Another highlight for Josie and Michael was seeing Shirley and Stuart, from Milang Old School House (MOSH) give their new and improved presentation to a packed room on the second day.
Their audience was definitely impressed with the combination of community involvement, hand-out CD-rom, and open-source-driven communicative web sites (at byte-on.org.au).
At the start of May, Josie and Michael went across to Adelaide, to join in the “Connecting Up” conference, from the organisation known as CISA (Community Information Strategies Australia Inc.) There was genuine interest from the audience, in the range of projects from 2005, and the Barkly Arts project movie was a great way to grab people’s attention. Fortunately the sound in the room was good enough to hear the fly buzzing at the start of the movie, and people were able to enjoy the terrific Tableland Drifters’ backing music (find out more about the Tableland Drifters from the Barkly Arts project web site; you can even download some of their music).
One other conference highlight was the keynote by Joe Baker, who spoke of several occasions where technology has been useful for community initiatives around the world. For example, the food voucher scheme in the US, where people had to stand in line for hours, until a passer-by came up with a database scheme, and later extended this to include barcode swipes and internet access too. You can find his keynote on the conference website, or via this direct link (it’s an mp3 file, 13.5mb).
The selection committee put their heads together, selected six exciting new projects from around Australia, and the journey begins. Mid-April saw people converge upon Melbourne, new project people, and also the community leaders from last year.
An energetic couple of days, filled with thinking, brainstorming, planning and getting to know each other. We were very lucky to have the incomparable Delia Bradshaw share her ideas around community, pedagogy and technology (you can hear this presentation, and view the slides here); as well as the inimitable Clint Smith taking us through the “Designing e-learning” web site.
Photos you may find on our flickr account here. (Especially worthwhile are the images of scarves draped over the machines.) Audio from the introductions is available on our ‘odeo’ podcast.
