Thanks for everyone's input so far. It's now pay back time. Drawing everything together and injecting Paul's and Duncan's excellent work this week with Wordpress MU the image to the left is an attempt to show the status of our current thinking. A focus on relationships between people and organisations rather than 'information'. A focus on 'services' rather than 'content'.

In summary, it's a graphical RSS aggregator, maybe Google Apps For Your Domain, with WordPress (organisational websites and individual blogs), Drupal (Experts Online), Gmail (for those who want it) and other things sitting behind it. Although we're focussing on ruralnet|online here we'd be able to replicate this for other networks using the Networks Online philosophy.

Please let us know what you think. This is an Aunt Sally for everyone to have a go at.

Key questions are: What's the business model? Do we need a forum facility? What about shared file storage?

:-)

For years the BBC have set the standard for the delivery of a huge amounts of content in an accessible way. At ruralnet|uk many 'how should we do this' discussions end up with someone suggesting that we look at the BBC's website to see how they do things, what screen widths they publish for etc etc.

Well, I think they have done it again. The BBC's new beta site is very interesting and gets close in many aspects to the ideas emerging in this co-design process.

The new site owes a lot to those innovators at Netvibes and Pageflakes. Most of the new BBC's home page consists of 'tablets' of information that you can move around! If you're really interested in the weather, move that tablet to the top. If you like sport, then drag that tablet to the top too. Oh, but you're intersted in Rugby? Well, edit the sport tablet so that it displays Rugby information instead of Football. Brilliant. Oh and I really like the retro clock too.

This approach was the one we took when faced with the challenge of 'getting farmers online' in Warwickshire at the end of last year. See 'Google Apps For Farmers'.

Is this how the new ruralnet|online should work?