I’ve organised many workshops during my working life but preparing for a series of workshops over several months was a new challenge. We’d been talking about the Cyber Security Innovation Centre for many years and had a clear idea of how it would work, yet when we finally got the nod it was another kettle of fish. Dreaming of something, planning it and delivering it are all different things.
What had originally been a physical centre where people would come to work, learn and collaborate was watered down to become a six month series of workshops with accommodation in two collocation centres. Not that I am ungrateful, getting the opportunity to put some of our plans in place, however much reduced, was invigorating.
There were three immediate issues to be addressed to get the Innovation Centre rolling: people to attend; people to deliver the workshops and; places to collocate. Locations were easy, one in Newcastle and one in Durham. Getting people to deliver the workshops wasn’t that hard either. There is a wealth of talent in the region and, once we had identified the topics we wanted to cover, it was just a question of matching one with the other and making sure the dates worked.
Getting people to sign up was the hardest part. Where do you go to attract people who are thinking about setting up a business? They are not in my network as this is mostly full of people who are in the cyber security sector already. The target audience was people who were working and wanted to do something on their own or students with good ideas for a possible commercial venture. Both these groups are hard to address.
For several weeks there were no signups, then there was one, a few and, in the end there were nearly twenty people, covering 14 possible businesses, who wanted to attend.
Of course not everyone turned up. 10 businesses attended most of the workshops but we ran them across both locations and at times, numbers were very low. It’s hard to be disappointed yet in such a venture the quality of the outcomes is much more important than the quantity. In the end, out of the ten, we ended up with 4 potentially viable businesses, 2 people who went into cyber security employment and one person who used his idea as his degree thesis. A success rate of between 50% and 70% is good by any standards, no matter how many people turned up.
You can’t rest upon your laurels yet it’s good sometimes to stop, take a breath and reflect on what has been achieved.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 