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<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Phew, quite a week! I started throwing myself into a few meetups in Leipzig and learnt a great many things about the event culture here (and other things) that I would like to share with you&hellip;<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Toastmasters, Leipzig Chapter</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I have never been to a <a href="https://www.toastmasters.org/" target="_blank">Toastmasters</a> event before, mainly because I&rsquo;ve never been invited, but also because I had always assumed it wouldn&rsquo;t quite suit me.&nbsp;<span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><a href="https://reports.toastmasters.org/findaclub/searchresults.cfm?Country=Germany&amp;State=&amp;City=Leipzig" target="_blank">Leipzig has two chapters</a>, one German and one English, unsurprisingly I went to the English one and they were pleased to have a native speaker to lend a hand.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Toastmasters in an International organisation that through its network of clubs helps develop people&rsquo;s presentation and public speaking skills. I&rsquo;ve always been slightly suspicious of these &lsquo;chapter&rsquo; type organisations, mainly because they&rsquo;re quite American in style and that always rubs an Englishman the wrong way. But also because I&rsquo;ve have often felt uncomfortable with bureaucracy and extraneous formality.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">However as the evening progressed I started to realise the benefits of some of these formalities and started to like them. I have plenty of public speaking experience and whilst I&rsquo;m not always great at it, I have the confidence to just do it without much thought. Not everyone does though and the enforced formalities about how proceedings should run, constructive feedback and a course structure (optional) help encourage and develop those who lack confidence to just plunge in the deep end.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I don&rsquo;t know enough about how German associations are legally run, but it seems to me that Toastmasters chapters are run on very US/UK lines so it was also an interesting insight into the inner workings of an organisation.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Leipzig PHP User Group</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">One of my general observations about events here is how late they start, I wonder if that in Melbourne meet up groups where what people did between work and others things and that here they are people&rsquo;s main event of the evening. So often an event wont start until 8/8:30 which is taking a slight adjustment for me.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The group was a little different from a group meet up in Melbourne, smaller (of course) but more casual. There were no formal talks but more of a casual discussion around PHP news and then the topic of the month, Project Management. Keeping up with the discussion was a lot of work for me, but I quite enjoyed it and people made me feel welcome.<p class="p1"><a href="https://phpugl.de" target="_blank"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">phpugl.de</a><p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>BUND Harvest bike ride</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The <a href="https://www.bund.net/" target="_blank">BUND</a> is the German branch of Friends of the Earth and in Leipzig runs a lot of land protection programs. I went on a fairly epic bike ride with them around some of their sites which also had lots and lots of fruit (mainly Apple and Plum) trees. Even better, we were invited to take as much fruit as we liked from them. Interestingly, several of these cites were owned by the city so were public access for people to pick fruit to. Again I had a couple of interesting broken German discussions learning about the first day of school, Allotments (Small gardens) and much more.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrischinchilla/sets/72157646641788879/" target="_blank">See photos of the ride here</a>.

A little while back I announced my intention to write a book on some techniques and ideas incorporating Lean and Agile methodologies into the&nbsp;not-for-profit&nbsp;sector. I made some good headway but it became fairly apparent to me quite quickly that maybe I didn&#39;t have quite enough material (right now) to produce a complete book. Well as luck would have it I met up with highly experienced not-for-profit consultant, Donnie Maclurcan and he mentioned his &#39;Not-for-Profit Handbook&#39; project that he was struggling to find the time to finish.

I've been in Germany for a couple of months now and of course there the obvious signs you're not a local when you open your mouth.

