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:

As Paul has said, at the focus group day we played a version of the social media game originally developed with my colleague Drew Mackie, and enhanced by Beth Kanter and others.
The way it worked, to summarise, was:

1. We split into two groups, and each invented a scenario. As Paul reported, these were a small village fighting for sustainability, and a large network of parish and town councils. The instruction was, "make it challenging because the other group will be solving the problems and looking at how social media can help". (Of course the catch is that you inherit the other group's challenges!).

| View | Upload your own

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.

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

This weekend I was at BarcampUkgovweb, a get-together of civil servants developing Government web sites and online services, with the consultants, contractors and freelances who work with them. Or would like to!

Congratulations Simon, Paul and the rest of the team on asking partners, subscribers and everyone else interested for ideas on developing Ruralnetonline.
To help do that, how about we think of some typical situations where organisations, groups or individuals have a communication or collaboration need that could be satisfied by Ruralnetonline.

One of the good things about all this Web 2.0 stuff is that you can pick up things that are really useful and interesting but would never have crossed your path otherwise.

Over at Nick Booth's Podnosh blog he blogged about a new website called Hear by Right. What's this got to do with ruralnet|online? Well, Hear by Right provides a framework to assess and improve the ways of involving young people in their futures.