Remarks of the Working Group for Rural Development

1. LOCREGIS and the Working Groups

LOCREGIS i a project, originally initiated by DG XVI of the European Union. The main tasks of LOCREGIS are

	to make an inventory of the Information Society Projects in the Objective 6 area in Finland and Sweden and Objective 1 area in Austria
	to identify characteristics (Best Practice) of so called core projects and disseminate information of these projects to persons planning new projects
	To contribute to a network of experts for ideas, projects and products in the Information Society

The Working Groups

The central ideas of the working groups of LOCREGIS are

to define and complete on specific areas the content of the Best Practice Criteria which have been developed by LOCREGIS and

to help starting new projects.

The working groups are

1.   Rural development and Information society,
2.   Information networks in new model of working and
      networking
3.   Making new educational and other services accessible to
      citizens especially on the sparsely populated and/or less
      developed areas
4.   Helpdesk for new projects

This paper is the final report of the Working Group for Rural development and Information Society. The results of the working groups will be presented in the LOCREGIS´ Helsinki-seminar, January 22-24, 1998.

2. The Working Group for Rural Development and Information Society

The aims of the Working Group

Different aspects of Rural Development are included in the content of several LOCREGIS´ core projects. Rural Development is considered to be a very important way to keep a region inhabited. One of the aims of the Working Group is to report about the special features of implementation of the Information Society projects in the rural areas.

The other aims of the Working Group are to
a) discuss the special conditions for development processes and
b) evaluate the role of Best Practice criteria in support and development of processes
c) give recommendations of the use of Best Practice Criteria in Rural Development processes

Participants

The participants of the working group are

Veli-Matti Karppinen and Tarja Lukkari/MATVE Finland
Päivi Kapiainen-Heiskanen/INTERNETIX and DINE PM, Finland
Ann-Margret Goransson/AGENDUM Sweden
Ake Wedin/IT-Triangle Sweden
Erich Pöttschacher/GMOA Austria

Rappoteurs:
Auli Strandh/LOCREGIS
Esko Hurme/LOCREGIS

The projects presented

The LOCREGIS core projects represented in the working group are:
Matve, Finland
Internetix, Finland
Agendum, Sweden
IT-Triangle, Sweden
GMOA, Austria

Presentations of the projects is found in annex 1.

3. The report from the meetings of the Working Group for Rural Development

General

The first meeting of the group was held on May 23-24, in Stockholm. The second meeting took place in Helsinki September 4, 1997. On the both occasions all the group members were present.
The Working Group for Rural Development is a functional group with an appropriate size. It is heterogeneous enough to guarantee a diversity and varicosity of opinions. The group also uses and reflects different approaches of Rural Development-projects which are commonly used in several countries.
All of the projects of the Working group are LOCREGIS´ core projects. They may be categorised in accordance to different approaches to rural development as follows:

1. Approach for more public awareness of IT (GMOA)
2. Approach for creating general and specific conditions for intelligent IT use and general development processes by using IT concept (IT-triangle)
3. Approach for IT-based local and regional platform development (Internetix)
4. Approach for local and regional based (and/or by modifying different kind of other networks) network development (technical, social, specific etc.) to achieve locally and regionally defined goals (Agendum and Matve)

The Rural Development projects - a part of a process

In the last years the importance of involving as many people as possible in the process of Information Society has been increasingly recognised. The reason is mainly democratic. By engaging so many people as possible in discussions, projects and processes the idea and understanding the new conditions created by the Information Society will be widely spread and understood. By investments
in education and further education the risks of division of people and societies in haves and have nots will decrease.

In sparsely populated areas the involvement of people seems to be even more important than elsewhere. Often these areas are struggling with many difficulties:

Low educational level

great distances and, therefore, expensive services

ageing population

young people, especially young women leaving the area

weakening industrial structures and few new investments in the area

The Information Society is seen as a way to create new possibilities in the rural areas. But to get people mobilised around the idea of IS there must be awareness among the people of the possibilities and benefits it can offer. Without the engagement of the people there will hardly be any changes towards Information Society.

