Jisc community champions 2020

I was thrilled to be invited along to this year’s Digifest as one of the first cohort of Jisc community champions.

Natasha Veenendaal, Head of community engagement at Jisc, explained that:

“The purpose of this award is to celebrate those people who are striving to share knowledge outside of their own institution. In doing so we also want to celebrate the power of community. Recognising the importance of bringing peers together to work through problems and share experience, for the good of our students and wider society”.

This year’s Community Champions with Jisc staff, photo by Natasha Veenendal

It was definitely an honour, and a wonderful chance to meet a lovely bunch of fellow community people. As a group we were treated to a personal ice-breaker drinks reception and a swanky meal out.

We were also involved in some ‘coffee and a chat’ filming by the film company Suited and Booted film. For this we were put in small groups and then filmed chatting to each using questions related to digital communities as a prompt. The 30 minute sessions will be edited and made in to short 60 second films.

Being filmed with Steven Hope and Esam Baboukhan, photo by Hannah Tennant

We finished the two days with a reflection session looking at what we had ‘learned, liked and lacked (thought could be improved)’ at the event. This led to us thinking about ways in which we could share Digifest insights with the wider community (from podcasts and viral sharing to the idea of a Digitfest Pest!)

 Many thanks to the Jisc community engagement for taking such good care of us!

You can read more about what went on at the event in my post – Digifest 2020: Bears, Holograms and Gen Z.