Competition, collaboration or confusion?

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.

Replacing the Rural Services Partnership's previous website takes the news service that was provided via the Rural Focus and combines it with password protected forums, document store and other areas for the members of the Rural Services Partnership (of which ruralnet|uk is a member) - I hope you're staying with this, there will be questions later!

What does this mean for ruralnet|online, how does it fit in with what we're trying to do over here?

Competition?

Well on the surface it may appear that several features we've discussed appear - although one difference is the balance of content in front of and behind behind the login - being a membership organisation there are items like meeting minutes which obviously need to be behind a login for that particular network, although other content like items in Rob Hindle's 'blog' (you will need a username and password to see anything on this page) are also completely behind the login except for a short teaser.

• Membership - While registration for the rsnonline website is limited to members of the 250 organisations that make up the Rural Services Partnership, ruralnet|online is aimed at anyone involved with rural development.
• Model - rsnonline appears to based on a centralised model of facilitation.  Members need to go to the website and login to engage and read forums, posts and documents.

  There is the potential for ruralnet|online to be a much more distributed network not forcing anyone to have to log into the site to engage and be part of the network - with our other services flowing across the network in tailored, relevant feeds.
  It would probably be much more 'porous' with more feeds being available from a central hub (eg it isn't possible to subscribe to individual blogs or other feeds apart from the main news feed within rsnonline, meaning that you have to keep going back to the central hub to get updates) 

  (Images from Ed Mitchell much more explaining this in brilliant and clear detail)

Collaboration?

Certainly there is scope for collaboration here:

• ruralnet|uk is a member of the Rural Services Partnership and we provided a Rural Services widget for the Rural Focus
• The work of the Rural Services Partnership is sponsored by the Commission for Rural Communities and so is our Rural Service Support project so surely there is some overlap there too (although more on confusion below)
• We already use the Rural Focus feeds for xPRESS Digest so I'm sure we will switch over to the new site and offer the use of the other tailored feeds coming from xPRESS
• If ruralnet|online ends up being more of a network of networks, if we could draw more information from the rsonline site then this could flagged and highlighted to a much wider audience and we could feed more information back into the forums and debates happening over there   

Confusion?

There is definitely some confusion when it comes to branding and users.  We've already had a support call asking why a user's ruralnet username and password won't work for the rsnonline site! It's taken us a couple of days to get our heads round it, so pity the poor end users who have to distinguish between ruralnet|online, rsnonline, Rural Services Partnership, Rural Service Support, ruralnet|uk - what's an organisation, network or service and who runs what?!  I'm sure this can be cleared up but it's an unfortunate byproduct of the sector (which is why I've tried to avoid acronyms which can be even more confusing)

So where does this leave us? As members of the Rural Services Partnership we're already talking to the rest of the membership and the developer Johann Tasker about the site and how it fits in with ruralnet|online and our other services - ( it's built on a Joomla platform so very Web 2.0 friendly) and of course anyone is more than welcome to comment over here about the site.

Unlike the BBC who will never acknowledge on air that Sky (whisper it quietly) show Premier League football live, despite the fact everyone who has ever watched a game of football on TV knows they do, we're quite happy to link to, highlight and discuss what's going on.

By knowing what is out there and also knowing can't deliver it all is what will make ruralnet|online and hopefully the sector stronger not weaker.