The night before Gov Camp (well it was 2 days ago when I wrote this...)

Trains are a great time for blogging. Life has been so rushed, crowded and mind-boggling recently that I’ve been unable to take time to sit and unpick what’s in my head. But the last couple of days, my head exploded with the pressure of unformed thoughts and today, thank God (yep, I actually mean I’m thanking God, not using it as an expression), I have over four hours of peace, quiet, laptop and table on a train. Unfortunately, I don’t have over four hours of battery and there are no power sockets. So I need to get blogging quick!

Enjoy the offerings over the next few days. They’ve been brewing for a while. And I need to dump the ideas into blogs to make space in my head for tomorrow . Ah, tomorrow. Gov Camp Cymru, an annual Saturday ideas-fest extraordinaire in Cardiff.

It’s a bit hard to explain Gov Camp Cymru. I’ve only been to one. And I’m still not sure what  I make of it. There are no pre-arranged workshops in pre-arranged break-out rooms. We start the day with a few seconds to pitch our idea of a workshop, discussion or whatever. There’s a queue of people, some of whom have finely crafted seminars/workshops with amazing resources. Others have a bright idea or a knotty problem and just want to pick people’s brains. A few (too many!) want to show off something they’ve done or tout for business.  Each person gets 90 seconds to say what their idea is and why someone should come. Then their idea gets allocated a room and people vote with their feet. You may get no-one or a crowd.

But that’s only one side of Gov Camp Cymru. Another is that it happens on a Saturday, there are T-shirts available (for free) so most people end up dressed in a similar way, and the lanyard name badges ask for a first name and twitter name, not your full name and job title. It’s liberating, in a scary way, to have no idea if you are talking to a world expert with immense power or someone who was attracted by the smell of fresh coffee and thought of free beer afterwards. 

And another side is that we muck in together to make the day happen. I’m a fringe volunteer. I make the odd comment as things are being organised but otherwise I just show up & help out on the day. The volunteering reinforces the sense that we are there because we want to be part of changing Wales rather than because it’s part of our work.

And the final side is that last year, I confess, I hadn’t allocated time after Gov Camp Cymru to follow up on the ideas and contacts I made, or track down all the information I was signposted towards. And so I became part of the problem. I had a great time, amazing ideas – and a year later I have nothing concrete to show for it. So this year, I reckon I need to pitch to lead a session on “What has changed because of Gov Camp Cymru 2014?”. At least this year I’m prepared for the Gov Camp experience, so let’s hope I make better long term use of it than last year.