I also did some updating of the Friends of Huong Phuong Orphanage site. A significant amount of money has already been raised and many milestones have already been reached – enough money to buy the outdoor and indoor play equipment has been raised and almost half of the women listed are now being supported through the scholarship program. The association has decided to keep the momentum up and is now considering things like developing a medical centre. Things have turned out remarkably well so far and I’m excited to see what comes next.

About this time every year groups tend to hold their Annual General Meetings. At Computing Assistance Support & Education we’re no exception, so like every year, here’s the invitation:

Engaging in Democracy with Web 2.0 Initiatives

Guest Speaker – Pia Waugh
3.00pm Wednesday 26 October, 2011 – Pia Waugh started work as an Adviser to Senator Kate Lundy in April 2009. Prior to this she was a consultant at Waugh Partners in Sydney, Australia. She has also worked as a Research Coordinator for the Australian Service for Knowledge on Open Source Software (ASK-OSS), the Open Source strategist for a large systems integrator and still works to develop the Australian FOSS industry and improve Government policies towards Free and Open Source Software.

Weston Creek Community Hub
Main Meeting Room (across from ACTCOSS)
6 Gritten Street
Weston Creek ACT, 2611

Good ol Pia. She’s worth listening to and always steps up to present when we need someone interesting.

Work has given me a paid day off as volunteer leave in order to prepare and participate which I thought was good of them. At first they weren’t too sure about it as it appears that nobody in living memory has applied for it. But after a few emails things were sorted out, so off I go! It should be an interesting afternoon so feel free to come along.

Today I don’t have to worry about any of that on account of it being a public holiday here in the ACT. Solon, Smug and myself organised an early morning tee-off for 18 holes at Magpies gold course today. It would appear that practice really does help. Some youtube training and some carefully considered shots meant that this time around I didn’t suck quite as bad. I wouldn’t call golf my favourite sport but I’ll give it a bit more time, at least until I have the basic skills. Always worth sticking with something – I played through a season of Euro Handball and was probably worse at that.

I’ve also used the time off this weekend to continue to plan for Dad’s 59th. I cooked last year and it came together really quite well. This year I’ve put a bit more thought into what the menu will be and at this stage we’re looking at veg&chicken rosemary skewers with sauces for entree, stuffed chicken rolls with white wine sauce and couscous for mains and a cheesecake for dessert. I did a trial run of the chicken stuffing last night, cooled rice with cheese, sage, garlic in mustard oil, salt and pepper. It came together well. I’ll have to make another attempt sooner rather than later, but I think the idea is a solid one and the tastebuds concur. I wanted to take some photos of the process but I also wanted not to get raw chicken all over my phone. Maybe next time I’ll co-opt some help!

Today’s workshop “Building Websites From The Ground Up” has proven very valuable for us and I assume everyone else. We’ve had a range of diverse speakers from a wide range of backgrounds who have really covered building a website from the ground up from concept to delivery. Viveka kicked off the day with a hugely detailed presentation on the Victorian AIDS Council’s efforts to develop their new website. She let us into the finer details of the planning process including objectives, constraints, assumptions and a lot, lot more. The key thing to take away from their experience, I think, is that documentation and planning has to be paramount in the process of developing a site, if you’re to end up with what you want! Also critical to the process was ensuring Government accessibility standards were met and that the staff were adequately trained in using the new software backend (Drupal). Have a look at their site which was launched late last year – great effort! http://www.vicaids.asn.au

Following on from Viveka’s presentation we had Andrew Johnson from FII who detailed a developer’s perspective on processes and jobs very similar to Viveka’s. He really emphasised the personal aspect to developing a website, encouraging looking at the task as developing a relationship between the developer and the organisation you (they’re) developing for. Returned to frequently was the idea that it was a good idea to actually like the client you’re working for. If you don’t…consider not taking the job! FII are big on Joomla which is great to see. They’ve got a range of projects on the go and we can recommend checking out their site! http://www.footefrancis.com.au

If that wasn’t enough (and it could have been) Gary Barber from Radharc weighed in on all things Information Architecture. Detailed, to say the least! He offered suggestions on how to better survey and study a userbase so that more appropriate development decisions could be made. He also showed us multiple ways of considering content, how we might look at it differently and how we might spot patterns. Surprisingly, something as mundane as sorting cards turned out to be a great way (through discussion, not necessarily the final arrangement of the cards!) to organise information in way everyone can understand or at least is happy with. Survey, observations, interviews, analytics! Details about these and more can be found at Gary’s site http://www.radharc.com.au

A slightly re-arranged schedule and a relateively relaxed atmosphere after lunch resulted in an expert’s panel on web content management systems. Joomla, Wordpres and Drupal all represented (Silverstripe gets a mention), the importance of keeping ALL of your web software up-to-date was reiterated by myself a few times. Seriously, you’ll get hacked if you don’t stay up to date. Andrew and Vivecka got to field followup questions from an engaged audience and everyone seemed pretty satisfied.

