A day of rural imagination

Yesterday, I spoke with two stakeholders (one from the province of Friesland, one from the local academy for higher education) about the prospects for virtual services and eHealth related pilot projects within the 'Vital Rural Area' concept. Perhaps also out of the Vital project...

Often it's not easy to think clearly, when one has to start from nothing. But the results of the session did not come out of the total blue either. In the preliminary stage of Vital, there has been an intensive desk research phase and all three conversation participants had years of experience with ICT related projects behind them.

In the end, we came to an agreement and the next day I wrote in concept an overview of our conclusions. The draft will be assessed by my two partners and if agreed upon, I will publish it in this weblog.

By the way, it was perhaps not a coincidence, that I spent the next morning at a meeting of stakeholders from the north eastern region of Friesland. There were parties present like the housing corporation, employees of individual municipalities, the local municipal Vital Rural Area representative, and members of the management of the town hospital of Dokkum.

At this gathering, the people present expressed a lot of aspirations in the services, care, health and wellbeing area, the portent of which was augmented by the means of the stakeholders to support their plans effectively. Perhaps it will be possible to connect all initiatives in such a way, that the sum will add to more than the individual parts.

Later on in the day, I discussed all this with a financing and subsidy specialist: it might even be possible to enlarge the projects by adding subsidy to subsidy, funding to funding. We spoke about the Vital budgets, but only as a start. To the total funding might be added the RAAK educational fund, the ZIPC (for care related innovations), the OP Noord economic program and cofinancing by ten to thirty local and regional SME and non-SME participants. Total project funding might raise up to several millions for the next four years.

Of course, a lot of work will have to be done to make all this possible, but even this preliminary work might be subsidized in part.