Inspiration for our workshop
This may change - and I haven’t really checked with Laura - but at our workshop I expect to be referring quite a bit to the amazing development work my friends over at Ruralnet|UK are doing. Briefly, they are about to celebrate 10 years of providing online services to community and voluntary organisations, rural and urban too. It has been a “walled garden” approach with paid-for services behind a login. They are now re-inventing the whole thing in the social media world where a lot of good stuff is free. What’s extremely interesting is that firstly, they are doing the whole thing in the open, and inviting people to contribute online and in meetings. Secondly,they are rising to the challenge of mixing free tools and paid-for services. More at the links above to items I’ve written, or directly at ruralnet|online here.
I should say I’m working with Ruralnet, particularly with the sort of game we’ll be running at the workshop … so I’m a touch biased. But since it’s all open, you can form your own judgements.
I also hope that Paul Henderson, who is leading the development work, will be at the conference … and that I can tempt him to give a wave from here!
Thanks for the poking David! I’ll be there - and I can show where we’ve got to so far and how much doing it in the open has helped us.
So much has come out already which would never have emerged if we hadn’t thrown some of our ideas up in the air and seen which ones people caught and ran with.
We can’t just stick our heads in the sand and hope all this social media blows over - far better to get in there and use it to our advantage. Google is our friend, in more ways than one.
The only worrying thing is that at some point we’re going to have to build it!
Comment by Paul Henderson — February 15, 2008 @ 4:46 pm