London Regional ICT Champion

I’ve just spent the last 2 weeks wading knee deep through the mangrove swamp that is policy and strategy writing, and it’s only now that I’ve emerged, blinking with relief into the winter sunshine of a February afternoon.

Image with kind permission from Maritess Ynclino. All rights reserved.

Before disappearing into the mangrove swamp of strategy, I’d been commissioned to write an ICT Strategy for London’s voluntary and community sector, an under-taking that threatened to make War & Peace look slim by comparison. As anybody’s who’s ever been commissioned to write a strategy document will know, what starts out as a short punchy document with calls to action can quickly get bogged down in a morass of detail, frustration, hand-wringing, sleepless nights and eventual mental breakdown. And that’s before the committee’s had a chance to get their hands on it.

During the writing of the strategy, I’ve also had some great mentoring support from Hilary Garner at Superhighways. Hilary is a seasoned campaigner when it comes to the battlefields of policy and strategy, and he immediately knew how to focus and cut the all the extraneous junk out of my document. I’d actually come to a point in the writing where I felt totally blocked – the answers were in my head, but I just couldn’t get them onto paper. Sometimes, even when you know the answers (or think you do), it needs someone else to ask the right questions to set you on your way again.
The strategy isn’t finished yet – it’s something of a work in progress. But for folks who who want to reserve their copy now, the London ICT Development Strategy is based on the LIDP and will be available from all good bookshops this June.