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.
Nine hours later we arrived, too late to start any real work but in time for a tour of the office and shopfront to see what we’d be dealing with. The space was quite large, a large front public area for displays/exhibits, a room for meetings/events and a back room for admin use. During the two days we noticed a great deal of interesting activity as they do a lot of research, meetings with locals and touch on a lot of areas such as health, politics and advocacy.
Between the server upgrade, six workstations to clean and a security camera to install there was a decent amount of work to be done. While waiting for various computers to do their thing we were taken by Tim, Speaker of the group, Richard and Wendy into the surrounding areas and shown the lay of the land. There’s a lot of history in Gamilaraay country, not enough of it heard we suspect. Interesting folks have passed through Walgett, Banjo Paterson and Breaker Morant, for example. With so much of the local knowledge and information collected and maintained by DEG, physically connecting with the places they were talking about reaffirmed our commitment to providing them with as much support as we could.
Housed and fed by Wendy and with a little remote server help from Andrew Tridgell the two days wrapped up with all jobs done at about 5:30pm on Tuesday. We gathered our things, said our last goodbyes (a CASE goodbye involves a hug and a quick monitor driver change) and headed home. A tiring but rewarding exercise resulting in stronger IT and community networks. Invited to return on recreation, we hope to visit again soon and see what we missed.

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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