have really enjoyed the experience.

Neil. The first week was always going to be the worst, overcoming technical difficulties. Spot-on today, it seems to have gone well. Have learnt a lot, great to hear other people’s comments, in particular on the Balanced Scorecard because ACF is very keen on this, so it’s great that everyone’s enthusiastic about using that. Was sceptical about online courses rather than face-to-face. Still have minor reservations but since we sorted out the IT I really enjoyed, particularly today’s session, because it went smoothly with the IT especially for me.

Liz. Using internet for this is eye-opening, I do feel difficult not being able to see people and talking into space is odd but I’m surprised it’s worked so well. I have learned a lot but I don’t feel I’ve grasped it yet, more on gut feeling rather than rigorous assessment for what’s a good option and what’s not. We’ve looked at examples where they are seeking loan finance. It would be interesting to look at those setting up enterprises without taking on debt. What I love about this is that we’re talking to people across the country. Residential will be good, being able to talk face-to-face. And all the things I’ve queried as not clear will be made clear. We’ll be able to meet face-to-face and even go back to listen to some of it.

Magda. I really enjoyed the sessions. The lesson I’ve learned from doing this is a personal benefit, that I can talk better and pitch better. Would like more, this session was definitely the best. I like the Dragon’s Den and also the Balanced Scorecard.

Kerry. It’s been great for me. Over the years I’ve seen lots of different ways of evaluating propositions but not seen the Balanced Scorecard – v useful, I’ll use it in future. It’s been great week-by-week to share views, with different people. Everybody brings something different to the thought process, and everyone’s spread out across the country which makes it even better. A novel way to go about learning – week-by-week we all got to grips with it. The technology can work. I’d like to have another go in future. Great to have the opportunity to take part and thanks.

Amanda. I’ve really enjoyed the two sessions I’ve managed to come to. Especially today with the Dragon’s Den approach and the DVD to watch beforehand. In terms of what I’m going to use Balanced Scorecard will be useful in future. In terms of the learning module, one of the reasons for coming on the course was to see how online learning might work. My organisation is interested in doing this in the future. After initial teething problems it has been really enjoyable.

Linda. We’re lucky to have in this project a mix of IT and residential for face-to-face. I work visually so I’m not a big fan of huge wads of text to plough through. It’s tough prioritising it with workload so I preferred the DVD to the paper homework. I can see this as a really exciting communications platform for feedback to practitioners on social enterprise ideas. If they’re lucky they might get funding for a single consultant supporter, where they get one individual with expertise in eg finance or marketing. With this platform you could have four experts, covering each of those four quadrants, in different parts of the world possibly, actually taking them through a business proposition and marrying up all that human capital in one project. That could be really exciting.

Judith. Didn’t have a mic – sent a text to the chatroom. Neil read this out: “It was brilliant, especially the Balanced Scorecard because it opens my thought process, and makes it more holistic. We definitely need more sessions. It was a bit difficult, given work pressure, to do the homework more thoroughly, especially last week’s huge business plan. Great learning experience and will be definitley useful in my work, is already proving useful. Online great - I’m at home with my vomiting child and would have otherwise missed the session if I’d had to travel. Hooray to the organisers!

Miles. I’ve participating in 2 of 3 sessions. I was a bit sceptical when I started and not too sure how things would go but I have been absolutely enlightened. It’s great integrating from people from different organisations and with one’s experience have a bit of input. Would like to have the four Dragon’s Den presentations and could have made a more informed decision. Looking forward to residential. I’m going through the mill with my Whitby project, trying to get it into a dev trust and becoming more sustainable. Have already taken the Balanced Scorecard back to the camp, so to speak. Thanks to the organisers I think you’ve done a really good job.

Simon. Can’t come to residential. Been a learning process for us moderators as well. As participants have got more comfortable with the technology, we’ve also been picking up hints and tips along the way to make these sessions more interactive and useful. If we were to start again we would get off to a flying start. Thanks to all the trainees who’ve acted as guinea pigs.

Hugh. Thank you to everyone. It’s been a learning experience for us. We’ve been exploring an awful lot at once, including difficult homework. But in the real world you get both information overload and inadequate information. The electronic platform and the material that fits in their as well as trying to sharing tools like the Balanced Scorecard and thinking about how ideas are pitched. It really has been a pilot for us all and I look forward to coming up with sensible ways forward at the residential. We have in the pipeline some proposals to do some further work to develop this and we’ll be using Elluminate within the DTA for internal discussions of all kinds in the future.

Jess. Have to produce final report for Finance Hub who have funded it. If you would like to feed in further points – as honest as you like, you’ve all been very polite to us but if you want to make any other points that you didn’t want to say in the main room, please email me. I wll send the final report round to all of you once we’ve submitted it to the FH and we’ll keep you informed with where we take this next. Thanks to everybody, it’s been great fun and I hope we’ll see as many of you as possible at the residential.

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.

When we set up online systems for groups the specification usually includes ‘forums’. These are online places where people who share interests can gather to share and exchange ideas, information and knowledge. However, forums are rarely very active. The next generation of internet tools (aka Web 2.0) offer new ways of thinking about linking people who share interests. The screencast below gives an idea of the possibilities.

This is just an idea. We’d be really interested to hear what you think.

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If the presentation doesn’t load (it has been known) then it can be downloaded here. The audio to go with it is here.

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.