COMMUNITY ISSUES: SETTING THE STAGE FOR COMMUNITY NETWORK PUBLISHING

• Develop a marketing and implementation strategy to include all sectors of your target audience.

• Staff the community network appropriately for maximum efficiency.

• Work with municipalities to identify a liaison.

• Involve participants from media (public radio, TV, newspapers, etc.), and learn from their experiences. The technology is different, but the issues are very similar.

• Participation needs to be reciprocal: invite others to participate in your efforts, but also find out about and get involved in other efforts already going on in your community.

• Find out who else in the community is also working on similar goals and work together as much as possible.

• Work within existing structures as much as possible; but don't be limited by them. Always be willing to suggest ways in which existing processes can be improved.

• Try not to feel deflated when hearing, "others have tried to do this before, and it didn't work, and let me spend the next hour telling you why it won't work again."