We would Appreciate your Feedback.

The summit planning committee is interested in your feedback, comments or questions about the web board process and product. Please submit you thoughts in the box below. See you at the Summit!

Sample feedback received from online discussion and online survey participants:

• "Interesting feature at this year's conference. I am anxious to see how you are able to integrate this information into the policy forum in a meaningful way."
  
  
• "Great survey anxious to get the results."
  
  
• "It was too restrictive. Our community has been stagnate for so long that it has taken a group of volunteer community leaders to form a steering committee to move the community development forward (with a push from the Blandin Foundation). I agree that agriculture is important to rural areas but also in the land use picture is the TIMBER industry, federal lands leased for grazing, water rights - recreational, tourism, bottling etc. I would hope that at the next conference this could be addressed or the topic explored."
  
  
• "Excellent facility - very impressive how they have handled such a large number of people for meals, etc. so efficiently! Really interesting sessions! Tues. lunch speaker, futurist/Kellogg Co., was so informative we could have listened to her for another hour! Summit got super coverage on radio - we listened to an MPR interview with Marcie McLaughlin on the drive from St. Paul to Duluth; other radio stations covered the Summit as well."
  
  
• "So far so good. cyber cafe very nice feature. missed the opportunity to get out into the area on organized outings like last year in St. john. sessions are good but I would like more focus on practical, how-to sessions vs. policy and abstracts."
  
  
• "Great move to do this!! I hope you get a great cross section of respondents."
  
  
• "I appreciate having this opportunity. As an educator in rural Nebraska, I am painfully aware of the inequities that exist in funding for education, health services and general access issues for rural areas."
  
  
• "Good issues, addition of electronic forum is important, but somehow we need to get rural people affordable access."
  
  
• "Several questions geared only for those working in rural areas, so did not answer, since I primarily work with an urban/suburban area."
  
  
• "I'm the mayor of a small rural community. The tension between rural and urban communities is intense. Until this tension is resolved, the rural areas are going to continue to lag behind other areas of the country in economic development. Using number oriented formulas to determine the distribution of resources will always discriminate against the smaller entity. State and Federal agencies must adopt flexible funding criteria to overcome this deficiency."
  
  
• "I am very interested to see if your country is suffering similar difficulties to our own. things are booming for the rich, but the average farming family is working harder, off the land to maintain their farm. CRAZY!!"