Following afternoon tea an enthusiastic/passionate discussion about domain names in Australia and abroad ensued. Darrell’s position on the auDA policy review panel allowed everyone to get a bit of insight into the domains industry and the history that preceeded it’s current state. Do .com.aus get more traffic? Are they more appropriate than asn.au? What would happen if Australia’s domain policy ended up matching the American free-for-all? There were a range of diverse opinions and everyone came away with something to think about…

Overall a very valuable day and we’re glad we attended! This is actually an event that runs prior to Making Links 2010 proper which of course we’ll be attending. We’ll continue the coverage here and of course you can follow the Twitter stream at #ml10 http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23ml10

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Day 2

The conference proper kicked off this morning with a wonderful Welcome To Country from the entertaining Nanna Beryl Harp. Tanya Notely then made us feel hopeful and afraid at the same time by giving a presentation about freedom and technology. She used examples from worldwide to show how communications technology can make dramatic changes to social fabrics in a very short time. She also talked about how fast repressive governments and regimes can (and do) disable these technologies when they feel they need to. The group she works for provides resources and assistance for those who are being repressed. Head over to http://www.tacticaltech.org to learn more.

We were then very lucky to hear from Susan Moylan-Coombs, an Indigenous character that worked for a long time at the ABC but recently has been working for National Indigenous Television. This is a channel I’d never heard of before but It’s accessible through Foxtel, Austar and Optus. Susan gave us some interesting numbers, including an impressive amount of original content created and aired for very little money. Alarmingly, we were told that NIT may very well be shut down at the end of the financial year. This is appalling news; if NIT disappeared not only would our Indigenous community miss out on much needed local content but Australia as a whole would be culturally lessened. For more information on National Indigenous Television click here…

More to follow…

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Day 2 post 2

Web accessibility is constantly overlooked. But there are a lot of really simple and easy things that you can do to ensure that people with disadvantage have a great user experience at your website. Actually, it’s the law that you attempt to provide this. Vicki Stanton gave us the the basics on how we could think about making websites more accessible. One very important point (one I’ll have to shame myself with) is that transcribing podcasts is important (which I’ll do as soon as I get back to Canberra..), captioning YouTube videos is important and understanding that screen readers for the vision impaired will not work well with your site if you don’t take care. Vicki provided a great range of links to resources to help you and your organisation bring your site up to standard. Check out  Check My Colors, WAVE  (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) and ATRC Web Accessibility Checker. Vicki’s personal story was inspiring and encouraging. Well done!

Jessica Kerr really, really, REALLY likes forms. By cheerful coincidence we have been thinking about web forms here at CASE, too. Her insights proved very valuable. Her approach to building a great form revolves around “The 4 Cs”. Clear, Concise, Clever and Cooperative and the way she detailed the thought process that should go into building a form makes us feel confident that the next one we do will be the best one we’ve done… apart from giving a great presentation, Jessica also provides a stack of great articles at formulate.com.au..

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Day 3

Computers in Homes New Zealand have come across the sea to visit Making Links this year to share with us the trials and tribulations of deploying low cost computer solutions to remote and disadvantaged communities. There was a great deal of emphasis placed on working side by side rather from the top down in these communities. NZ (or this group at any rate) seems to have a grasp on how imposition of new ideas or interventions made in the social structure is so very condescending for an Indigenous culture with thousands of years of history. It took them over ten years to get where they are today and now with a line in the budget they certainly aren’t going away any time soon. While the politics and the geography are very different to Australia’s, the inspiration behind the ideas were valuable. For more information on the project you can head over to http://www.computersinhomes.org.nz

The WA Community Resource Network was another inspiring story that has obviously done a great amount of good for rural and regional communities in Western Australia. Generally focusing on communities between 200-3000 in population, they have ensured services like banking, Centrelink, vehicle registration and other government services are available to these areas. The polar opposite of waiting in line at Centrelink would be attending one of these community centres to enjoy a live cast of an orchestra performance in Perth. Which they also organise! From essential services to cultural enrichment, WACRN is providing these and more to a lot of grateful people. Find out more about the organisation at http://www.crc.net.au

More to follow….

