my|ruralnet - first shot at what ruralnet|online might be

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:

1. A mixture of free and paid for services. Some stuff we can give away or are a conduit for - a role for ruralnet to be a filter or aggregator for the sector - a digital curator at fairly low cost but great benefit to the sector. For example there is a real humdinger of a debate going on at the Commission for Rural Communities website. Why duplicate that over on ruralnet|online when we can pull in the feed instead and highlight, point towards, encourage participation by sharing what is going on at CRC. These free services would also include feeds to the paid stuff that we would offer (like Experts Online and GrantNet (tailored of course)

2. Personalisation. Some users/networks will be happy to pick up our feeds, tools, widgets and services and incorporate them into their systems to a greater or lesser extend with very little intervention from us. Others will need to have them set up for them from scratch- like our Google Apps for Farmers with training and handholding all the way. We need to be able to cope this this spectrum of users.

But it needs to be in their space, what's right for them, not forcing them to come to us and use (unless they don't have a system in the first place, we can also provide that for them - ruralnet|uk is always available for weddings, funerals etc)

So what would this look like?

Good question - what does a network look like when it's actually fairly distributed and you don't necessarily host it?
Well it might look a bit like this. In fact it doesn't look like anything - it's up to you and your network how it looks. You might set everyone in your organisation with Bloglines or Google Reader or maybe a Pageflakes dashboard.

How do you get it?
You would go to the ruralnet|online website where there would be some highlights of what is going on across the network (posts, comments, reactions) and you can go in and select what your network will contain.

A little bit like the National Rural search - in fact I can see the local events feeds from National Rural being a great addition to the package (there is lots over very clever stuff behind the scenes there). 2 or 3 clicks later and out pops your network in a box (well an OPML file) with some instructions on what to do next, including step by step guides for getting your personal network up and running and some tips on how to participate (eg Tim Davies' one page guides, the Commoncraft videos) and possibly our own training videos and resources.

Throw in a place to blog (if you haven't already got one) and some agreed shared tags and digital curating from us, we have a way of creating a network made up from many networks. At the same time we would always include tailored feeds to our other services so they people can access them as and when they need them.

Remember these aren't just another set of links, these are a hand picked set of dynamically updated live feeds - the traffic and pulse of the network, the value coming not just from the information, but the tailored, filtered, relevant information and relationships built across the network.

We still have one interesting issue that traditional membership organisations have an easy numerical advantage - measuring stuff - it's easy for membership organisations to measure 'success' (or is it?) - number of subscribers/logins etc but if we're not forcing users to come to one place to get it all, but do a certain amount themselves where we can't directly measure it, how do we show how good the network is? It's do-able but not as simple as come to us and login - but that's broken right, otherwise we wouldn't be doing this?