Tuesday morning, start of day 2 of the diagnostic event for the next Urban Ideas Bakery due to take place in Pecs, Hungary in March. The purpose of this meeting is to make decisions about the theme of the Pecs Bakery, and also about who needs to be there to make sure the ideas it develops are put into practice. There’s a great mix of people here, representing the university, the local city council, the business community, and the civil society / NGO sector. We had a lively night out last night – lots of tasting of local delicacies and lots of energetic discussion. Of the 16 participants who took part in yesterday’s discussion, 12 are here bright and early this morning. All these people are busy and have lots of other commitments so I think today’s turn out is a positive sign of how useful and relevant this process is.

So, who’s here? Well, we’ve got the project manager for the ‘I love Pecs’ website www.ilovepecs.hu (an interesting echo of the Kaunas bakery’s theme!), a member of the Pecs 2010 European Capital of Culture Board (the year was officially launched on Sunday evening), architects, a theatre festival director, businessmen, researchers, NGO leaders etc etc. We’ve also got 3 bakers from Kaunas (two based in the UK, one in Hungary). And our facilitator is the famous Ted Matthews (I heard last night that there’s some very questionable video film of his early but failed music career, which is soon to be posted on Youtube). I also told Ted about my own highly questionable appearances on Youtube too, but I’m hoping the aforementioned Pecs delicacies will have made him forget all about this.

But I digress. The job today is to pull together the pieces we created yesterday. These were the needs, the challenges, examples of what’s worked (or nearly worked) in the past, and what factors (or who) has contributed to or blocked success. To keep the bakery metaphor going, we’ve got the ingredients and given them a good stir to make our dough. Now we’ve got to knead the dough and leave it a warm place so that we’ll be ready to bake come March. I’ll let you know how day 2 is going later.