I didn't make it to the barcampUKGovweb (which to non-geeks probably sounds like some sort of some sort of alcoholic scouting trip for MPs) but loads of people who went have been enthusing about it online, including Dave Briggs who had an interesting post about the best platform to use for an online working group. Tom Steinberg of mySociety was proposing that mailing lists (generated by a Google group, which can do other things too) are still the best way of doing it online. The rationale was that:
email is work, and the web is not work. People are now so used to working through their email, that they are quite happy for it to be used for a number of purposes, whether it be news alerts (more popular than RSS feeds) or community interactions (more popular than social networks).
Hmm Dave puts a few counter arguments and I would like to chip in with a few observations which are relevant to ruralnet|online.
Something we hear all the time is that people are drowning in email and getting stuff out of their inboxes would be a real boon, and leave email for what it is good for - communicating messages one-to-one (or occasionally one-to-few).
Secondly there is a huge potential for people who have missed out on "Web 1.0" to skip all that messy stuff and make use of the new tools as we have found out with our courses for farmers using Google Apps
So should ruralnet|online just be a mailing list? (PS this would reduce development costs significantly, but not make a great press release come April 10th :) )
ruralnet|online feed
Paul I don't think email
Paul
I don't think email lists are good for making new connections, so as a social exercise they don't work too well. True, we had a mailing list for the Barcamp, but the real social networking was done through blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc.
Mailing lists are fine when a smallish group of people who know each other are working on a common project. But I think ruralnet would be much the poorer if it went down this route itself!
I admit it - I'm an email
I admit it - I'm an email centric worker. I have a FaceBook and a blog but I don't 'get' social networking, and I got bored with doing the blog. If I knew how, I'd put a link here to another comment on this site about my challenges with iGoogle...
If I need to know about something, it needs to get to my Inbox (to this end, I often send myself emails)...and if I need to do something, it needs to get to my Task List...and if I need to be somewhere, it needs to be in my calendar...and mostly it all starts with an email!...
Whatever ruralnet|online morphs into, it needs to consider us email centric Luddites...or help us re-engineer our workflow... :-)
I must admit I was
I must admit I was exaggerating a little to prompt a response and I agree that email lists are not good at making connections (I'm not entirely convinced Facebook is good for meeting new people but great at keeping up with people I already know). I'm sure ruralnet|online will be much more than that but who knows - see you tomorrow!
Email is work, web is
Email is work, web is not...
That's odd?...both 'feel' like work but actually it's the content or context that defines whether it's work or not...
For me, a computer screen is synonymous with 'work' ...it all feels like work when I have to sit at a computer screen to engage. But since we're talking about a 'work' context, thats okay, right?...