Weeknotes w/c 21 June

Another super busy week. (This might be a theme.) 

I had a great chat with Claire from the Planning Inspectorate about her new project investigating how AI might be useful to planners in analysing consultation comments,  or representations, as they are known in the regulatory jargon. I say a great chat, but I fear it was somewhat one-sided...Claire made the mistake of letting on that I wa the first local authority planner she'd spoken to, so I gave her chapter and verse on the challenges planners face in collating, analysing and presenting reps to PINS. If we could just send them a secure database link rather than endless PDFs, that would be a great start 😉. I've got a half finished post about this in more detail so I'll stop there.

I sent out a survey this week to ask our cultural and digital community in Colchester what the way forward should be for the Creative Colchester Partnership, for which I am the new Chair. Already lots of great responses in, and if you are local and have a view (or want to put yourself forward as a new board members) please complete, and share! 

An extract from what I said when I sent it out to our mailing list:

'...I think there’s scope for us to really step up our impact, particularly with the new cultural strategy being developed for the borough – and I would like this to be led by what the sector want from us.'

I believe in using consultation and engagement to build a strong evidence base to support the development of strategy, so this is a natural way for me to start my period as chair. I'll report back when the survey has closed.

I am currently in the mode where you could invite me to just about anything, and I'd turn up...one thing that the last period has told me is that life is definitely too short to make lame excuses. But one thing I didn't need persuading about was to go to a beautiful dusky Hyde Park to meet up with the Public Practice gang, to celebrate Finn Williams going.off to his dream job as city architect of Malmo and Pooja Agrawal taking over as CEO. Public Practice gave me my entry into public sector work and I am so glad for it. Finn and Pooja are both brilliant and I'm so excited to see PP grow and expand its impact. 

And on Friday I went to Firstsite for the (in person! With drinks and lunch and everything!) opening of their new Michael Landy show, all about Essex. It was good to see a very strong turnout from the new administrations of Colchester BC and Essex CC. You don't need to have voted for them, to want them to do a good job for our communities now they are in office. Kevin Bentley as the new Essex leader gave a firm commitment to increasing ECC's funding and engagement with the arts and I for one am encouraged by this.

At the weekend we had family to stay and I mainly cooked, cooked and cooked some more. That is, to use the clichéd phrase of the moment, my love language...