Every five years the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station (MAES) and Michigan State University Extension (MSUE) are charged with reviewing our priorities to ensure that we are best using our resources to address the issues that Michigan residents believe are important. Time has flown quickly and it feels to me like we just completed our last five-year review, but here we are again.
This time our needs assessment has a new twist that I think is going to help us reach new audiences and yield some very interesting information. Through a partnership with MSU’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences, we are working with a company called INgage Networks to develop a social media presence that will allow us to ask questions and build a dialogue with Michigan residents about the most important issues they believe we can help them address.
This year’s process is titled “AdvanceMichigan: Shaping Michigan’s Economic Future.” INgage is working with an MAES/MSUE team led by Marie Ruemenapp and a team of Comm Arts researchers led by assistant professor Cliff Lampe to create an interactive site that will allow people (that includes you!) to upload images, video clips and stories about how MSUE education and MAES research have made a positive difference in their lives. There will be discussion boards where people can share their ideas for how we can contribute to a brighter future for our state’s communities, families, businesses, young people, farms and natural resources.
Look for more information about the AdvanceMichigan work in weeks to come. We’ll launch the site in late March, and right off the bat we’ll be looking to you to help us kick things off by posting pictures, stories and other information about what you are doing and by sharing your ideas for moving our institutes forward. We’ll also be looking to our clients, partners and the broader MSU community to add their insights, and then to those who may not know about us to share their thoughts about how we can use our educational resources to advance Michigan. Please plan to be a regular contributor and to ask others to add their input as well. The site will be open for dialog and discussion through June. We’ll collect valuable data that will be analyzed over the summer and made available this fall.
This is a great example of how we are “walking the talk” and using new technology to do our work and serve the people of our state. We’ll also be contributing to the knowledge base on how people use social media networks and serving as a model for other state Extension systems.
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