Monday, March 05, 2007

Find out more about the Thatcham Vision at our launch event

We're holding a public meeting on Tuesday 13th March at Thatcham Football Club to launch the Vision's first action plan. If you'd like to play an active part in improving Thatcham, or would just like to know more about what's involved, please do come along. There will be a free buffet from 7.00pm to 7.30pm, followed by some short presentations and an opportunity to talk to some of those involved in the eight topic areas covered so far, before a final question and answer session finishing at 9.30pm.

Just in case you don't know, the Football Club is located about 150 metres to the south of the level crossing, on Crookham Road.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Getting involved

One of the main aims of the Thatcham Vision project, and others like it (see this page for details of similar projects elsewhere in West Berkshire), is to involve people in improving where they live.

There are lots of ways in which people can play a more active part in our community. Our recently published action plan includes over 100 actions and pojects and many of them can be taken forward by people from Thatcham. Some proposed projects have already been implemented and action teams have been set up for others.

We will also be setting up new topic teams to look at aspects of Thatcham which are not covered in the current action plan. These include topics like secondary education and health and wellbing.

In addition to proposing new areas for action, the action plan contains specific proposals for ways in which the community can build on and strengthen existing initiatives - like Neigbourhood Watch and Neigbhourhood Action Groups.

Incidentally, the Neigbourhood Watch site linked to above includes the interesting statistic that 3 million Britains can't tell the difference between their neigbours and an intruder: in other words, they don't recognise their neigbours. Do you?

Strong and prosperous communities

In October the Government published a White Paper which describes its ideas for involving people more in how their communities are run. You can download a summary of the White paper - or the whole thing if you want - from this webpage.

To quote from that page:

'The white paper is on the side of individuals and families who want to make a difference, both to their own lives and to the communities in which they live.

Our vision is of revitalised local authorities, working with their partners, to reshape public services around the citizens and communities that use them.

This means changing the way we work to give citizens and communities a bigger say; to enable local partners to respond more flexibly to local needs; to reduce the amount of top-down control from central government - and to enable citizens and communities to play their part.'

All sounds like good stuff although the devil will, of course, be in the detail. A major theme in our emerging action plan is to do with involving people in 'reshaping public services' and enabing 'citizens and communities to play their part'. See the next post for a thought about that.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

For those who haven't seen 'An Inconvenient Truth' ...

... this is worth a look

Also, if you have't seen the film the brand new Thatcham Film Club has been asked if it can arrange a showing in the town once its new £10,000 projection system, courtesy of Awards for All, has been installed.
 

Secretary of State Blog

I may have mentioned this before, but David Miliband's blog is well worth a look.  There's a heated debate about global warming starting up following a post of his titled 'Good Science or Flat Earth'. 

Friday, November 17, 2006

We-Think

On Tuesday I received an email from a friend telling me to listen to the podcast of 'Start The Week' as one of the guests had things to say that she thought might interest me. ( You can download it here - it's the 13th November edition.)

The someone in question was Charles Leadbeater , a former journalist, adviser at No 10 and now 'management guru' - at least according to Andrew Marr.

Charles has recently published a book called 'We-Think'. Here's what he says about it on his website:

'We-Think: the power of mass creativity - is about what the rise of the participative culture - the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist - means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. People want to be players not just spectators, part of the action, not on the sidelines, participants and contributors not just workers by day and consumers by night.'

Interesting stuff. If you want to read the book you can buy copies from the boring conventional routes like Amazon and bookshops. But you can also read it online here because he has published it to a wiki. In fact, he's using the Wikia platform which hosts the Thatcham Vision's very own wiki.

Wikis, as you'll know by now, are websites which visitors can edit themselves. So you can not only read the book but also write new bits, change existing ones, comment via the 'talk' pages and so on. If you'd like to keep track of any changes to We-Think, copy and paste the address of this special page into a 'feed reader' like the web-based www.bloglines.com See the 'help' page at Bloglines to find out how this works.

The Thatcham Vision is all about 'enabling people to be players and not spectators'. As Charles says, the web is a tool - a phenomenally powerful tool - which if used properly can enable this aspect of the emerging vision to be achieved. Connect Thatcham - our web access project is already under way - is looking at ways of extending web access to all households in Thatcham. More on that story later.

Monday, June 05, 2006

Watch this space...

... as visitors will have noticed, the blog has been rather inactive for a while.  This is entirely due to the fact that a vast number of Vision related activities are taking place simultaneously.  Our first group of hot topic teams are reaching the end of their work, three new ones (covering anti-social behaviour and crime, homes and housing and lifelong learning) are just getting going, we're launching a business survey this week and we're busy completing the analysis of the Thatcham Survey.  We'll be posting news to the website, and here, over the next couple of weeks so don't forget to check back if you're interested in keeping up-to-date.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Wrap spin-off?

We've been contacted by a business that's interested in meeting one of the needs identified in our Thatcham Vision supplement.  The team had hoped that one of the benefits of the supplement is that it would attract new businesses to the town.  We obviously can't say anything just now about the specifics of this particular business, but if you have ideas for new businesses in Thatcham that you'd like to bounce off us we'd be delighted to hear from you.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Einstein


Anyone whose interest in Einstein has been sparked by his hitherto unknown connection with Thatcham might like to take a look at this excellent website - Einstein Online - which includes straightforward and clear explanations of the great man's ideas.