What did you do at work today?

“What did you do at work today Daddy?”  “I made grown-ups hold up bits of blue, green and red laminated card.”  “Is that all?”

No, not at all.  It all started this morning when I had a nice cappuccino with a colleague in the restaurant at Gateshead civic centre.  For some reason I always like going there.  It is one of the better ones around, light and airy and you can steal their electricity.  It helped that I had guest access to their wireless network and was able to catch up on some emails and documents while I was waiting for my colleague to arrive.  While we drank the coffee (and ate some Christmas cake) we got our thoughts together about how we would organise the evaluation of our upcoming broadband procurement tender and how we would arrange the subsequent programme office.

I was at Gateshead for one of our regular North East ICT Managers meetings where the seven of us get together to talk about what is up in our own worlds. We take great comfort from knowing that all of us are in the same boat, sharing many of the same issues and opportunities and that we are all prepared to talk them through and lend a hand. The time flowed by nicely and we came away with two or three great ideas for collaborating.  It seemed like real progress.  After that it was back to County Hall and a couple more meetings.

But the main event was this evening when we held a Local Broadband Champions event with twenty five or so people interested in improving access to superfast broadband in their communities.  I did a presentation about progress so far but the meat of the event was a workshop on how to apply for Awards for All funding from the Big Lottery.  The presenter said her piece and there were some examples of successful and not so successful applications which the audience had to work out which was which.  Then came a quiz to make sure everyone had been awake.  The Champions had to hold up the different coloured laminated cards depending upon the answer, blue, green and red.  I smiled to myself at the enthusiasm with which people took part, straining to hold up the right cards, cheering when they were right and groaning when they were wrong.  There were no prizes, no winners and certainly no losers but it rounded off the evening perfectly.

“So that’s what I did today, another eventful one.”  “Really Daddy, it doesn’t seem like work to me!”