It's early February as we reach the very last of the Core Sessions before we go totally loose on project work. In the previous weeks since the last Core Session, us Penlee House Citizen Curators have met a few times and cracked on with planning, thanks to meetings with Tehmina and Zoe, plus Katie from Penlee House itself. We have a good idea of the outcomes we'd like to deliver, although the nitty gritty is still ahead to make it happen. The next formal session will be the big finale in late April, two months from now, where one needs to be able to demonstrate the project is primed and loaded to go, even though it doesn't necessarily have to be live by that date.
Rather bizarrely, my notes from this session are not in my notebook, so goodness knows where they went. Therefore I'm relying on my rubbish memory totally for this blog post.
Project Workshop
On a blowy damp morning, we ended up for this session in the cartshed at Penlee House, which has officially the slowest cold water tap in the South-West but an impressive three kettles to ensure everyone is well watered. This session is all about the project that us Citizen Curators have to get busy with over the next two months, so therefore we started off with a little pre-enable of filling in our thoughts about everything we'd learnt from the course. I'm not good with a blank piece of paper in front of me, so had to get that brain churning via looking at my notes and the handouts from previous sessions, plus a second cup of coffee. Strangely, my sheet is also missing from my notebook but it was divided up into sections in a table form covering the main headings from the core sessions: Communications, Research, Collections etc. What came to mind for me? Unsure as the sheet has gone missing :D I'll probably be doing a conclusion post on the whole course in the early summer so I'll neatly slope my shoulders at this point and move on to the next part of the session.
A Good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
That was today's quote on the handout and also sums up the next portion of the morning that took us up to coffee and cake, or, as most other people call it, lunch. We had a double sided handout full of multiple sections to fill in, this piece of paper being our formal project plan document which needs to be submitted by the 22nd February. Although there are some 14 sections to be filled in, it's not as daunting as it sounds, especially as most groups have done a decent amount of ground work for their projects by this point. Of course, this isn't the day we have to do the project plan, but an opportunity to think about the form, get a draft copy done and have some help. Types of things to think about and cover on the form include 'communication' - what message are you telling your audience? who is your audience? What are the primary outcomes? What is unique or different about your project? what's the star object? what about feedback,? what's the Cornish connection and more. I'll not go through everything but suffice to say it's comprehensive but also a very highly useful document to help collate ones previous planning work into a formal structured plan document. Plus, it's only two sides of A4 so you aren't writing an essay here.
I thought you was doing that?
Additionally, we had a one-sided handout form that is like a tasklist, detailing the tasks you need to do to complete the project, who is doing it and by when. There's also a shopping list which isn't for your next supermarket trip but the bits and bobs you'll need for the project such as interpretation boards, flyers etc.
All in all, a very useful morning spent bringing everything together in a more formal manner and helping to ensure you've not forgotten anything or lost your focus.
Golden Tree Productions
The afternoon was taken up by a presentation and group tasks set by a representative from Golden Tree Productions, who promote Cornishness off the back of a pot of money given our way in 2014 when Cornwall became officially a national minority. All the sordid details of that framework and what it means for us Cornish was shown to us, and we got to do some group tasks to test our cornishness and thinking about what one needs to do to put a big project together, as Golden Tree did with the Cornish Tick Box Bus ... which, I don't think I'd even heard about before. Mind you, given my introverted ways, they are lucky I'd heard anything about their work thus far.
It was interesting, although a little dry perhaps. I'm not totally sure what to think, most likely because I'm totally unsure what to say about the whole Cornish topic, and I'm about as Cornish as they come! I actually kept quite quiet during this part of the day, mostly because I was a little sleepy but also because I've never really been able to convey my thoughts on the topic coherently. Certainly this blog isn't the place to start ranting on about Cornish stuff either way but as a presentation is was adequate, and as a guide to a project, it ticked a few boxes (no pun intended) although if I'm being honest, I'd had preferred more structured examples I think.
That's not quite all folks
I'll be back with another blog post probably in May as a sort of conclusion to our project and the whole course. Until then, we've got work to do :)
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