Computing Assistance Support & Education Inc – CASE Notes

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…

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

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.

The Making Links Conference 2008 will be held in Melbourne from 12th-14th November.

CASE President Darrell Burkey will give two presentations, Tail, Dog, Wag (1Mb pdf file) and Joomla! Web Based Content Management (310k pdf file). Darrell will also speak about domain name issues (65k pdf file) at the conference ‘web day’.

Making Links is a conference that seeks to engage interested people, organisations and groups working at the intersection of social action and IT – including community workers, educators, trainers, not-for-profit organisations, school teachers, environmental campaigners and activists.

The Conference seeks to:

• bring the community sector together to access resources, training and services, and to share ideas, skills and creative applications of technology.

• Explore the possibilities ICTs generate for communities whose voices have been marginalized and excluded from the mainstream.

• Showcase innovative, grass roots ICT initiatives in community cultural development, outreach, and e-learning.

• Build and develop networks amongst workers and activists interested in how ICT can be used to support social justice.