So, I’m at NETC and if I were a good blogger, I’d have been carrying my laptop to all the sessions and blogging live (there’s wireless and everything). But I am far from the perfect blogger and although I can and do take lots of notes during presentations (mostly questions that occur to me but may or may not have anything to do with the talk at hand) I rarely am able to write my conclusions until I have time to walk away and think about what was said, what notes/questions I’ve written down and how it all works together. Sometimes, unfortunately, I never have time to do formulate conclusions or write them down. Sometimes, I suspect, that’s why bloggers live-blog--write it down and move on--leave it to others to do with it as they will.

But, back to the subject at hand, the keynote speaker for today’s (now yesterday, actually, when this is posted) session of NETC was Dan Cotton who is the new director of e-extension. E-extension is a concept that’s been under discussion for several years, a tool that will help make Extension’s expertise and services available to new audiences in ways that are convenient, immediate, and accessible. It’s a concept that’s been much discussed and much planned and yet, in the way of new electronic things, is still very much an amorphous, not-really-sure-yet-what-it-is thing (and, to be honest, I think that’s its best feature at present).

It’s good stuff and it’s cool that it’s happening and in a time of difficult budget issues, it’s a big commitment by extension to fund e-extension. In addition to Dan Cotton as the new director, Kevin Gamble will be the Associate Director for Information Technology, Carla Craycraft and Craig Wood will be Associate Directors for Content. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on what Dan said. If you want to know more details visit the website. From here on in this post, I’m going to talk about stuff I’d like to see in addition to what’s generally talked about in the context of e-Extension.

Three things I’d like to see:

• A blog for anyone in extension who wants one
• Emergent capability (never forget this: on the internet what gets used is more important that what’s excellent; or, looked at another way--what gets used determines what's excellent)
• Online dialogues on controversial research topics (extension as facilitators for dialogues about things that affect people’s lives)

There should be as little governing policy as necessary to do the job (look at Harvard, University of Minnesota Libraries, Sun Microsystems, and Robert Scoble's Corporate Weblog Manifesto

‘Seeking information’ is only a small part of what people are doing online. We cannot be successful simply as a dispenser of information. Or, more accurately, we can be successful if we put a lot of effort into it and do it very, very well, but we will not be astonishing. I want to be astonishing.

We will also be much more successful if we expand our vision beyond what people will receive from us--we must be ready to receive knowledge from them as well. The web is a conversation. e-Extension is our opportunity to embrace that conversation. Dan Gillmor (We the Media) says that the thing it pays for him to know as a journalist--to embrace, really--is that his readers know more than he does. We need to embrace this too. We may have many experts, but if we look at all of Extension’s clientele and at everything they bring to the table, collectively they will always know more than we do. And that’s a good thing.

One reason this is so important is that we don’t know what the next great important thing is that Extension can do for people or that people can do for us. No one knows. Being open, flexible, self-organizing, and emergent will make it less necessary for us to know upfront what the next great thing is--we can’t know anyway; no one knows until it’s there--so our best shot at being successful will be to put in place systems that give us room to try things and see what happens.

It’s about the contact, the conversation, and the community as much (or more) than the content. It is also about putting things out there, encouraging energy, taking risks and seeing what will happen. People won't come to us because we're never wrong, never untidy, and never less than our best. They'll come because they trust us. And they will trust us because they know us, because we're there with things they want when they want them, and because we're engaged in conversation with them everyday.

Dan said today that he wants e-Extension to be a remarkable thing. I want it to be more than that, I want it to be a place where remarkable things happen.

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This is not at all as coherent as I would like it to be and it definitely doesn't include everything I wanted to say (for one thing I want to go on a bit about communities of practice at some later point) but I’ll leave it here for now.