The Official CASE Blog

As is common at conferences like this, URLs for interesting sites get get suggested thick and fast. Here’s a summary of a few interesting ones we were pointed to during the conference. We had a great time and want to thank everyone for their talks, and to everyone who attended ours. We’ll have online versions of them available shortly, in the meantime make sure to check out the following sites:

Techsoup.org – A vast ICT resource for not-for-profits including valuable templates for essential IT documentation.

www.aiia.com.au/GreenIT – A comprehensive book looking at “green computing” strategies for business and not-for-profits.

act.ly – A site that enables you to start petitions and polls on Twitter, great for online activism!

doingitbetter.net.au – A comprehensive program run by Monash University and partners investigating how to expand the capacity of ICT in the community service sector.

www.ici.qut.edu.au/projects/sustainablefoodculture.jsp – An example of where Federal government’s ARC funding is enabling social action through technology.

prezi.com – A place that allows you to make impressive looking power-point-esq presentations, and can be viewed on a web browser.

Xero.com – “Cloud accouting”. Affordable bookkeeping and financial services for small to medium sized groups, with a Web 2.0 twist.

SalesForce.com – an impressive CRM. They give free licenses to charities and not-for-profits.

OpenOffice.org – A free, professional word processor that rivals, and is compatible with, Microsoft Office.

Overall, a great two days. You can review the Twitter feed of the event here, for further info, links and insights from the day. To review our very own Twitter posts from the day, click here.

We’re down in Melbourne for the annual Making Links conference. The focus is the convergence of social action and technology and we’re coming up on morning tea of the first day. So far we’ve had a great talk by Matthew Allen on “de-tooling” technology, whereby change how we think about our role within systems and how we treat them reflects our attitudes towards offline community. Lisa Harvey (@lisaharvey) has provided a summary on the ongoing efforts of the Australian Federal Government’s Gov 2.0 taskforce. Included in her presentation were ideas about open information, a look at the developments triggered by the Gov 2.0 roadshow from earlier in the year and how interaction with the public service has the chance to run in both directions.

CASE’s Annual General Meeting wrapped up this evening after a small but pleasant gathering. Patron Sen. Kate Lundy arrived just in time to stop the Web 2.0 version of herself stealing the show and what followed was a relaxed, informal talk about human engagement through technology. After Kate’s presentation we briefly looked at the  year behind us, Darrell detailed VISE’s Online Volunteer Management System (developed by CASE over a number of years), our trip to the Dharriwaa Elder’s Group in Walgett, and welcomed new members Hepatitis C Council of NSW, among others.

Business as usual followed, then the nomination of committee members for the coming year. Darrell Burkey maintains his position as President, Amanda Plowright maintains her position as Vice President and I have been returned as a committee member.

Looking forward to the year ahead!

The Sydney Joomla Users Group is putting on “Sydney JoomlaDay 2009″ on the 17-18th of October. The conference itself runs on the Saturday with workshops being held on Sunday. They’ll be looking at the new features of the upcoming Joomla 1.6 amongst other things. Presenting will be Andrew Eddie, Sam Moffat and Brad Bake. At CASE we’re pretty interested in Sam Moffat’s talk on Joomla security and hope to ask some questions of him! For full detail on what will be presented you can view the conference program.

The essential twitter details are @sydjug for their official feed and #SJD09 for the hashtag.

Tickets are only $50 and these days always prove very informative. Head over to the official Sydney JoomlaDay 2009 site to find out more.

CASE is holding it’s Annual General Meeting Tuesday 22 September. We’re please to announce that Senator Kate Lundy will be presenting a talk on Government 2.0 & Citizen Engagement from 5:30pm, preceding the AGM proper. Senator Lundy has been a patron of CASE and involved in web technologies for quite some time now. We’re hoping for an illuminating talk that looks at the recent developments of her #publicsphere initiative and the federal government’s Government 2.0 initiative. The AGM will run from 6.00pm – 7.00pm at the Offices of Volunteering ACT, Canberra Labor Club Community Chambers, 55 Chandler Street Belconnen ACT.

Feel free to join us! For further information make sure to check out the official CASE website.

Last weekend Sen. Kate Lundy held the third installment of her “publisphere” series. This even focused on ICT & Creative industries.

The Australian ICT industry is extremely broad in scope and expertise – from core infrastructure to mobile, Web 2.0 and of course the creative industries such as gaming, film and digital arts. Australia has done quite well on the international scene, however we could still do more to inspire many smart Australian professionals and companies to base themselves in Australia in the long term and to encourage international investment in the Australian ICT sector.

Having a strong Australian-based sector means a positive contribution to a number of important national goals: economic growth and exports, provide opportunities for skills development and experience in Australia’s workforce and finally, reinforcing Australia’s international reputation for excellence.

You can see the whole overview here and here!

Ever wondered why a top software developer would spend his time helping out non-profit organisations? Is it possible to be involved in a court case with Microsoft for 10 years and come away happy? Did CASE really teach a Masters level course in Free and Open Source software development at the Australian National University?

Hear what Andrew Tridgell has to say when CASE Management Committee member Sam McKeon and Darrell Burkey get together for a conversation about all of the above and more.

It’s a fairly casual podcast this time around but we quickly get to the heart of the matter.

You can listen to this podcast by heading over to our podcast page and selecting Episode 5!

Recently CASE headed out back to meet our friends in Walgett, The Dharriwaa Elders Group. Almost a year prior we’d worked together remotely to install a server in their office, CASE techos building the computer in Canberra and then shipping it to Walgett. Guiding installation and setup over the phone and with our remote administration tools, DEG ended up with a high quality intranet that has been stable for twelve months. For more details on this project you can listen to our podcast with Wendy from the DEG.

DEG undertake a lot of cartography and multimedia work and the related files are huge. After a year they were running out of space on their server which could only be addressed by us attending in person and installing new physical hard drives. So on a Sunday morning we packed our bags-and-things into the car and headed north….

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While attending Connecting Up 09 Darrell and I had a chance to meet Wendy Spencer from of the Dharriwaa Elders Group, Walgett NSW. After a long day we made it back to the hotel room to record a podcast with her (Wendy bravely jumping in front of the mic despite having a cold – and I didn’t end up sick!). Wendy talks about the DEG finding CASE and how the relationship developed between the two groups. We then examine some of the technical aspects of the work CASE has done for the Elders group.

Head over to the CASE podcast page to listen in to Episode 4.

Chris Smart, Australian Linux guru, has started writing for Linux Magazine. This week he’s looking at the Linux graphical user interface “KDE”.

“KDE stands for the K Desktop Environment and was first released in 1998 by Matthias Ettrich, who was a student at the time. Ettrich saw a need for the Unix world to have a unified desktop environment which had a consistent look and feel, rather than just multiple applications looking and behaving however they wanted to…Now in its 11th year, KDE has come a long way in a short amount of time and recently celebrated the release of version 4.0, marking a turning point in the development of the project…”

If you’ve been thinking about giving Linux a shot, maybe the new KDE will give you the confidence to go ahead with it. Chris also runs Make The Move, kind of like an Apple version of “Make the Switch”, only Chris’s solution is thousands of dollars cheaper!
Read his article “KDE 4: The Komplete Desktop?” here.