The presentations on gaming mechanics for social action were fascinating. The idea of using game mechanics to achieve social action at first appeared novel but after a few minutes of schooling we were made aware of significant change achieved by making challenges/chores/laws “fun”. A wonderful example offered was an experiment by a car company who created a “Speed camera lottery”. Over a period of days a speed camera measured those speeding and those not, recording the details. Those who broke the speed limit were issued with fines as normal but those who obeyed the rules went into a lottery to win some of the money surrendered by those who were fined.

The change (for the better) of driving habits in the area were profound. This was one of many ideas floated out during the session. Words like “gamification” “interestingness” and “pointsification” are all real words even if this spellchecker doesn’t agree. Collecting, points, leader boards, levels, exchanges and flow are other words also used to describe the game mechanisms that people use to encourage participation in an activity.

The counter gaming presentation, apart from being heavy on theory (not a bad thing, and a great reading list is provided) was actually quite confronting. Videos such as “dead-in-Iraq” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTnuUMM7frk) and “Shoot an Iraqi” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtvvVbeaSHk) showed us how games and social media designed to re-enforce the institutions of war and conflict can actually be ‘hacked’ in various ways to turn the message on its head. Given the academic background of the material used, I’ve got to do some serious reading before I can say anything more in-depth! We’ll get a copy of the reading list up on the blog when we can!

FII’s Joomla presentation was comprehensive and energetic, demonstrating their in-depth knowledge of the web content management system. Working with the software for many years they have developed a range of open source and commercial components, modules and plug-ins which Andrew gave us a brief overview of. The question about open source versus proprietary CMS software was asked, the answer was that the entry cost of open source is much lower than a commercial solution but you have to trust in the community behind the free software to support your needs into the future; in some cases organisations require service level agreements that can only be properly arranged in a paid environment. On the other hand the community behind Joomla is so large and friendly that finding good help isn’t that hard.

By the end of the day everyone appeared happy and tired. The closing plenary summarised a lot of the feelings I’d heard expressed out during the tea breaks. A good group of people that have come together to share some great ideas. There’s plenty of work to be done by ourselves and by the conference. One discussion earlier today perhaps alluded to the goal we all share; by working hard enough and encouraging enough positive change we’re actually all working to put ourselves out of business, making our support groups unnecessary and irrelevant. Some groups put a timetable on that goal (2020 for example) and the more cynical among us perhaps don’t. Personally, I don’t mind – Tweeting and blogging isn’t all I do. Getting back to the other side of the continent is next on the list, for example. Then, probably sleep.

Thanks to everyone involved, see you next year!

Things kick into gear early in the morning tomorrow, so for now it’s sleep time!

The very next morning instead of sleeping after all that, I was out at Piallago paintballing. It was a lot of fun, a well run day with about 50/50 guys and girls a mix I can recommend and probably prefer for that kind of activity. Took a minor amount of damage, really the killer has been my legs; I’m not usually running through rough terrain for hours on end. Lisa got into it, maybe that’s an understatement. A paintball marker should be the only weaponry she’s ever allowed to touch. It’s Wednesday and I still haven’t recovered from the weekend!

Today has been about the garden. My peas have come on strong and were ready to harvest. Also, three leeks that grew in a wild patch (self seeded, not touched by me) were ready to come up, so I’ve got about 1.5kg of vegetables to work with for tonight’s soup. Which will likely involve peas and leeks. I have a large new garden bed that took weeks to dig (about 3×3, half a metre deep) that will provide a lot of tomatoes and corn, come summer (hopefully).

Away from recreation we’ve had a few good weeks over at CASE; finally took position of a fancy card printer and learned how to use it, now just have to come up with a nice design using relatively limited software. The office is coming together slowly, put on hold for our AGM which turned out to be a great event. The guys from Woden Community Services gave a great presentation detailing how they performed a major IT overhaul for their group, with great results. What’s more, they brought copies of all their high quality documentation to share. Brilliant! Then we surprised Tridge with Kate Lundy dropping by to do a small presentation bestowing to him life-membership and a new Sonic Screwdriver. A heartfelt speech for someone who has helped a lot. The business end of the AGM concluded quickly with me being reelected to the committee for another year. How about that!

