Yesterday and today I'm out and about with at the UK Circuit Riders conference in sunny Birmingham. We had a great day yesterday and I helped out with a session run by David Wilcox, Nick Booth and Laura Whitehead who I've finally met!). highlight of the session was the chance to Skype with Beth Kanter (who has already blogged about it here).

I picked up on a new 'forum' while doing xpress this morning. It's from the CPRE and nothing more sophisticated than a Wordpress.com blog.

One huge advantage of doing this in the open is that we know we're not the only rural organisation/network out there.  Acknowledging this means that we're much more consciously looking outward (and using tools like Google Analytics to see who is linking to us and talking about us - including in New Zealand) so we were pleasantly surprised and interested to see a new website for the called rsnonline.

When we played out the scenarios in David's game we noticed that ruralnet|online didn't figure much. In fact although it was there in the background some of the people didn't use it until year 3!

Now this might seem a bit worrying when we're trying to work out what ruralnet|online should be but I didn't come away thinking that.

We had a fair amount of debate on the day about one-stop-shops vs network and where ruralnet|online would fit in.

As has been said here and elsewhere the old model of a membership and subscribers is breaking down and having to be rethought radically. Whatever happens I think the following two points will be central to our offering:

Like I said in the previous post, it's been a busy week and getting around to posting something has been a challenge, but firstly a BIG thank you to everyone who came. Despite what Dave Briggs said there is no need to feel guilty, we got a huge amount out of the day and I hope everyone that came also got something out of it too, even if it was just an eye opener to what is possible.

The timings for the day went a bit out of the window thanks to some train problems, but after Simon's introduction and my review of my Working2.0 day there was a great session back at the ranch which we didn't really capture but there was a huge amount of informal knowledge sharing, demonstrating between all the participants and one of the highlights of the day. continued . . .

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Wow you know it was a good day when it takes you a week to post anything about it.

We had a great meeting a couple of weeks ago with Megan Griffith and Karl Wilding from NCVO (and David Wilcox), where we discussed amongst other things the future of ICT Foresight.

One of the things we wanted to do was map the people, organisations, initiatives, events, places/platforms and ideas that were involved in shaping the future of the third sector. We had a very low tech approach on the day - colour-coded post it notes (pics to come). However we thought by pulling this together online it could be shared, added to, tracked and reused by everyone involved.

A quick mini blog post about campaigning prompted by Bill's comment about campaigning.

It's not often you sit at the computer and go wow - but that just happened. I'm going through a list of movers and shakers in the social media world making an OPML to share with everyone and was adding Paul Miller to the list - another UKwebcampbargov attendee who picked up on the fascinating Farmsubsidy.org.

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