<p class="p1"><em>The more I come to USA, the less I understand it, in fact I could say, the less I like it.</em>Before we explore that further, I had to leave Germany first&hellip;Leipzig airport has a couple of positives and negatives being a small airport&hellip;The main negative is you can&rsquo;t seem to online check-in to international flights that originate from there, but on the flip side, check in and security takes about ten minutes.I&rsquo;ve been in Australia so long that I had forgotten (or it&rsquo;s changed?) that Europe to America flights don&rsquo;t server free alcohol, ah well&hellip;&nbsp;Sadly in Chicago I didn&rsquo;t have quite enough time to get into the city so stayed in the airport which was an extremely busty and stressful airport. It also had atrocious wifi, no shops before checkin and confirmed the typical American stereotype of having no phone stores.&nbsp;Still, got my first beer and burger in :)Back to America&hellip;I guess this was my first trip where I left the major cities (ignoring Portland last year) behind and you fast realise that smaller town America is a whole different world. I&rsquo;m about to make some general sweeping statements that are based on my experience, they may be right or wrong, but they&rsquo;re based on my experiences.Firstly is the massive noticeable difference between the &lsquo;haves&rsquo; and the &lsquo;have-nots&rsquo;. This is not an original observation but it&rsquo;s increasingly noticeable and very confronting to outsiders. Especially in downtown areas and &lsquo;ghettos&rsquo;, there are frequent groups of people who really look like they need help and aren&rsquo;t receiving any (as far as one can tell). Then a block away you will find expensive restaurants, shops or homes that flaunt their exclusivity. Of course you will find these extremes in every country, but it is especially noticeable and when you are aware of America&rsquo;s social security system and attitudes towards private enterprise it&rsquo;s repercussions are very clear.Secondly is the assumption that you drive. Again, this is not unique to America, but much more of an issue. In both Minneapolis and Providence I struggled to find any decent (or affordable) supermarkets in the central areas, they were all in the suburbs in giant malls. This continues into general life where riding on public transport or not having a car available for other trips is considered very odd, even for tourists. Take Providence, I know it&rsquo;s a small city, but there was one grocery and liquor store in the entire downtown area, which were both overpriced.It also seems that visiting America&rsquo;s smaller cities in August (much like many other cities in the world) is a bad idea as they&rsquo;re half empty and lots is closed.Now to get more specific&hellip;&nbsp;&nbsp;<h2>Minneapolis</h2>

So, we're coming up to our first month living in Leipzig (and Germany), so I think I can now start to give some initial impressions. Especially as now we are moving out of 'Holiday' mode and into 'Work' mode.

A couple of months ago I watched the movies 'Her' and 'Computer Chess'.

I just took part in my first rally in Leipzig (and Germany), The '<a href="https://www.gso-le.de/" target="_blank">Global Space Odyssey</a>', representing refugee rights this year. I'm not sure if this is how every rally in Germany happens, I doubt it is, I think this was something special that happens on a yearly basis as local news and social media was awash with reports on the event.

In the past ten days I finally made the second overseas move of my life. This time from Melbourne to Leipzig.

Not a post I would usually share, but it seemed the easiest way of getting everything in one place. A bunch of stuff that might appeal to musicians, technical people etc etc&hellip;

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">It&rsquo;s been a busy week and I haven&rsquo;t quite found the time for a daily blog, so instead, lets have a quick weekly round up&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">On Monday I went to Mobile Mondays, <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/momomay-mobile-entrepreneur-and-startup-success-secrets-may-12-6pm-tickets-11398538335" target="_blank">a session on entrepreneurs and startups</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">. It was the usual slightly random feel that MoMoMelb often has. I found most of the speakers a little too forthright, telling you how good they all were rather than what they offered. Most interesting of the night was Brad Birchall of <a href="https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CCwQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.seeracloud.com%2F&amp;ei=V_Z3U-_fJMLplAW-koCYBA&amp;usg=AFQjCNE2Y4i0sHPjfUFMf_8Z6358MTtGgw&amp;sig2=8L3j4nDBYSMJTkLYMUthcQ&amp;bvm=bv.66917471,d.dGI" target="_blank">Seera</a> (a competency framework for recruitment), but generally I couldn&rsquo;t quite figure what a lot of them actually did and why mobile was relevant.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Tuesday was Drupal Melbourne. Stuart Clarke gave a talk on <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/deciphered/building-on-a-commons-base-sustainable-distro-based-development" target="_blank">maintaining a Drupal distribution</a> which is worth a read if you do that sort of thing. Our main speaker of the night was a visitor from India, Anoop John, who I also met up with later in the week. His presentation on <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/zyxware/drupal-in-india" target="_blank">Drupal in India</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">&nbsp;was a fascinating insight into an emerging country in the Drupal ecosystem as well as the world generally. I was also given a present for my help with the meet ups over the past years, which was very nice. :)<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Wednesday was a <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/product-anonymous-may-14-mvp-tickets-10598537511" target="_blank">special session for the typically intimate Product Anonymous</a>, with a very large turnout, different venue and sponsorship. The subject was &lsquo;Minimum Viable Product&rsquo; (MVP) with speakers from Adioso, Seek, 99 Designs, Geoplex and hosted (admirably) by Jock Busuttil, Founder of Product People. It was a great session and I picked up some great advice that I will be applying to the Lean and Agile nonprofit project.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">At a slight tangent, on Saturday I went to the <a href="https://prov.vic.gov.au/" target="_blank">Public Records of Victoria</a> (PROV) open day and feel it&rsquo;s worth mentioning here. I found it fascinating that we still have so many paper records, in fact just 1% of Victoria&rsquo;s records have been digitised. So my fears of losing all of our records and output due to a lack of a compatible reading device in the distant future are far from being realised. Amongst many other things, I also learnt that PROV is a world leader in electronic record management and has advised the world through the <a href="https://prov.vic.gov.au/government/vers" target="_blank">VERS</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">&nbsp;standard. Finally I learnt about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_Society_of_Utah" target="_blank">Genealogical Society of Utah</a><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">&nbsp;who are a branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and perform a massive amount of support&nbsp; for records offices all around the world through their FamilySearch brand.

