Monday and Tuesday of this week saw me in Sydney for Connecting Up 09. This is an annual conference that focuses on technology in the Australian community services sector. This year the emphasis was on Web 2.0 and the ideas that surround it. It was a massive two days, almost an overdose, but the quality of the presentations was decent and generally things ran quite well (with the exception of the the wireless internet, which was unreliable at best – the ironing is delicious?). I ran a series of posts on the CASE blog but I’m copying them here because they’re pretty valuable:
We’re coming up on lunch in the first day of Connecting Up 09 – there have been some highlights so far including a great talk by Mark Pesce where he explored ideas surrounding the gradual change of our social fabric. An incredibly comprehensive online version of his presentation (plus much much more) can be found at his blog here.
Elliot Bledsoe’s talk on creative commons and copyright was very informative and ultimately, very important. Learning more about creative commons can be done (quite easily!) through their newly revamped website at www.creativecommons.org.au. A very important tip is to make sure you generate creative commons licenses specific to your country, even though CC applies worldwide.
The official Twitter feed has been getting a healthy workout despite generally poor wireless broadband at the venue! You can follow the twitter conversation here.
The second day of Connecting Up 09 is now in full swing. We’ve just had a talk from Alan Noble, engineering director of Google Aus/NZ. He gave a brief overview of some of their lesser known apps, cloud computing and answered some good questions. Just how green can cloud computing be? Can we get our information back out of the cloud if we place it there? He also detailed how adwords works and where community organisations can go to apply for grants from Google.
The wireless connectivity issues that plagued the conference seem to have been resolved (at this stage) so Twitter is still filling up with tweets. Elliott Bledsoe who gave the talk on Creative Commons yesterday also has a great blog post that explains how hash tagging in Twitter works and would be a valuable read for anyone new to Twitter.
Yesterday Susan Devine and Gail Tuft gave a talk on how they have used a wiki to maintain business knowledge. The session was packed and a lot of people were very interested in trying out a wiki themselves. Gail reccommended DocuWIKI for a simple, easy to use wiki platform.
Peter Deitz from Social Actions gave a thought provoking presentation on “Social Actions”. For his site you can see www.socialactions.com, for a list of social networking sites you can see this wikipedia entry.
Headshift, a social networking consultancy based in the UK (but looking to expand into Australia) has done some good work and their offical site can be found here: http://www.headshift.com.
CASE President, Darrell Burkey, presented also. His presentation “What’s in a Name – Choosing the Right Domain Name” looked at what makes a good domain name, how to register domain names and how to select the most effective name to represent your organisation. Also outlined were most common problems that organisations have with their domain names and how to prevent them. You can find CASE’s domain name info sheet here.
For the official CUA09 website, click here.