Joitske, I have also found that embedding meetings and conferences into the normal life of participants is very difficult. I’ll look forward to your lessons from using Ning. In another workshop, we tried that with facebook, but probably did not invest too much time in the pre-conference activities, so it did not really take of.

At apf-dairy.ning.com we are now trying to engage participants in conversations before the event. We hope to discuss during the event how to continue- in that way we hope to build some ownership of the social media.

Also, your audience might find Extension in Social Media http://collaborate.extension.org/wiki/Social_Media_in_Extension and Beginners Guide to Social Media http://collaborate.extension.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide_to_Social_Media_in_Extension helpful.

Beth, I am on twitter (@sdohrn) but have not been active in quite a while. I did however set up ecto and will use the twitter feature to shoot out notices of new posts. Not many people we work with (agriculture development, natural resources management) use web2.0 tools (yet?) and I have tried too often to introduce more than one tool at a time to learn that that does not work at all. This is why we are trying to get the blogging right and so might able to recruit more bloggers next time to free up time for us to tweet, film and do other exciting things.

We are only two people who will write, so I think rather than live blogging, we will take notes and then post session (or speaker summaries).

Simone, I am following Beth’s suggestion and will be using the desktop blog editor ecto (I decided to use my mac, not the PC laptop from work, since I feel more comfortable on that, plus it is smaller and lighter). On the PC I use Windows Live Writer, which I like a lot and up to know I used Scribefire (a Firefox extension) on my mac. I decided to try ecto because it runs as a separate program, so my writing won’t be affected by browser crashes.

All of these programs are fairly easy to set up and are basically desktop text editors that save your work on your computer first and by adding your blog credentials you then publish your post directly from the program without having to login to the webinterface of your blog.

There is a post on desktop blog editors on problogger and one on Mashable on editors for Windows but they are not the newest.

We employed an external company to install, design and train the intranet to key staff. Although we matched the old intranet for content and added some new features, probably the most important factor for the success was the training. It was such a huge concept and we felt the company did not deliver a good enough training scheme. Its only a few ’switched-on’ individuals who have seen the potential and contributed some useful content. However, there’s still user apathy.

With help from a previously published blog entry regarding Web 2.0 collaboration and a 3 day workshop with Chris Addison from Euphoric, we hope to inspire our researchers and staff look again at the intranet and realise how good it is.