The Digital Village Develops

Leading on from the MyWeb2 project Margrove Park have been successful in a funding bid to develop their "Digital Village" and will sustain the Village Hall Internet connection beyond the current project and provide them with their own bank of laptops. We're quite excited at the prospect of developing the Digital Village concept further and in the bid we spoke of creating a virtual Post Office, Corner Shop, School and Job Shop as the village has none of these things.

I'm sure we could replicate it elsewhere. One thing to take into account, if a Village has a real post office then such a thing (Virtial PO ) would be counter productive. Margrove Park do not have this.

Virtual Post Office - All the things you can do online such as apply for a TV License, RE-tax your car. Taxing your car online for instance is far more efficient than going to a post office.

Virtual, Job Shop - job search online, pointers and advice, CV's etc - closely connected to ..............

Virtual School - The Digital Skills Network currently in development. Online support and learning on a range of subjects including how to run your virtual post office.

Virtual Corner Shop particularly useful to older residents, they club together to form a consorteum to be able to place an order sufficiently large to warrant a Tescos/Iceland - whoever Groceries delivery

Physically how this works is there will be a bank or laptops available at regular times in the Village Hall for people to come in to use these facilities. They're operated by the core group who are not absolute experts but have just enough expertise and local knowledge to make it work.