guess you were wondering…

… what we were up to…

Well, silence is golden because we’ve been working our butts off to bring you the very best of hyperlocal communities in action at our next ConkerTU on Saturday 16th January.

Whilst we’ve all been tweeting and blogging merrily away, a rather nice bunch of local Forest Community folk have been campaigning like mad to keep their local fire station open. You may have noticed the odd retweet for @MoiraonFire or the mighty @Hedgewytch’s convulsions at how fit all the fire fighters at the last ConkerTU were!

Anyway, at our launch we created http://moirafirestation.posterous.com/ for our local activists and they loved it so much that yet more Parish and Town Councillors have signed up for a session with the “conkertu kid”, Phil Campbell. Indeed, Moira’s very own IT suite is being specially opened for the occasion on Tuesday night.

Another key finding during the launch was learning about the vast number of great local projects, attractions and community groups which just aren’t hooked up with one another. Conkers is right at a Local Authority boundary you see, so you can imagine how delighted we were when General Manager, Steve said yes, let’s bring everyone here.

We’ll be posting more precise details over the next couple of weeks, but ConkerTU Local will give you the choice of attending either a morning or afternoon session as we’d like to involve as many folk as possible. A lot of local groups will be presenting their work and ideas, so we can start to capture some feedback about the success and popularity of these and build some truly sustainable action from the event.

We’re working on a creche and teen zone so as to occupy our favourite little diversions and there may be some up and coming local bands in the amphitheatre too!

What’s more, vegetal inclusion was such a success at the last ConkerTU that we’ve decided to continue the tradition with: “get your jacket, you’ve pulled!” - in this instance more of the yummy Red Leicester from those lovely farmers over at Sparkenhoe to serve with any potato Steve can bake!

For anyone keen to hang out for an evening in the Forest, Donisthorpe Parish is inviting people to a traditional Wassail in and around the orchard, which was such a feature of discussion at the ConkerTU launch.

That’s all for now!

Emma