Ken Carpenter carries many different business cards. For a man who retired from a successful sales career selling center pivot irrigation systems (those are the devices that form the green circles airline passengers see as they flyover much of our farm country), he seems busier than many people with 8 to 5 jobs. Carpenter has a small real estate office facing the highway in Del Norte, Colorado in Rio Grande County. He also worked on MIRA, serves as a trustee on the local museum board, and is a member of a regional technology committee that includes ex-MIRA members taking part with him. As I entered his office, the owner of amigo.net, a local ISP, was leaving. This valley has been a pioneer in installing point-to-point wireless networks, and amigo.net had helped with the La Jara installation that Ben Beachy had worked. They were planning on using the technology to offer phone and Internet service to a group of families in a remote area of the county. Carpenter has invited him to address a MIRA training group. He brought an antenna and had members of the audience assemble it as he talked. The participants loved this kind of session.

Carpenter had a high opinion of the training process, except that the whole project took so long. When you are donating time, a year is quite long. He thought three to four months would have been about right. Apart from that, it really changed people. Both he and Mary Hoffman encouraged people to take leadership positions, try out new jobs, and not worry if they did not like them. Rather than require everyone to come to Alamosa for each training, they moved the sites from one county to another.

Carpenter's group started with a wide range of program ideas but decided to design a web site to serve the San Luis Valley Museum Association Until that time all the small museums were working independently. With the project they all pulled together once they understood the concept. He said they had a hard time explaining the project to all the directors. During our visit Margaret Finnerty the director of the Saguache County Museum joined us and told me what a difference the project was making for this network of fourteen rural museums. They were working on a museum pass that would be good for admission to all the museums. It was amazing to think that without MIRA this sort of cooperation might not have occurred to anyone working in the museums. The web designer they hired was from nearby Pagosa Springs, and he became so involved in the project that he now maintains the site at no charge.

Carpenter described a planning process undertaken by the U.S. Forest Service in Rio Grande County. Based on the Quincy Library Group model to achieve local consensus on contentious issues, the Forest Service held meetings where Carpenter said, "Everyone hated each other at the beginning, but then we realized that what we shared was the wish to preserve the forests, and we ended up getting along." He said the MIRA experience was like that: people who would normally never talk to each other, came together to work toward a common goal.