Parish councils are making deliberations that may offer opportunities for veterinary practices. Within the next few weeks important decisions will be taken about the establishment of Unitary Authorities and Community Boards. If you have started to yawn already you may miss the whole thrust and benefit of microportals.

One of the very successful microportals is being managed by a veterinary surgeon, John Lund, not for veterinary benefit but in support of his community. Within the rural areas the central activities revolve around the church, parish council and village hall. Good, old, sleepy, activities of great relevance to a few but of less interest to many. The parish magazine, or in many areas the group parishes magazine, publishes the various activities and is supported by advertising. Entries are usually small and cheap offering plumbing and candlestick making, providing basic information with a ’phone number. Not so in Bridford.

Try and imagine something that you want to know about, or do, starting from your home. If your area has a community hub you will already have it as your home page on the computer. You will already have entered your postcode. A single mouse click and up comes the hub. Rather importantly the use of hubs is going way beyond the people who surf the web. In this area very few folk spend time accessing websites for information. They could, but they choose to carry on as before, possibly because the activity lacks personality. Whereas, everything on the community portal is relevant to their household, local plumbers, pubs, doctors, events, buses, trains, parish history, church services, whatever, and the activities and offerings of the local veterinary practices.

So, what would you like to say to the people living within five miles, or ten miles of your practice? Would you wish to list the address and ’phone number or possibly the website? Would you wish to highlight a particular activity or clinical success or participation in sport, money raising, new surgery, changes in staff or disease alerts? Would you wish to talk to the community with a piece of video? Would you wish to change what is on the hub every month or week? I hope you are beginning to see that this microportal development is very much more than having a website.

The beginnings of the existing microportals have often developed in order to involve and inform people about goings on locally and also to raise money for the church or village hall. Church based portals have been credited with increasing footfall, donations and wellbeing. Individual parishes have latched on to the idea and from slow beginnings the number of people within the area going to the portal each day increases rapidly. Thousands of hits are recorded. People go to the portal for one item but then come across other things of interest. In a holiday area, such as Bridford on the edge of Dartmoor, people are encouraged to look at the hub from their home wherever it is and very rapidly the extent of aspects of interest are able to be noted.

So, at the moment the whole idea of community microportals is known to a few but major expansion is anticipated. The current establishment of county councils and district councils is to be replaced by unitary authorities. Each county will be voting on this soon and some areas will change and others may not. However, locally, the idea of shedding five chief executives of the district councils, plus all the buildings and infrastructure, with the frustrating inefficiencies and expense, has an appeal. No doubt the single authority will absorb most of the people and sites but that is not the main thrust of interest. Underlying the large authority will be the community boards, based in this area on market towns. Each parish council will be represented on these boards and there will be a community budget for the development of, yes, communities. So it is not difficult to consider that microportal community hubs will pop up covering all the communities within a community board. The opportunities for the promotion of veterinary practices, or indeed veterinary activity in general is very real.

Moving on, there are microportals for associations and professional groups. Here again these are different from websites as such and websites with links, partly because of the one click concept and ease of access. With specific groups the quality of the portal presentation may become a bigger issue. Within a community portal there will be a variety of presentations from the simple to the complex, the plain to the colourful, whereas for an association site there may be issues of quality of presentation and appearance that incur additional mastering and expense. A list of portals is available at www.2day.ws/sites and it is easy to view a range and get some idea of the breadth of the topic.

The other aspect to consider is that veterinary surgeons and veterinary businesses are targets for the services of others. As you interact with a microportal so you are open to becoming interested in a topic you had not initially thought to access. These will range from the expected to the unexpected.

For example, it was unexpected to find the topic of workplace grievances, conflict resolution and stress management. Thinking about it where better to introduce the availability of mediation than on a microportal. To promote your abilities to resolve issues between people at a local level appears worthwhile. There is a relevance here to partnerships and one of the areas highlighted is the difficulties that arise between partners as the relationship evolves over the years. This aspect of partnerships is well recognised for accountants, solicitors and of course veterinary surgeons. The point made is that it is often the local issues that bring matters to a head, with chatter between wives, clients and third parties. If there are general workplace issues that need to be aired, it may be that local microportals will form part of the tools available to a professional mediator that handles these very local matters in a confidential manner.

The topic of microportals seems to be moving rapidly from village hall activities and church services to professional concerns. Here abouts there is a distinct thrust to buy local. A veterinary practice as part of the local community appears important.

If you have experience of microportals or wish to discuss developments please contact rgard@agmed.freeserve.co.uk.


Richard Gard

4th September 2008.
First Published Veterinary Review
www.veterinaryreview.com

We have to upgrade both the 2day servers due to very heavy daily traffic from all over the UK.

We add 22,000 community sites and 35,000 School plus University Community sites - making us one of the largest community networks in the UK!

We break the 200,000 visits a day threshold!

2day's flood beating backups. We now backup our system onto a server in the USA.

To cope with new traffic levels 2day commissions a second server.

2day daily hits break the 200,000 barrier

2day hits go over 100,000 in one day and our server is upgraded to take the new level of traffic

Three new templates are launched. One community one and two conventional website ones.

Our hits go up to over one per second!

Richard Searight - the new Fox-Talbot!
Unique window on the internet - The Microportal

A tiny village in Wiltshire, which is credited with being the birthplace of photography, is repeating history by introducing a new way of looking at the world wide web - The Microportal, or personal website!

More than 170 years ago William Henry Fox Talbot took the first photograph of a lattice window in his home at Lacock Abbey - now 2Day Microportals, headed up by Lacock-based Richard Searight, is offering communities another window, that to the World Wide Web.

The uniqueness of the system is that once users have introduced their postcode, everything they need is within three clicks of the mouse. Every day over 30,000 people use the 2Day Microportal to look something up.

The first 2Day microportal was www.lacock.2day.ws, which is now one of the most used community sites in the whole of the UK, with over 100,000 hits a year from a population of just 1,300 people.

Users can not only find contact details for everyday needs, such as the cinema, eating out, weather and local schools, but also use the site for instant access to things such as a route planner, directory inquiries and news headlines. There are also live links to train, road and airport information - all available within three clicks. People can even take their local site on holiday because it refocuses on any location in the UK.

Richard Searight says his aim is to provide every community in the UK with a personalised one-stop shop. Communities are empowered by being able to run the embedded local sections themselves and even post advertising to pay for the site!

Particularly interesting is the fact that churches have adopted the system as a means of getting themselves back into the centre of communities. 'So far we have over 200 church sites, including one in the Shetland Isles, which is receiving over 250 hits per day', says Richard.

'The vision is to create sites so complete that everyone has to make them their homepage. Once a whole community does that it starts to communicate and gel together as a social unit. The church understands this,' he said. Up until the advent of Microportals, achieving a totally comprehensive community website was completely impossible for the average local webmaster.

For further information: Richard Searight, 2Day Microportals Ltd., 01249 730439 or 07770 846450. Or visit www.2day.ws.