This discussion topic addresses a fantastic premise and offers a promising perspective of thoughts that have been brewing in my mind for some time now; and a consolidated review of the responses provide quite a slew of insightful gems.

These give rise to an over-arching view of the ulitmate purpose of resilience (using ICT or not); and its sustenance to foster significant quality of life indices within rural communities. In this respect, it is important to note that resilience must inherently be an internally-developed capacity to prevent, withstand, or overcome; and so it asserts (obliquely, even if not plainly) the strategic imperative of leveraging resources in redressing capacity imbalances between rural and urban areas in the developing world.

In this sense, the sustained dissonance of expectations around availability, affordability, and accessibility to resources and amenities, between rural communities and urban ones, must necessarily be abridged.  

The ideas that LeeHBabcock has crystallized as ICT4Ag Version 2.0 are completely aligned with my thoughts about an "Impact Network" that delivers a hybrid Impact-as-a-Service platform in (but also beyond) agriculture; specially designed and deployed with exigencies of rural communities in mind.

As Lee has posited, valuable enhancments of resilience in agriculture must be sustained beyond it, to enable impact in other critical spheres like healthcare, education, utilities, etc. In this way, the cumulative effect of an agriculture-anchored, but community-benefiting resilience capacity, is more likely to be sustained in everyone's strategic interests.

Following this train of thought, ICT platforms that enable the democratized delivery of a variety of Content, Services, and Applications for rual communities must be embraced. Just like a Mall developer solicits commitments from anchor tenants, to ensure financing and guarantee off-take, ICT platform developers need to view agriculture as the "anchor tenant", and then build coalitions of agriculture stakeholders to cross-subsidize the platform's deployment, ultimately as Lee puts it, "into the smallholder farming household". Once these agriculture "anchor tenants" are lined up as broad coalitions, concerted efforts are then pursued to include education, healthcare, utilities, and others, as addtional incentives to drive uptake, usage, and scale.  

From my perspective, all this is possible from the ICT side of things, due to the downward trends in the costs of hardware, software, and other allied ICT components, ignited by the open-source community, commoditized pervasive hardware computing (like Raspberry Pis and others), and efficiencies of sharing economy principles. These platforms will emerge as augmentations, not replacements of legacy systems; but need to be fundamentally disruptive and decentralized in their models, methodologies, and processes, to ensure a "resilience" that is different from the "centralized" systems that currently drive urban centres.

What is needed is the crystalization of the ICT4Ag community, and other partners, to drive support for any collaborative technology platform that mirrors the principles that Lee has outlined. 

In my mind, it is possible to envision impactful information and off-grid energy access, that not only supply the infrastructure to ignite localized capacity enhancement and service delivery in agriculture, healthcare, education, utilities, etc., but also enables rural communities to be supplied with renewable energy access to power basic life tasks, especially access devices with which to receive necessary information. This rural infrastructure base could also enable the various early-warning, monitoring, and alert services needed to strengthen resilience in response to the vagaries of our rural public health and physical environment, like disease epidemics or climate change dislocations. Thank you.