Last month Simon Greenish former CEO of Bletchley Park, Iain Standen current CEO of Bletchley Park and I gave a talk at the University of York entitled Did Twitter save Bletchley Park?
The talk introduced by Prof John Clark gives a good overview of Bletchley Park past, present and future.
In the first section Simon Greenish talks about the history of Bletchley Park, the codebreaking, Enigma, Alan Turing and all that good stuff. During WW2 Hitler thought that the messages the German forces were sending were unbreakable, he didn’t realise that at Bletchley Park they were reading most of the messages sent, sometimes even before the intended recipient!
In the next section I talk about how I got involved with Bletchley Park in 2008. The story begins with the
Women of Station X project and BCSWomen, the British Computer Society’s online network for women that I set up in 2001. When I found out from Simon Greenish that Bletchley Park was in financial difficulties and may have to close I started a campaign to save it, my SavingBletchleyPark blog documents most of the highlights of the campaign. I first used traditional media in the campaign: BBC news, the Radio 4 Today program, a Letter to the Times. Rory Cellan Jones was instrumental in making that happen. A few months later I started using social media, particulalrly Twitter, in earnest and soon realised how powerful a tool it can be. From social media gurus like @documentally, @sizemore and @Jemimah_Knight through to Stephen Fry, Tom Watson MP and Google, Twitter helped me to find people and organisations who cared about Bletchley Park and wanted to help secure its future.
The final section focuses on the vision for Bletchley Park. The new CEO Iain Standen talks about the exciting plans for the future that are in place, the work being carried out over the next few years and asks everyone to help out.
The audience were great. It was so lovely to see lots of Twitter friends there including @Garyshort and Courtney Williams š
Did Twitter save Bletchley Park? The audience at the University of York said YES!