There was a panel discussion at tonight's launch but it was really all about launching Victoria's peak body for startups, entrepreneurs and founders tonight and the packed room was very much in drinking and talking mode.

With an average global combined market share of 85-95%, iOS and Android are by far the dominant players in the mobile operating system space. So why bother looking into or developing on any other platforms?

I have dabbled with a little bit of work in the tech/health scene and always knew that Melbourne generally had a large and healthy medical ‘industry’, but I had no idea that the Startup space was so large! Tonight’s event was held at the brand new Royal Children’s Hospital, which was very shiny, new and welcoming. The crowd was a good mix of clinicians, technical folk and business folk and there were quite a few speakers, so I’ll get on with telling you about them all in my usual very brief manner.

Another great 'What do you know' session from <a href="https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webdirections.org%2F&ei=yw5CU5rLDcmdkgWC4oDoCA&usg=AFQjCNFVeqPXVmE57AS0EUr3fdd42psoPA&sig2=HXz7xVEu8XhKCcZjXcFpTg&bvm=bv.64125504,d.dGI" target="_blank">Web Directions</a>, lots of short talks, lots of short descriptions...

My new tech collective, Gregarious Mammal is a proud sponsor of the next <a href="https://sf2014.civicrm.org/" target="_blank">CivCon in San Francisco</a>&nbsp;on the 24-25th April&nbsp;and as a sponsor we have a free ticket that we wont be able to utilise, so we&#39;re giving it away!

We had two local and two international speakers this month&hellip;

One of the peculiar aspects of Android is that theoretically, everything is replaceable. This includes phone features, which initially seems odd, the fact that you can replace your phone dialler with something else.

The old paradigms in software design have been on life support for a long time.

Every now and then along comes a piece of software that just does pretty much everything right, one of these is Dash.

I&rsquo;ve been attending the <a href="https://www.meetup.com/Melbourne-KMLF/events/142133462/" target="_blank">Knowledge Management Melbourne</a> sessions without still being entirely clear what a Knowledge manager actually is, but I find the topics they present interesting and relevant, so&hellip;

This was a great <a href="https://productanonymous.com/" target="_blank">Product Anonymous</a> session with <a href="https://au.linkedin.com/pub/jason-cormier/15/131/744" target="_blank">Jason Corimor</a> of <a href="https://www.mashery.com/" target="_blank">Mashery</a> that covered the business and commercialisation of using APIs, I intend to expand on a few of these topics in the future, so will touch upon them here.

I have the fantastic opportunity to represent two of my favourite non-tech talks from last year, I&#39;m back at Laneway Learning to present my &quot;<a href="/cosmic-horror-hp-lovecraft">Cosmic Horror &amp; HP Lovecraft talk</a>&quot; on March 5th, you can <a href="https://melbourne.lanewaylearning.com/classes/cosmic-horror-and-hp-lovecraft/?utm_content=buffer21da4&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer" target="_blank">book in at the Laneway Learning website</a>. I&#39;m also presenting a segment of my &quot;<a href="/mapping-and-why-your-view-world-wrong">Mapping and why your view of the world is wrong</a>&quot; talk at <a href="https://thelaborastory.com/" target="_blank">The Laborastory</a> about John Harrison on the 1st April.

