There are those basics. I was in a small English village last fall. I was asking people about how they find out what's going on in the town and how they communicate with the mayor when they need to chat. They said they go to the local pub. Life is very much that way.
One of the issues is that we often think about the Internet as something where we have to rely on fixed lines and broadband services, but actually, the Internet as an information source is being jumped over by mobile Internet services coming through the wireless networks that have gotten very good. Even in many very small rural communities, you actually have reasonable wireless services. That is another mechanism.
If there is a location where people normally congregate, and that is the shopping centre, the community centre, and others, those become good information sources, and you need to promote them along the way as well.
The key for democracy is to make sure that there are locations and facilitators who are ensuring that a range of the kinds of issues that need to be discussed for local governance are there. What's happening in the schools, in the commissions, and in the water districts? All of those are really important developments at the local level. What councils are doing is critical. Somebody has to be facilitating that information flow. In larger communities, it tends to be commercial media, but in smaller communities, you have to find other ways to do that.