The Warwickshire Rural Hub now have 1000 members and evidence suggests that only about half of them use email. Many don't even have a connection to the internet, some won't have access to broadband even if they wanted it.
The hub was established after the 2001 Foot & Mouth (FMD) outbreak to support farmers and enable them to support themselves. Analyses of the way in which farmers coped during the FMD outbreak have showed that those with access to email and the internet coped better. So there is a really bit return for getting rurally isolated farmers online.
But how should you go about doing this? Is a training course the answer? Although this is what we'd been asked for, experience has told us that running a simple training course in these circumstances would have been next to useless. Time for some creative experimentation.
We decided we needed to set them up with their own email account, show them how to use it and how to use Google – quite a tall order for someone who has to use two hands to control a mouse . . .
It was also relevant that these farmers were part of a group.
We used Google Apps for Your Domain which:
- provided them all with gMail @warkshub.net
- aggregated key information from a range of relevant sources onto a single page: newsfeeds (inc a filtered feed from our own xPRESS Digest service), weather, access to their gMail account, shared calendars of farmers markets and other events in the West Midlands and more
- provided the network facilitators with a mechanism to communicate with the whole group.
My colleague Rob said:
The group can now receive timely and relevant information from the worldwide web delivered straight to their desktop. They have effectively
Good to see that you managed to do this practically.
An oft-quoted adage (that this adds further credibility to) is that “RSS is like sex… you hear people going on about how great it is, but until you actually try it yourself, it’s hard really to appreciate what all the hype is about !”