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Celebrating International Women’s Day with our Digital Champions

I first became inspired by the opportunities that could become a reality through town digitisation in July 2022, when I attended an online conference and heard of the reality of digitisation through the SMART Towns initiative in Cardigan; it was fantastic!  Learning a little of the potential offered through LoRaWAN at the same conference convinced me. I must make it clear that I have absolutely no digital expertise except for common sense and fairly proficient on a computer, so all of this was entirely new to me. I was Mayor of Welshpool at the time and hoped to be able to arrange a similar presentation for our town businesses; unfortunately this didn’t take place, but the majority of businesses were keen to learn more about the potential economic benefit that could be achieved by adopting digital technology.

I tried again in spring 2023, but again, nothing progressed. And then in Autumn 2023, I received an email from One Voice Wales inviting me to attend a series of webinars on the benefits and practicalities of SMART Towns - I jumped at the chance and having attended each of the four webinars and also alerting a fellow Councillor, who actually understands the technical terms(!), we arranged a meeting for local businesses, with SMART Towns, Mid Wales Tourism and Powys County Council.

Following the SMART Towns Conference, which I’m looking forward to attending, we need to progress with the local businesses. At this stage, we need to do a bit more networking so that a partnership of the businesses and Town Council can develop, but there are already several exciting ideas, flowing including working with Mid Wales Tourism and looking into a community owned enterprise.

woman smiling for a picture