The Floyd team pulled together the residents of the county to involve them in a community planning session for the team project. This team was lead by two individuals who are long-standing community activists and who viewed the MIRA project as a catalyst to involve more county residents in community decision making. The experience and skill level of these two individuals is a critical reason for the team's success.

The Floyd team managed to completely utilize the MIRA process due to the human capacity already present on the team. The team knew how to recruit and motivate team members, organize community meetings, facilitate community decision making, ensure broad representation on the team and at the community meetings, devote the time needed to accomplish these tasks, promote the process locally, and provide the opportunity for the community to take ownership of the final project.

The Floyd team held two community meetings, open to those outside the MIRA team, to brainstorm ideas for a project. The first meeting had 17 participants and generated project outlines for almost 20 separate projects. Everyone was given five adhesive dots to vote. Each participant could place no more than two dots on any one project idea. After the voting the project list was narrowed to four. These four were discussed at length and then participants were each given one dot. After this vote a project was selected. One member of the Floyd team commented, "At the end of about two hours we went from having a bunch of project ideas to having and agreeing on one. It was magic." During the second meeting, which had 10 participants, the Floyd team outlined goals and action steps for the project.

When outlining the chosen project, the Floyd team put no restrictions, such as financial or time constraints, on the brainstorming process. Their objective was to outline their preferred outcome and take full advantage of this opportunity. Therefore, the resulting project is afar-reaching one that will exceed the funds and time frame of the MIRA grant. This approach has given the Floyd team the opportunity to ensure that this project will be sustained in the future. Due to the ability of the Floyd team to engage the community as a whole and allow for additional partnerships, team members have enabled new people and have spread the investment and pride in the project throughout the community.

The Floyd project, Information Network Forum (INFO), is to build on the foundation of an existing service in creating a communications service with readily available, up-to-date information on all aspects of Floyd's assets, services, and entertainment. This service will exist on a web site and will involve the purchase and installation of touch-screen computers. The computers will be installed in participating country stores and retail outlets throughout the county, making the information available to as many citizens and visitors as possible.

This project will build on the FIN network that was established as Floyd's "electronic village" through an effort inspired by the Ninth District Congressman, Rick Boucher, and implemented by the local telephone service and Internet provider, Citizen's Telephone Cooperative. The existing FIN service is currently managed by a volunteer group without the resources necessary to market or update it effectively. The initial step in this project consists of building a coalition among the Floyd INFO Team, FIN's volunteer group, the county public and private schools, and the county government. Other coalitions will also be explored.

The Floyd INFO team will utilize the training from the MIRA workshops by applying the asset mapping technique as a subsequent step in their project. The INFO team will work with the schools to formulate an internship program in which the interns will map and enter existing informational assets into a central database.

Additional action steps outlined by the Floyd INFO team consist of community outreach to civic organizations, churches, youth groups, other networks, interest groups, etc.; installation and promotion; continued effort for access and maintenance of the site; actively researching and contacting financial, technical, and educational opportunities and resources to leverage the initial MIRA grant money, and assuring the continuance of the project beyond the MIRA time frame.

To measure the progress of the project, the Floyd INFO team will conduct a monthly assessment based on the action steps laid out by the grant application. The team intends to include a home-page visitor count indicator to measure the growth and impact of promotions.

The Floyd INFO team intends to link disparate elements of the community into a web of communication and information sharing through technology. Just as the MIRA workshop series gathered the New River Valley to share, learn, communicate, form a group with common goals and derive shared benefits from the process, the Floyd INFO team looks forward to interlinking the community as much from the process as from the project itself.