Promotion of the educational level in the villages as it comes to the basic education and training in Information Society skills and knowledge is also essential as well as the fact that the local processes towards Information Society must have political acceptance and back-up on the national, regional and local level. Preferably, but not at all always, the policies for implementing of Information Society should be co-ordinated and co-operating and interacting on all these levels.

Both Intenetix and Matve point out the importance of an active role in supporting and developing the existing educational and service structures such as village schools. According to the project leaders preserving and maintaining the village schools is the first positive step to start building new functions around them using IT technology, e.g. the Internet and videoconferencing. In other words: to build new on the basis of old structures

4. The strategy of building an Information Society

The strategy of building Information Society might be divided in the following steps:

	Investments in an IS infrastructure
	Adopting of local and regional IS policy documents by the key actors where such problems are analysed which can be solved with help of IS-structures
	Harmonising the local and regional policies with each other and preferably with the national policies
	Partnership between the key actors of IS in the region
	Mobilisation and increase of project activities on local and regional level. This means starting of processes to promote the understanding of and awareness about IS in a local and regional context. This may be done by starting local and regional projects to stimulate new ways of thinking and acting, which increases the critical mass and promotes the spin off of enterprises and new job opportunities.
	Further development of the ”surviver projects” under the former step according to the aims of the adopted IS policy document.

All these steps are needed in a successful realisation of IS, but not necessarily in chronological order. They may also be carried out separatly or parallel to each other. The first four points deal with creating a physical and political infrastructures for a sustainable development. The last two are dealing with initiatives, which mobilise and bring people together around the idea of the Information Society. They are the initiating projects which are important in the context of rural development .

When looking at the LOCREGIS´core projects for rural development, you can note, that the investments in the infrastructure are already made in the areas where project activities are carried out. Partly, the investments have been made with help of Structural Funds. Though, a more or less complete infrastructure is not a condition for starting IS-projects, which actually may function as the first catalysts towards an IS-infrastructure.

Of all the projects presented only IT-triangle can be seen as a part of a policy adopted by the local decision makers. Thus, all the other projects are started by individual project managers and they aim at awareness and mobilisation of people around the idea of IS. IT-triangle points out that a strategy does not help if the people are not involved. Mobilisation and strategy development should therefore happen in a co-ordinated process where the two parts support each other.

Agendum stresses that you should not make any strategic documents before a fair number of local people have IT-experiences, otherwise you do not simply know what you are doing. Therefore it is necessary to let some ”madcaps” go for it being allowed to start up mobilising projects that at that stage might seem just crazy, but which definitely are necessary steps in the processes. The most authorities seem to want the strategies carried out in a logical order, first strategies, then infrastructure and finally the content to put into it. The problem is that by the time things start to happen, the strategy is outdated and probably the infrastructure too. The first thing we have to learn about IS is that things happen very fast and there is not much time for strategic planning. So, let thousand flowers blossom!

5. The use of LOCREGIS´ Best Practice criteria for Rural Development projects

As mentioned before, one of the tasks of LOCREGIS is the development of so called Best Practice Criteria, These criteria can be used as a testing instrument for project which want to get fundings from the EU programmes. They can also be used as selection instruments by the financiers or as evaluation instruments for already completed projects.

According to the Working Group of Rural Development the use of Best Practice instruments in evaluation of the Rural Development projects is not an easy task. The mobilisation projects must be esteemed as processes, which means difficulties in using suggested Best Practice as an only instrument of evaluation.

Each project in the Working Group for Rural Development is a part of a Rural Development Process, possibly with an exception of GMOA, which may be seen as an initiator project for a Rural IT-development. In the same time GMOA is using the traditional civil structures in the villages for its purposes thus working in a process-orientated way.
Most often the rural development projects are in the respect of their running time and their tasks limited parts of general development processes in the villages.

