The questions below have come up from discussions with stakeholders and from questioning ourselves. We don't necessarily have the answers - so any help would be appreciated! If you have more questions, please ask in the comment box below.
Fundamental questions
- Is Farm-PEP needed?
- Can it help connect rather than add to the fragmentation?
- What is our main aim and priority?
- We need a stronger clarity of purpose - but what should it be & where should we start?
- How can we best fulfil the role of connecting organisations, people & projects in the knowledge ecosystem?
- Who are our targets users and audience?
- What is the motivation for users to sign up to Farm-PEP?
- How important is discussion?
- Is there a sufficiently large engaged audience to make PEP work?
- Would companies pay to be members of Farm-PEP with company & product pages?
- Would enough organisations pay enough to make PEP viable for the long term?
- Should we focus just on the UK, or should we allow or encourage international engagement?
- How do we ensure engagement and content comes from across all sectors, not just arable?
- How do we start PEP - should we go for breadth or depth?
- Should Farm-PEP be aligned with or distinct from YEN and ADAS?
Questions to farmers and users
- What would you most value Farm-PEP for?
- finding out about projects and getting involved?
- finding out about organisations & whats going on
- connecting with other farmers & PEP users
- finding out about new knowledge in particular areas of interest?
- Getting distilled best practice advice in particular areas of interest?
- Getting involved in the generation, distillation and sharing of knowledge?
- telling others about what you are doing?
- Asking Questions?
- Would you be likely to engage in discussions or to challenge content that didn't meet with your experience?
- How open should we expect people to be with project activities, progress and results?
- How would you like to see content presented to you?
- by theme or knowledge area?
- by project?
- by organisation?
- another way?
- What would be your attitude to commercial content on PEP?
- Would you want to put information about yourself on PEP, visible to registered users?
- Would you want to be contactable via PEP, and to be able to contact other users?
Questions to research & KE professionals & organisations
- What can Farm-PEP do to help you meet your objectives?
- Would you be interested in becoming a Moderator on Farm-PEP
- How could PEP meaningfully interact with your existing website, or planned developments?
- Would you link to your projects and resources on your website from PEP, with minimal basic info?
- Would you be prepared to put full content on PEP, even it it duplicates your own web content?
- For projects that don't currently have a web presence, would you welcome a space to present and discuss them?
- How comfortable would you be in being open about project activity and reporting initial results?
Technical Questions
- How do we appoint and manage Moderators?
- How should we rate content?
- How should we manage tags & themes?
- What the rules for Farm-PEP users be?
- How should rules be enforced?
- How should commercial content be dealt with?
- How to manage discussion - distributed on everything, or more focused?
- Should we begin with Organisation profiles and Personal profiles?
- Should the initial focus be on Projects, organisations or people?
- Should we start broad and shallow aiming for users and projects across many sectors and themes, or deep and narrow, focusing on a few themes with detailed projects, demonstrating the full distillation of knowledge?