CASE Podcast Episode 5

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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!

Walgett Trip

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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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CASE Podcast Episode 4

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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.

KDE 4: The Komplete Desktop?

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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.

Cool Twitter services

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There’s a large number of Twitter related services out there. Some cater towards the “power user”, others are just a great way to keep track of statistics relating to your Twitter account. At CASE we’ve been using Twitter  in order to be involved in various conferences and events as well as communicating interesting bits and pieces to our members. The links below are some Twitter related web service we find interesting and or useful:

Twitalyzer: This website examines your Twitter account and then gives you scores in the following categories: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity and Clout. These are measured by how many people follow you, how many times you re tweet, how frequently people are choosing to follow you and so on. The site makes recommendations on how you should improve your scores and gives you a whole stack of nice graphs to visualise the whole thing. This site is a must if you think your Twitter campaign is important. Great for stats!

Qwitter: This site offers a service whereby you’re notified when someone stops following you on Twitter, and shows you what your last tweet was before they canceled. This would be a very valuable tool for someone dealing with controversial material – you can effectively see visualise people turning their back on you on the Twitterscape! Simple, yet effective.

Whatthetrend: This site shows you the emerging trends on Twitter and allows users to post detailed descriptions on what those trends are, and why they’re trending. Great for seeing what’s popular and what people think of it. This is also a good place to keep an eye out for upcoming spam and scams.

ChirpCity: This is a handy website that searches for and then collates tweets by city. This means you can keep an eye on what’s emerging in your area even before it trends.

Connecting Up 09 Sydney Part 3

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There’s been an abundance of good references mentioned during the event and we want to take note of a few of them here.

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.

More to follow…

Connecting Up 09 Sydney Part 2

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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.

More to follow after today’s roundtable discussions have finished…

Connecting Up 09 Sydney Part 1

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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.

Elliott 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.

More to follow…

CASE Podcast Episode 3 – Kate Lundy

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We’re pleased to release the next episode in our occasional podcast series. This time I head out of the studio to visit ACT Senator Kate Lundy. We discuss using Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter, Wordpress and Joomla, get her views on the proposed national broadband network and how she feels about funding to community organisations.

To listen to this podcast head over to the official CASE podcast page!

note on Public Sphere event held today @ ANU

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The first Public Sphere event has just finished It’s been an information packed, thought provoking few hours. Here’s a brief rundown of material that has resulted:

More posts to follow, just need to let the dust settle!

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