This process can be described as a spiral which often starts out of a social need ( unemployment, disappearing of the youth from the village, for instance). This need, which may not always be commonly recognised, but which already is in the air, is usually channelled by an initiator, which may be for instance a regional unit of a university (Matve), a local person with a leader competence and confidence in the eyes of the people (Agendum) or a regional or local group with executive powers (IT-triangle).

A general problem of process orientated initiatives is that they are not easily administrated by traditional methods, it may take a long time before the results can be seen and inside them there often occurs a rivalty which may disturb the process, but which also may turn to another success feature. In other words the process orientated projects are not appealing to the administrative tradition used by regional, national or transnational bureaucracy. That is why these projects often have difficulties when starting and when trying to explain their results in the framework of top down or strictly project orientated evaluation.

Cutting of these processes into ”pieces of projects”, which often takes place, is only an administrative necessity based on the rationales of the administrative and financing structures. Often these projects themselves are so closely integrated in the village processes, that rigid administrative demands and project plans are not really suitable methods to catch the essentials of the development. You could also put it in this way: the more a project suits in the framework of the criteria built on the ”goal-results-follow up”-thinking, the more they are just projects and the less processes

How to support the processes

The working group agrees that project actions within village development should be steered and estimated out of the facts based on local and regional rationales. It is difficult to describe a process with help of Best Practice criteria, which very much are created out of the ”goal and hard ware result”-thinking.

This also means that an important part of the evaluation is to identify the features of the pre-processing and mobilisation in the context of village development. Both pre-processing and mobilisation seem to be survival factors for these projects, but both factors are not easy to describe in the terms of Best Practice.

In this context it is important to ponder what the terms ”self sustainability” and ”critical mass” really mean in the context of village development. One way to identify the outcome of critical mass and self sustainability for village projects is the grade of the integration of the project in the social, economic and every day life of the village. In other words: to achieve a critical mass and to be self sustainable, the project concept must be in accordance with the overall cultural climate of the village. Another way to measure the success is also reproduction or leverage-effect of the project. A village development project, which is through an ”envy-effect” or through networks able to reproduce itself among other groups has already started to turn to a process, even if the project managers may not always have realised it.

To exaggerate the importance of critical mass may lead to the fact that, projects like Matve will drop out in the first round. North-Karelia and also North of Sweden will always be placed on the map as a less favoured area with its special challenges and its special problems. Support to the improvement of the possibilities of living of these people out of the public money is a social and regional political question and also a question of equality, which should not be evaluated simply out of efficient financial goals.
It is possible that many of the new activities created by Rural Development projects will be semipublic and half time employment opportunities. This means that groups of people take over earlier public services and make it cheaper and hopefully better. The financing comes from the public sector, which partly saves money with help of this arrangement. But most often the employment opportunities created in this way are not savings or creation of new jobs - they are just replacing the lost old ones in a new way. Anyway, for the village they may be the only way to keep up an acceptable structure of services and make people stay in the municipality.

6. Experiences

All the projects involved in the working group have met different kinds of problems. These problems might be characterised as

problems of bureaucratic character

problems with financing

problems concerning evaluation instruments

The rural development projects which start as mobilisation projects are most often very small projects with a minimum of personal and financial resources. In this working group GMOA is a typical ”first awareness” project. The rest of the projects have taken the step from the initial, mobilisation phase into a more stable project structure. In the same time they still are experimental, small projects without greater resources.

Not surprisingly all the projects have met a lot of bureaucratic demands which have been difficult to meet due to lack of time and lack of resources. They have been sent sheets with hundreds of questions from the central government, not always relevant for these kinds of projects. They have been obliged to report the money used within the projects, even if the grants have not been paid yet.
Internetix project has been producing an open learning environment on the Internet since August 1996. The environment was opened in December 1996. The project is run by Otava Folk High School in Mikkeli Rural District that is a part of the Objective 6 area in Finland. The project is funded by the Ministry of Education and the European Social Fund (ESF).

