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.

I was alarmed to hear a piece on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme this morning. It said that OfCom had reported that broadband uptake in rural areas was now higher than it is in urban areas and that ‘a digital divide’ had been closed. This is so misleading that it beggars belief and will do a lot damage to the efforts of those campaigning for broadband in rural areas.

I think the uptake figures quoted were 59% vs 57%. But, before everyone relaxes and says “job done” – especially those developing policies for Government - I’d like to point out one or two things:

1 Figures are higher in rural areas DESPITE the fact that there are a significant number of people who can’t get it, even though they are desperate for it. I wrote about this earlier – see this true story

2 So DEMAND is a lot higher in rural areas than urban areas but the market cannot supply to all those who want it

3 Why is demand so high? Well, there is a mix of reasons: less of the population is within reach of a public access point; you can’t just walk around the corner to access a service and more and more services (including government ones) are increasingly provided online and, furthermore, realistically, you need broadband to use them.

4 An urban person’s broadband is not the same as a rural person’s broadband. I expect these figures relate to the increasingly inadequate ADSL, telephone-based service. This service will not be considered to be broadband in 2-3 years time. I wonder how the figures would compare if you looked at the higher spec services, the non-ADSL services, the services we’ll all need in the very near future. I can tell you that the rural figure will be near to zero as these services are simply not available.

So please, let’s not take our eye of the rural broadband ball on the basis of a very, very misleading headline from the Today Programme.

Monday, April 28th, 2008
Broadband must be recognised as an essential service

Monday, December 17th, 2007
The trouble with rural broadband

Friday, April 30th, 2004
Rural Broadband - Is BT good for rural communities?

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.

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.

| View | Upload your own

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

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 >>

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