Helen Reynolds (1), Lyndall Ash (2)

Preferred presentation format: Unrefereed Paper

Affiliation(s): (1) Department of Primary Industries (Victoria)

Title: Lyndall Ash Position: Community Education Officer Organisation: Department of Primary Industries, (Victoria) Contact email: Lyndall.Ash@dpi.vic.gov.au Contact phone: 03 5833 5964

Keywords: Group design, community structures, group models, measuring group success

In the experience of the Community Focus Team in the Shepparton Irrigation Region, Victoria, Australia, the way a community group is structured will determine and in some cases stifle, what the group can achieve. It is important for a group not to confine itself to automatically adopting a particular set up. This paper will look at a range of potential models for group design that could be used by community-based groups. It will also examine how adopting an alternative model can allow a group to achieve their aims more readily and view their accomplishments more clearly.

Key learning points:

• Don’t adopt a particular group model automatically.
• Consider the aims, timeframes and lifestyle of the community involved then match these expectations and abilities with the appropriate group set up.
• Adopting an alternative model will allow groups to view their accomplishments more clearly.

Darren Schmidt, Peter Holden, Tonia Grundy

Online opportunities: the case for re-configuring extension in a web environment

Preferred presentation format: Refereed paper

Affiliation(s): Department of Primary Industries, Queensland

Title: Mr Darren Schmidt Position: Information extension officer Organisation: Department of Primary Industries, Queensland Contact email: mailto:darren.schmidt@dpi.qld.gov.au Contact phone: 07 4160 0725

Keywords: Web, information, marketing, evaluation, communication, extension

This paper details the learnings that precipitated from a project that sought to significantly redesign a web site intended for use by graingrowers in the northern cropping zone of Australia. It offers a brief background to the project’s problem premise, and then touches on how the extension officers involved in the re-design set about challenging assumptions about what a web page can or can’t do. It briefly describes their efforts in building an extremely content-heavy web page with a minimum of navigational aids. In short, the project compressed the content of four large crop management books into the one site, making it a very rich information resource, yet most of the information can be accessed by no more than four mouse clicks.

This paper, however, is primarily focused on how extension principles were adapted for communication between growers and organisations in an online environment. It argues that despite the many shortcomings and nascent promises offered by web-mediated communication, it is possible to exploit the web’s capacities of timeliness, access and a-synchronous communication in a way that traditional extension would struggle to do.

The paper details the irony that, in this case, it was the host organisation – rather than graingrowers and other online clients – that has more work to do in understanding the role not only of the web in contemporary business and information sharing but also the bifurcating role of extension in an evolving online information environment.

Key learning points:

• Government-funded information providers face unique impediments when transitioning bulk information to online environments because of the “lifting of the corporate bar” on the world wide web
• Agricultural organisations, which are often decentralised and have a long and established tradition in print, may find the transition to online information provision problematic and the “ghosts” of old extension models hinder rather than help this process
• Online extension provision provides a great opportunity for real-time, comprehensive and specific evaluation of an organisation’s information products and services