When Internetix was started there was an approval for funding for year 1996 and promises for an additional 3-year funding. The Finnish structure for the administration of European Social Funds involves decision-making on several national levels: regional (local regional government with regional political representatives) and national (ministry-level). The regional and national decision-making is a collaborative process. From the point of view of project management this may, however, cause major delays and setbacks for the projects.

E.g. Internetix was waiting for a signal to file an application for additional 3-year funding (1997-99) in spring. This signal and a verbal promise for further funding were given in June 1997 after several negotiations and meetings with the regional government and the Ministry of Education. Luckily enough, there were no doubts about the success of the project. Due to internal processes related to the allocation of funds at the Ministry of Education, Internetix received another verbal promise for the approval for funding in early September. Internetix is still (18 Sept 1997) waiting for an official document to state that the additional funding has been approved until the end of 1999. Luckily enough this should only be a matter of time. Meanwhile, Internetix has been reporting about the spenditure of EU-funding in January, May and September 1997 (=reporting about the money that has been borrowed from the Mikkeli Rural District?)The question is: Could a project that is not a part of a larger unit manage 9 months without funding? Apparently running a project funded by European Social Fund can prove out to be risky for project management even if goals are met.

IT-triangle is a project that uses co-operation to increase the critical mass in order to make things happen faster and better. At this moment the project has come into a ”vicious circle” as the project tries to initiate co-operation between three counties which by tradition have clear administrative boarders between each other. IT-triangle was started by some key actors in the three municipalities which got the idea of co-operation. After discussions and planning the idea of the project was ”sold” to the decision makers, who adopted it and brought it into their strategy. The project was then sent to the Central Decision Group in Östersund, which, in lack of money, sent it further to the local decision groups in the respective county. Now, the project has been sent around between these groups, which seem to have difficulties to agree on a common investment. This is, of course, devastating to the spirit of the project managers and participants in the project. A solution might be to cut the project into three pieces, to get the ”right” administrative structure for it, but this would mean that the idea of the project would be partly lost.

As well GMOA as Internetix have been partly evaluated by methods which are not relevant to the special character of the projects.
GMOA suffered of many technical breakdowns within the GMOA-network depending on the technical support which was insufficient. In the end the sponsors did not evaluate the qualitative but only the quantitative aspects: how many new Internet accounts, how many visitors and so on, which do not give a fair picture of the total content of the project. Astonishingly no one was willing to cover staff costs even if technical investigations were no problem at all.

Also Agendum had technical troubles, which has led to disappointment in the actual state of technology, software incompability, problems with videoconferencing with more than on partner etc. The projects has also met a lot of bureaucratic barriers. The experience from the projects is that 90 % of the work is lobbying and trouble shooting. Partly this situation depends on the system, where structural funds are not administrated by one authority, but by three of them. This has its roots in different regulations of the Funds from the Commission and preparation and planning for the EU-membership in Sweden. The situation has become troublesome when applied by three different domestic authorities, each imposing their own specific regulations on project owners. According to Agendum this is especially visible within the LEADER programme , where all the three funds are in use.

Highlights

In spite of difficulties all the projects can report about highlights in their context. Visibility, opportunities to international contacts, empowerment and self confidence are some of the benefits of the rural development projects.

When the right constellation of project management and supporting authorities is found, there seems to be good opportunities to promote both awareness and rural development in the project areas. As result of AGENDUM´s work, enterprises run by women have started to use modern technology in building networks between each other and in influencing decision makers.

GMOA had a positive press reaction from the first to the last minute of the project. The bottom up strategy worked put perfectly and many of the social, economical and generation gaps could be bridged. The town feast attracted about 50 % of the town population even if the majority had not used computers before. The self organisation ability of the participating people was astonishing. The awareness for the perspectives and dangers of the IS could be raised within all social groups. The local authorities recognised the chance - right at the moment there are negotiations about the settlement of call centre - that means 30 new jobs in the village of Poettsching. An international village development group is to be founded and the co-operation with MATVE and a Finnish village will bring new inputs and results very soon.

