The challenge of CyberFest

For the last few nights, despite the unusual, and for me unbearable heat, I have been waking up in a cold sweat. It’s all Graham’s fault.

Some months ago I agreed to help Dynamo develop a cyber work stream across the region. The aim was to position the North East of England as a great place to develop and deliver cyber related businesses. We want to make the region one of the safest in the world. All good so far. Things have got off the ground and we have called this work #CyberNorth.

Luckily and kindly, we had been given some funding from Accenture to help get this underway. One thing I have learned about doing anything is that some money always helps. One of their requirements however was the delivery of what they called a ‘Marquee event’ which I took to mean a significantly large gathering of people probably in Newcastle.

That’s when Graham came along and made the excellent suggestion that we develop this into a series of events across the North East under the banner of #CyberFest. This is why I now suffer from sleep deprivation.

We now have five events lined up with a possible three others to come along. This means locations to find, speakers to persuade, additional sponsorship to secure and of course plenty of people to come along and make the events a success. All in all we need probably around six to seven hundred souls. It also means a constant campaign on social media to raise awareness and garner enthusiasm.

I always pride myself on having a comfort zone outside of my comfort zone, if you know what I mean, yet this is seriously challenging my ability and nerves. Still, it looks like it’s starting to come together, there are still six weeks to go until it all kicks off and the team from Beaconhouse Events are great.

You can find more details here.

Thanks Graham.