[a2t] Meeting at Sight Village 2008 & group future
- From: "Patrick Adams" <patrick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'A2T List'" <a2t@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:48:22 +0100
As promised my notes on the meeting. If there is anything you think I
missed, just post to the list.
Present at the meeting were:
Peter Bosher, Soundlinks Ltd; Enitan T Ajayi CCPH; Tim Burgess, Raised Bar
Ltd; Graham Longley, Aspire Consultancy; Patrick Adams, Riverside Training
Partnership (in the chair); John Ramm, Rammland Ltd; Stephanie Sargeant
Apologies: Brian Cairnie, Cragside Accessibility Ltd; Ashif Sindhi, Sindhi
Systems Ltd (who was nearly there but misunderstood the time of the
meeting!)
1. The meeting agreed that the only e-mail route for the group would be via
the FreeList.org facility already set up by Pete Bosher.
2. The group might meet more often but it should meet at least twice a year,
once at Sight Village and the other to be decided by group members in
agreement with each other.
3. There may be tele conferences using Skype but these will not be held
regularly as happened in the months up to February 2008. Any group member,
posting to freelist can request a tele conference meeting to raise any issue
whenever they wish.
4. Group members are strongly encouraged to post regularly to freelist,
putting up ideas, asking other group members for advice, passing on work
they cannot do etc. The lifeblood of the group is through communication.
During the meeting these ideas were discussed:
1. Remote training: there is a huge potential market for VI people who are
not employed to learn how to use their PC based systems with Access
Technology. Carrying out the IT4All training days for BCAB all the trainers
in the A2T group agreed this was a vast untapped market. Just how to tap
this market is a very interesting proposition that the meeting felt should
be tackled.
Telephone Training: BCAB already does do this to a limited extent. A2T
Group members can identify potential markets via the local Associations for
the Blind and other local groups and feed this back to other group members
in terms of:
how many possible customers would there be in this area overall; what
systems are commonly requested but not fulfilled at present because of the
cost of one-to -one training; what cost would be acceptable for an
individual and what for a group; questions like this would be necessary to
ask if a project like this could get off the ground. Obviously each group
member must ask themselves how much they would be willing to work for per
hour, per week, per month or per year in terms of a marketing strategy.
Would members be willing to work at a lower than acceptable rate to
establish themselves working in this area?
If marketing information became available to other group members then it
might help the group as a whole to establish a network via the web site in
different areas of the country
Group members could then decide whether this product was a goer for them.
Then regional training services for live training and national remote
training services could be posted on the web site to enhance the A2T group.
Better hit rates on the site would improve the market profile of the group
as a whole.
Remote Training via the web: all the above applies if you use software that
can take over a customer's PC and establish a training session for
individual or group using this route. This approach would incur up-front
costs for those who wanted to join such a scheme. The potential for this
approach is that members could then sell hardware and software to potential
trainees and support these via the web.
Sight & Sound Technology
I had a short discussion with Mervyn Robertson at Sight Village on the Sight
& Sound stand.
Mervyn was most strong on the existence of organisations that bought
products from S & S and did not support those products but wanted their
discount. He said S & S were in the planning stages of setting up
accreditation for their products for resellers, dealers and maybe assessors.
This accreditation would be chargeable but he thought that for organisations
and individuals belonging to our group should not incur the same charges as
a large private or government organisation. He also said it might be
possible to come to some arrangement with those belonging to the BTCS
Accreditation scheme. Two things come out of our discussion:
1. those who have lost their reseller status selling S & S products might
regain this via an accreditation scheme
2. The A2T group should visit S & S in Northampton when this accreditation
scheme is further advanced in the planning stage, say in the Autumn/Winter
this year.
I will keep a watching brief on this possible scheme and report back to
group members.
Lastly, arising out of the meeting at Sight Village and following more
reflections I would like to ask if all members could post to the rest their
individual skills in Access Technology plus what they also do in the way of
assessment or consultancy, plus what Access Technology products they retail.
This information will then be posted to the web site with links to each
person's own web site. This is a very basic beginning to our network. Once
we start getting this detail then we will have to agree who will actually
design the pages and how much this would be for each contributing group
member. Remember you have to invest a little before you get anything out.
That's all from me at present.
Patrick Adams
(who agreed to continue as Chairman until July 2009 when this will be
reviewed by the group)
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