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I think yesterdays visit went very well. I would be interested to hear the views of others who were present at the Text Pal visit. Aplogies for the heating... it suddenly got very hot in the room!

I feel I need to mention that last night I felt l really could have benefited from hearing some feedback there and then or from the county team after the judges had departed. I worked very hard to ensure we could pull yesterday off (from a pilot perspective) and it would have been useful to hear whether the team felt it went well. It’s not a big issue as I am aware that it has been an intense day for all involved, but it would have been nice and I feel that it would have also helped to make us feel like one team and not lots of individual teams.

Here are the comments I had from the judges; I must confess that it’s not as much as it maybe could have been, as I wanted to ensure that the young carers felt comfortable and part of it all and that they were not just there for show. With Fran away it meant that there was only one of us to support the group and chat to the judges but I think it was important to support the group and I hope that the judges were able to recognise this.

She was very interested to hear that WE were supplying the mobile phones (I hope I've got that right - when I did the radio interviews I was saying that BT were donating them which is obviously not the case now but that was what I was led to believe earlier on) She commented to the guy that it was a good use of the money but I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or honest??? I assumed it was an honest comment.

She was also interested in sustainability - which I have already produced a plan on for the project - tying in Blurb and making use of the other forms of communcation.

Overall I believe that they were impressed and could see the benefits. I will publish results of the questionnaire completed by the young carers in my next entry.

Rather than do a weekly newsletter things are moving so fast I'm doing some regular blogs. I would suggest we can all do the same to keep each other up to speed - especially about new ideas.

Two things to update everyone on.

First is a discussion I had with Adult Social Services and Annie Mosley who looks after the carers network. There are several thousand adult carers in the county supported by Adult Services and Health and two key vooluntary bodies - West Norfolk Carers and Norwich and District Carers Forum. Like young people they are often isolated and restricted to their homes a lot of the time.

There are existing phone support networks and a national online forum www.chill4us.org. We have gradually been providing computer equipment and training in a range of skills but this could be accelerated.

The two ideas we discussed are:

• An employment bank where they put details of services they can offer online and we encourage local organisations to use this - they could offer an online service as part of out temporary register for example.
• Some of this may be offering ICT helpline support to other carers  or other organisations - possibly as part of the Voluntary sector Invest To Save shared services bid if that is approved in February.

As always we can do joint marketing of this via My Norfolk as a joint package based on their profile.

Second is a discussion  with the IDeA yesterday which is confidential for now. Wearing my chair of esd toolkit hat I have been working with them on their joined up knowledge management solution for local government. One potential element is using the My Norfolk style service as a way of helping communitioes of practice in local government and beyond in the third sector get access to the information they need based on their work profile. Different set of websites and metadata but the same basic system. They have money to develop this so could do both things at once.