[quote="Lisa-Cespedes"] TOPIC 2 Managing a portal with thousands of resources and users: Are communities "attracted" to quality, like bees to honey? [/quote] Thousands of resources could be very usefull to attract users, and a different variety of users. But they will only be there and will be faitfull to the portal if there is enought quality in the information delivered. We will be able to see if it's quality information based on is comming back to get further information - trust on the portal. So our main job is deliver quality to the portal!

Hi MIchael, For example we have developed an SMS service to deliver information about the amount of water the farmer must apply in a particular period. We try to do it out of charge for the farmer, but the communications costs are high, and in some of our rural areas (in the field exactly) the connection coverage is very bad. telephony is ruled by few companies that develop the acess were it justifies with the potential number of users. Out of this areas, even in Portugal, we do have some acess problems. And all comunnications developments and new services are always available only near the big cities, after that in the others cities and towns. And when we reach the field, ussully are not available Do you imagine that in Europe? We understand that they are profitable companies, but what about the public service? shouldn´t it be available for everybody??? Regards Jorge maia

Hi Laura, It's very nice to know about your activity. Can you explain better what tools do you have already working? In which subject are you now focusing your activity? Regards Jorge Maia

Dear All, Like Brenda refer in Africa. One of the main issues are related with network coverage. Most of the rural areas are not with the disarable network connection. Even in a smal country like Portugal, some parts of the rural areas have lack of network connection Jorge Maia

I everybody. I work in irrigation technology transfer to farmer. Because we use the information in real time to support farmers activities, masin of our work is done by web. And here we get the main constrain: only 15% of farmers use frequently internet services. So we are facing the real challenge to deliver information in real time to all farmers[/img]