Now, I have some peas to shell…

I finished CASE podcast episode 5 with very special guest Andrew Tridgell (only just – my iBook’s harddrive half-died during the process…fortunately I was able to recover the podcast files.

The River Cottage blog (essentially the garden of buzzmoo.com) has been given a couple of updates too.

If you’re interested in politics, there’s the #gov2au Twitter feed that’s getting a good workout this week due to the Federal Government’s “Government 2.0 roadshow”, essentially an open forum that’s touring the capital cities allowing citizens to contribute to “Towards Government 2.0: An Issues Paper“.

That should be enough links for now!

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.

Akismet  for WordPress: Anti-spam. If you’re running WP you’re probably already running Akismet. It’s a fantastic anti spam plugin that fights against the scourge of comment spam. If you aren’t running Kismet you’ve probably got a lot of jibberish comments from Russia. If you’re not running it, you must set it up immediately! You’ll need an API key for this, but getting one is a simple process. Akismet = ftw.

NextGEN gallery: Photo Gallery. This is a fully featured but simple to use gallery plugin for WordPress. It uses the nice Lightbox transition effects to display your photos and there’s an option to turn those photos into a flash slideshow. It’s got good thumbnailing, tagging and watermarking options. I’ve tried a few gallery plugins and this is definately my most favourite to date!

Cystats: Cystats is a great web-stats plugin with a good layout and a comprehensive set of views. It lets you see who visists, when and where. I use Cystats for “blog-only” traffic data which for some people is going to be their focus. Free, well supported – a must have!

So there you have three essential plugins for a multimedia website. Check back later for additions to this list!

]]> http://www.buzzmoo.com/2009/04/joomla-tutorial-videos/feed/ 0 http://www.buzzmoo.com/2009/03/case-podcast-2-content-managment-systems/ http://www.buzzmoo.com/2009/03/case-podcast-2-content-managment-systems/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:22:33 +0000 BuzzMoo http://www.buzzmoo.com/?p=639 There’s a golden rule when it comes to content. If you’re doing a series, have a few episodes complete before going to air so that you have a buffer. That was the plan and of course we haven’t followed it. So I’m pleased to replease Computing Assistance Support & Education Podcast Episode 2!

In this episode Amanda and I talk about web Content Management Systems, specifically Joomla. This podcast gives a brief introduction to what a CMS is, what the popular ones are, and how Joomla can help you and your organisation.

Click here to go to the CASE Podcast page to listen in!

You can follow along with all CASE’s projects at the official CASE Blog.

As for me, I’m tired but glad things went well. There are plenty of things I learned, one important one is that you need practice to demo a large number of these things effectively. Being intimately familiar with the devices will make the difference when trying to pitch their case, and that takes time.

So what’s next? Basically wait and see what the powers-that-be decide what they’ll do next (In Australia, specifically) we’ll see something solid on the OLPC wiki (wiki.laptop.org) shortly, I believe. More to follow…

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For Immediate Release 14 October, 2008 

One Laptop Per Child Open Day 

Computing Assistance Support & Education (CASE) will be hosting Canberra’s first One Laptop Per Child Open Day Monday 27 October 2008 3.00pm at Volunteering ACT 55 Chandler Street (corner of Chandler and Cameron Streets) Belconnen. 

Pia Waugh, open source software expert and One Laptop Per Child community member, will be speaking about the success of the OLPC project around the world and the opportunities it provides for educational projects in our region. 

Following the event CASE will hold it’s 10th Annual General Meeting for members. 

Come and play with the OLPC XO devices on display, and find out how this unique technology is being used in educational projects around the world. 

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I’ll be giving a presentation on the technical aspects of the XO itself (nothing too complicated), and then we will be on hand to demonstrate some of the features and answer questions as best we can. Pia will be talking at the end (at 5, is the plan). I’ll be covering the event from this blog, so be sure to check back here!

The International Digital Entertainment Festival (iDEF) is the platform for events and activities from an industry, educational and consumer perspective, with the support of major industry members and associations. The festival will include the Digital Lifestyle Show, eGames Expo and Develop, an ICT Symposium and Careers Expo.

The eGames Expo, as I’m sure you know, will be in its third year this year and promises to be great fun. So be one of the many thousands sure to enjoy it this year and check out .

Meanwhile if you’re a fan of community support and have a FaceBook page you might be interested in joining Computer Assistance Support & Education’s (CASE) new FaceBook page. It’ll be updated regularly and used to communicate news about special events – of which there should be a few soon!