Viewing blog postReturn to blogGood trip to Manchester on Friday
Last Friday, Oli, Josef and I went to Manchester to see Co-operatives UK and the Phone Co-op, and a very successful day it was too.
Our first visit was to Co-ops UK. We were scheduled to see Graham Mitchell, their marketing and communications man, but he was illl at the last minute and couldn't see us. Instead we saw John Butler, the Deputy Secretary: much higher up, but not so relevant. Still, we seemed to make a good impression, telling him about Open Source software. We must still see Graham Mitchell sometime, but it was a good opening. Next we went to the Phone Co-op, to see Shaun Femsom, who heads their Internet division. It was very informal. We spent a couple of hours with him at a local pub. He is very bright and sharp, asked lots of difficult, penetrating questions, but listened carefully and sympathetically. He is an old hand, having started Poptel and was very much in tune with us. He suggested that he would listen sympathetically to a proposal from us for jointly hosting the Open Groups on their server. I don't think we could have asked for more! We had quite a good discussion on the train on the way back too. Someone (not me) suggested that the Open Groups concentrate more on offering blogs and wikis than on email and maillists. The more I think about that, the more I like it. Firstly, it sets us apart from the crowd of social networking software providers. Secondly, there is a lot of 'low hanging fruit' (to use Mamading's expression) there for the picking. We can offer groups a blog for the whole group, and also for members or sub-groups. They can set up RSS links between them, and also for other similar groups, as well as the whole of the RSS world. Thus we have the start to a decentralised community. We can offer wikis set up with a set of template pages they may use if they wish. These can include vision pages, working group pages, meeting support pages, etc. So with a trivial amount of development work, we can offer a basic organisational support system. All of this needs to be supplemented with very good user guides, which will build into induction courses. We can also set up cross-group support discussions, to help link groups with each other and give them backup. So, all looking very promising. Next stop, the New Economics Foundation on Thursday.
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