Focus group thoughts

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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Onwards to lunch and after that, the card game where two scenarios (a small village fighting for sustainability and a large network of parish and town councils) were played out over a period of 3 years with some of the tools we went over during the day and other non-techy or free tools and processes. This story telling really brought out some interesting problems and opportunities about how groups and networks actually work (or not) and I'm sure David Wilcox will expand on this later.

Finally Simon brought us back to where ruralnet|online sits in the all of this. One striking thing that came out was the notion that has been discussed here about a one-stop-shop versus a more distributed, aggregated model with a mixture of free and paid for services. I'll expand more on this tomorrow with an idea we came up with making your own personal ruralnet|online - or my|ruralnet...