We won !
At a packed ceremony last night, at Hunsbury Hill, Northampton, home of ACRE*, the winner of the Best Community Website was announced and the overall winner was . . .
geddington.net !
The competition was part of the Community Website Project being run by ACRE – Action with Communities in Rural England – and funded by Northamptonshire Libraries. The Project’s aims were to:
n Help all communities in the county to develop a website and become part of an on-line neighbourhood.
n To enable communities to automatically share information on events, news and campaigns with neighbouring websites.
n To bring together all current and new village websites into a mapped community website hub, maintained by Northamptonshire County Council.
n To create an on-line forum of community website editors who can provide support and assistance to each other.
The Project was the brainchild of Steve McCarthy, a former head of IT at Northamptonshire County Council. Steve said: “There’s plenty of website software out there for people to use, I wondered if it was possible to train groups to use it themselves.” January of this year saw training sessions set up in Libraries all over the county. Elaine O’Leary, Project Manager of Northamptonshire ACRE, explained: “We want every sort of community to be in control of their own on-line home.”
The evening was the culmination of all the efforts put in by the organisers over the past year. John Griff from BBC Radio Northampton got the evening underway with a speech about how useful community websites were to journalists and researchers, as well as the general public.
They then announced the winners of Category 1 (Most Online Engagement) and Category 2 (Best Informative Site) who were: Woodford Halse for Category 1 and joint winners for Category 2 : Burton Latimer and Helmdon. The winner of Category 3 (Impact on the Local Community) was Walgrave and for Category 4 (Best Young Person Created Site) was Sasha, from Stanwick W.I.
We had entered the first 3 categories and on those, were judged as the Overall Best Community Website. We received a Certificate and an engraved Trophy.
You can see the trophy in the window of our treasurer, Janet Jones, at 1 West Street.
We say on our Home page, that the geddington.net site is run by villagers, for the village, offering a communication and information resource for all. We have to thank Geddington residents,, organisations and businesses, for without their the help and information, we would have been hard pressed to achieve this result. Thank you!
Pam Hopkins – Janet Jones – Tony Locock
Pam Hopkins, John Griff, Janet Jones, Tony Locock, Steve McCarthy
* Action with Communities in Rural England
Hunsbury Hill Centre, Harksome Hill, Northampton. NN4 9QX Tel: 01604 765888
4 comments on “Celebration Time!”
Congratulations, Well done! To a team inspired to keep us all informed. You have set a very high “Bench Mark”
Congratulations! Good information makes for good decisions.
Information, involvement and influencing decisions particularly those affecting our community!
Well done Geddington – worthy winners … from the category 3 winners