MATVE has engaged so many local enterprises in their project, that their number must be diminished because of practical reasons. MATVE also co-operates with IVC, International Virtual Camps for young people, who camp during a couple of weeks in the forest and have access to ITC and may communicate with other camps run in the same time elsewhere in Europe.

Internetix has been able to create a network for co-operation. Over 40 co-operative agreements have been signed by Finnish high schools as well as other educational and research institutions. This enables the project to develop teaching material and other activities that meet the needs of test users. The total number of interactive teaching materials is over 40 at the moment. There seems to be several target groups: small high school seeking options for their selection of studies. A definition for a small high school in Finland can mean an annual enrollment of 20 new students. Larger high school look for additional material and new approaches to technology. The concept of network universities using the Internetix environment has found significant feedback. There are definite plans for producing teaching material in the field of futures studies, tourism management and co-operative forms of business. Rural development is one of the key areas for other activities. A polytechnic-level teaching material in the field of forestry has been completed. In addition, a database for rural projects was opened. The number of users has increased significantly: there are approx. 600 daily users of Internetix. The number of users has the tendency of increasing rapidly.

The distance-learning projects in South Savo have formed a joint administrative structure, ESMO, the South Savo Multimedia Network that gathers together all regional distance-learning and IT projects. ESMO also looks for possibilities for starting an educational net radio.

IT-triangel has contributed to a process in the area, which among other thing has generated totally 300 new jobs with surroundings in Ånge - a village, which was threatened by sudden death because of the collapse of earlier industrial structures.
These examples might also illustrate the high potential of development, which lies in rural development projects. It is only through the process of mobilisation and information these kind of results can be reached.

7. The results of the Working Group for Rural

Development

As a direct consequence of the experts meeting in the Working group , a co-operation between Matve, Finland and GMOA, Austria has been established as well as between Internetix and some other LOCREGIS projects.

The final report of the Working Group has been completed.
The Working Group for Rural Development has made an evaluation of the Best Practice Criteria. The remarks of the Working Groups can be found in annex 2.

All the projects, except Agendum, have also been evaluated with help of the Best Practice Criteria by the group members (Annex 3).

8. Conclusions of the Working Group for Rural Development

The conclusions of the Working Group are as follows:

	When Best Practice Criteria have been used as evaluation method, the evaluators must have knowledge of local conditions in the project area or have an opportunity to get proper information about local conditions to be able to make an appropriate evaluation
	All the members of the evaluation group must use the BP criteria in the same way and the criteria must be understood in the same way by the evaluators
	The mobilisation projects for Rural Development must be evaluated out of their special features. The Best practice criteria as they are proposed are not in all their parts suitable for these projects (see also annex 2, Remarks of the working group about Best Practice Criteria)

9. Recommendations of the Working Group for Rural

Development

	The administration of the structural funds and other programmes decided in the member countries should be concentrated in one regional administrative body
	This administrative body should be an organisation with powers and responsibility for the regional development and a good knowledge of the special regional and local conditions
	The granting system should stimulate not only interregional projects between the member countries, but also interregional projects in the member countries, with other words projects which are carried out in co-operation between different counties/landscapes
	The administrative and evaluation routines for the different programmes decided on the member state level should be as simple as possible and they should be co-ordinated
	The project evaluation may be based on Best Practice criteria, but they should be implemented with consideration of the local conditions and the special character of different projects
	The group agrees that the best way to promote mobilisation projects for rural development is to start many small projects. These projects, which could be called initiator projects should not be treated in the same way as larger projects. They should be financed up to 75 % by the commission and reported only once a year to the granting organisation.
	In the next step, when the initiator projects are developed to larger units, a ”normal” reporting and evaluation system should be used
	To promote the idea and understanding of IS in rural area, a special programme for rural mobilisation projects should be created by the European Union with less bureaucratic barriers and more possibilities to work actively with villages and their inhabitants with problems dealing attitudes to, knowledge of and education