Broadband Champions at Rory Stewart's Gt. Asby Meeting. John Popham Photo
This is the first draft of my account. It’s written from my point of view as Broadband Champion for the Lyvennet Valley villages of Crosby Ravensworth Parish and will be fleshed out with more interesting detail in due course between bouts of Website design and maintenance. Any errors are likely to be my own, are unintentional and will be subject to later correction and your patience is much appreciated with this work in progress. Here will follow a blow-by-blow account in the days to come.
Hard on the heels of his very dynamic and crammed-to-capacity Big Society Meeting at Gt. Asby on November 5th, our Penrith and the Border MP Rory Stewart followed up his successful Rheged Broadband Conference with a meeting of local community Broadband Champions and Community leaders at Great Asby Village Hall on Saturday, 6th of November.
It was a well organized event that enabled important ideas to disseminate and coalesce.
These ladies and gentlemen, drawn from Parishes all across the constituency gathered to achieve three purposes:
1) to hear, from Rory, the latest developments in the campaign to connect our rural populations with super fast communications that are becoming increasingly essential for our future prosperity and improving the quality of life. He has managed to secure more than double the amount of funding that we’d hoped for in order to help connect rural Cumbria to the fast lanes of the information superhighway!
2) to be brought “up t0 speed” about community fast broadband by leading experts including Dr. Barry Forde (founder of the CLEO fast broadband network for Schools), representatives of the Great Asby Broadband Group, Mike Kiely & Robert Ling of Broadband Delivery UK, Mr. Simon Jones from the UK Division of the Cisco Systems communications giant and Ms. Nicky Getgood of Talk About Local .
and
3) for a focussed discussion of key questions in smaller, local working groups of Community Broadband Champions. Our summarised findings were then delivered to the whole gathering so that we could share information.
A fine account complete with associated video and nice photographs can be found at Citizen reporter, John Popham’s weblog.
Broadband Champions engaged in brainstorming!
Here in the days to come, will follow a blow-by-blow account.
Better Cumbria 
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