• SRDC has received funding for the E-Commerce Demonstration Project and is in the process of identifying e-commerce projects at LGUs across the United States. SRDC is trying to identify faculty doing either research or outreach work. Bo urged everyone to get this information to SRDC if they haven't already done so.
  
  
• Health SERA meeting will be March 3-5 in Nashville. Gail Cramer (LSU AgEcon) is research advisor on the project.
  
  
• SRDC is continuing to develop a plan for evaluation of the Center. The upcoming first phase entails meeting with a small team of evaluation experts in Atlanta. Once plans are in place, they may contract the evaluation out to a team. SRDC will be engaging workshop participants to help them evaluate the impact of the Center.
  
  
• RUPRI has designated a National Rural Poverty Center and will work through the regional rural development centers to organize a national rural poverty conference. SRDC will be meeting with RUPRI after the upcoming SAAS meetings to start planning for the conference
  
  
• The regional rural development centers are still working to renew the RCCI efforts.
  
  
• The Rural Sociological Society just published a new volume on Challenges in Rural America for the 21st Century. Lou Swanson and David Brown, who edited the volume, will join SRDC when they meet with Experiment and Extension Administrators/Directors to discuss the issues facing rural areas

PLC met in December 2003. No action items emerged from this meeting. The committee spent some time discussing e-answers. The committee also discussed the impending retirement of several Southern extension leaders and forming a task force for shaping extension leadership in future. The task force will be multidisciplinary and we all agreed that CRD needs to be at the table, especially since we have the expertise to contribute to this process.

• Civic Engagement (Bo Beaulieu) - The team will be meeting on March 1 and 2 in Nashville to plan for civic engagement training workshop for the week of September 13. However, the Pew Partnership related to Bo that they do not want to support anymore training in Leadership Plenty; they want to see the Leadership Plenty program used in rural communities. Bo will try to get their permission to provide the training, with SRDC paying for duplication of the materials. We have no site yet for the Civic Engagement Training.
  
  
• Economic Development (Mike Woods) - This team is charged with recommending a curriculum for economic diversity and development.
  
  
  • Mike identified four activities that are currently in process that bear on economic development: (1) the Southern Community Development Educators' conference in Tampa in May, (2) the National Extension Tourism conference in Florida, (3) Hank Cothran's work on BR&E, and (4) the E-Commerce Demonstration project.
    
    
  • Mike brought up several questions for all the track teams to consider in developing curriculum for training workshops. Do we need to be broad or do we need to start focusing more on certain issues within an area? Do we need to develop web-based or other distance education program courses? Do we need both types (distance and face to face interactions)? Do we need to move up and do more advanced courses? What about resources for travel? What is our saturation point? How do we figure out our audience?
    
    
  • Bo suggested that all the track teams needs to decide when and how to best use training bundles.
    
    
  • Another question emerged from the group as to whether we should open up these training sessions to the private sector. In the past, SRDC has given first preference to CES faculty and they have few problems filling their sessions.
    
    
  • We discussed the possibility of having two tracks in one set of meetings to address the issue of whether or not we need basic or advanced instruction.

The registration sites will be up next week. The track chairs need to think about moderators for the session. The format for the final session is still not decided. Virgil related the team didn't want to duplicate research roundtables of the last meeting but is thinking about multi-state programming roundtables. We are having some problems getting Putnam for our opening session; his schedule appears to be full. Plans B and C may be to get Suzanne Morris (Smart Communities), or Lou Swanson (Challenges to Rural America) as speakers for the opening session. Florida will provide opening speakers to greet people. The PLC Meeting at Southern CRD Conference in Tampa will be on Wednesday May 19 at 8:00 a.m.

The work continues with the larger national group with efforts to publicize the organization of NACDEP in each state. An e-mail brochure is available and Hank will send it out again to the group.

The steering committee met in Biloxi in December and is working to develop guidelines. The taxonomy for civic engagement is nearly complete but we need to further develop the general economic development, community service, workforce development and forest services taxonomies. Alan will send out what we have to the group so that we can add to them. Rod Howe (USDA CSREES) and Janet Ayres have met with Alan to discuss core competencies for CRD.

The conference planning team is on track but responses to requests for submissions have been slow. The deadline is approaching.
BRE Rewrite Update (Hank Cothran) - Hank is working on updating the BR&E books that came out of NE Center.