ICT Strategy consultation

It was an extremely useful and interesting experience, and was encouraging to gather so many people with an interest in the strategy in one room at the same time to share experiences.

Feedback from the day was gathered live and is available on the blog. We’ve also gathered together the resources and tidied up the feedback and placed this on the site for people who weren’t there to have a look at what went on.

Spectrogramme

The session started with a spectrogramme on ‘Would funding alone improve use of ICT?’ This idea was ‘borrowed’ from the ICT Hub’s Circuit Rider conference, and as at that conference it was very successful in stimulating debate and getting people to think about the issues. This seemingly simple question raised a lot of very interesting points, with an overall agreement that funding is an important part of the mix but that throwing money alone at the situation just won’t work.

Presentation

Stephen Gray from NICVA gave a short overview of the draft ICT Strategy with time for participants to ask questions and clarify any issues that arose. The presentation also included a brief overview of what a circuit rider is and what we hope to do with the circuit rider model in Northern Ireland.

Feedback

The key part of the day for us was gathering feedback from participants on the draft strategy. The room was split up into three tables and each table went through the draft strategy and looked at each objective from four perspectives:

1. What are your initial feelings
2. Is it realistic, will it have an impact
3. What’s missing?
4. What is necessary for it to have an impact

The feedback from each of the tables was written up live on the blog and has been collated on the strategy site for easier reading.