Committee meeting synopsis
Meeting date: 20 April, 2018
GDPR
You may have come across these letters. They stand for ‘General Data Protection
Regulation’ - new legislation, coming from Europe but which the government says
it will retain after Brexit. This comes into force on 25 May, updating existing
data protection laws. The main target is large organisations that hold sensitive
personal information about you, but even organisations like ours have to follow
the new ‘rules’. We will finalise the policy documents after we have attended a
workshop in the first half of May where we hope to get professional advice to
ensure we’re on the right track. Like everyone else, we have to tell you the
basis on which we hold and process your personal information, and we have chosen
to do this on the basis of ‘legitimate interests’: we interpret this to mean you
have asked to be kept informed of walks and other activities, and in order to do
this, we need your name and email address. We have also asked those of you
coming on our walks to have a phone number to contact you in case of late
changes to the arrangements. In all of these, we have always made it clear that
we will use those details only for the purposes outlined, and we will not pass
them on to anyone else unless we have your explicit permission to do so. We hold
this information in a password protected spreadsheet, held on a computer which
is also password protected. All collective emails are sent ‘blind copy’ so your
email address is not visible to anyone else. As this is the basis on which we
worked to date, we believe we do not need to ask you to opt in again, but this
is something we will check at the workshop. In the meantime, if you do have any
concerns about how we’re dealing with your information, please contact Ken
Publicity
We (mainly Catherine and Sue) have been monitoring and extending the locations
where we have placed WaW ‘stickers’ - now up to 24 locations. Recently,
Catherine has also been asking if they will take a batch of our walks guides,
for which (thanks to Dereham Town Council) we have also been able to offer a
leaflet holder: to date, 20 have accepted, so spreading the word more widely. In
addition, many of those parishes outside Dereham through which one or more of
our walks run, have taken a supply of packs, and/or put a link on their websites
to our own. Most recently, North Elmham has told us they have given packs to a
local group of walkers, the parish church in Worthing, the King’s Head Hotel
(pub and good quality accommodation), the Teapost (café) and Post Office, and
the parish church in Elmham. We are most grateful for those wonderful actions on
our behalf.
Maintenance
We conducted a litter pick along 2 of our footpaths (FP11 and FP14), generating
five bags of rubbish. There are a couple of other paths which need more heavy
duty attention, and we are hoping for assistance on these. We have also once
more had the input of The Conservation Volunteers on Restricted Byway 30 (runs
from Northall Green to Swanton Road), this time cutting back encroaching trees
and bushes, making it more easily possible to walk and cycle along here. We hope
to agree more work with this splendid group in the near future.
Badley Moor
Those who came on our last walk will know that we had hoped to call in briefly
at Badley Moor, common land open to the public, accessed off Footpath 26
(Dumpling Green) and FP35. We didn’t go there as we were confident it would be
very wet underfoot. We will schedule this in before too long in the future. In
the meantime, we are pleased to report that the landowner has finally installed
a kissing gate (replacing a stile) as access to the Common. We and Open Spaces
Society are very pleased about this, and will be issuing a press release soon.
Next walk
Now the main news. Our next walk is a Dereham circular, ending once more at The
George, where we again have the reserved use of the conservatory. I don’t want
to make a big thing out of it, but do need to point out that we will make a
crossing of the A47 as a single carriageway at one point. I would anticipate
that traffic will be lighter than at some times, but we will be taking extra
care in escorting people across. It’s something that I (and others) do
regularly, so I don’t expect any difficulty, but I am aware that some are wary
of this.
More dates for your diary:
- 16 June, 1330 - a shorter, Dereham based walk, ending with refreshments at
our Annual Public Meeting, which we hope you will attend - come and give us your
thoughts about what we’ve been doing, and, more importantly, what we should do
in the future.
- 29 July, 1330 - a new venture: a town walk around some of the most important
historical sites in the town; there won’t be a long distance covered, but plenty
of information from (among others) St Nicholas Church, Bishop Bonner’s Cottage
Museum and Mid Norfolk (suppliers of tea and cake). As this is a little
different, we would much appreciate an idea of whether this would appeal to you
- no obligation, of course.
- 27 August - a ‘standard’ (is there such a thing?!) walk
- 30 September - walk ending in a garden party
- 1 January - well, you don’t want to have to think too much about next year,
yet, do you?