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A strange session tonight as we had a last minute cancellation, this coupled with the typical business session audience, i.e. High RSVP, high no-show, meant it was a quiet and quick evening.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Andrew Skinner confessed to not being a confident public speaker, however this didn&#39;t detract from his high quality, high content presentation. The presentation covered getting client / internal team buy in for developing apps and Andrew drew from his years of experience working with some high profile clients and projects. His practical take homes was an explanation of Business canvases for developing business models and how to use them.<br /><em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Connect with Andrew via LinkedIn - <span class="s2" style="line-height: 1.538em;"><a href="https://au.linkedin.com/in/andy2307" style="line-height: 1.538em;">https://au.linkedin.com/in/andy2307</a></em><p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Cameron Burns took a very different approach, being from a marketing background, throwing away his planned talk and just seeing what the audience were interested in. He covered sources of funding, choices of development stacks, using remote development teams, marketing plans for your apps and much much more in a quick fire sequence of tips and advice.<br /><em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Connect with Cameron via LinkedIn - https://au.linkedin.com/pub/cameron-burns/21/71/629</em>

This was a strange event for a couple of reasons, firstly it didn't run very smoothly with lots of minor technical issues and delays that made the event run very long and late, with the main event not really starting until 8pm after a 6:30 start. Secondly the pitches (I saw, see later) were generally a little unsure and not in the traditional pitch style, I spent a lot of time thinking 'and...?', it was never very clear why the pitchers were pitching, what did they want to win for, what did they need the money for? A lot of the pitches had references to 'how awesome' eLance was, feeling more like a pitch for eLance than their own products some of the time.

This was a great session with a myriad of conflicting opinions and points of few, that always sparks a good debate :)</div>&nbsp;</div>First up a great set of introductory resources for startup founders from Scott Handsaker, with a lot of new initiatives arriving in Melbourne. His slides will be available on the <a href="https://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Melbourne/events/160212272/" target="_blank">event&#39;s meetup page</a>.</div>&nbsp;</div>Secondly was a very constructive talk on outsourcing that actually gave some great constructive advice on best practise in this sometimes thorny field. Advice covered finding, briefing and using outsourced workers as well as more details on creating a brief, making sure they follow it and how to evaluate their work coping with time differences and other infrastructure and culture differences. Finally, in a nice positive twist, the speaker recommend being generous and encourage to your workers.&nbsp;</div>&nbsp;</div>Final came a panel with a mixed bag of local and international entrepreneurs, Susan Wu, Leni Mayo and Brendan Lewis. They discussed the Melbourne startup ecosystem and how it compares with others around the world, especially in the UK and US. Here&rsquo;s a few tidbits I garnered and remembered to write down.</div>&nbsp;</div><ul><li>People only look for success, not necessarily actions when weighing up the impact of startups and/or a city. Connections and support for these startups are equally as important.</li><li>Those individuals and organisations who are successful should give back.</li><li>London had been a recent case study of government encouraging growth through backing and legislation, but London scale is vastly larger than Melbourne.</li><li>Melbourne&#39;s lack of size and geography makes us look more outward, also our lack of plan B if you fail, there are no massive employers Like Google or Apple who will value you.</li><li>Australia is too full of safe investors, non risky investing.</li><li>Lean and tech startups aren&#39;t the only startups in Melbourne, there are many others participating in different scenes such as medical.&nbsp;</li></ul>

When did you last use the references feature in Microsoft Word?

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Over the weekend I saw <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/" target="_blank">Her</a>&nbsp;and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2007360/" target="_blank">Computer chess</a>, very different films about technology that were delivered in very different ways, but there were several similar threads running in them that got me thinking, these similarities were&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">They ended up not being about what I was expecting and (more seriously), they were about the interactions of computers with humans, albeit at very different ends of the spectrum.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">At one end, the amateur made Computer Chess dealt with the early days of computers interacting with humans (taking place in the 70s), in the film the programers are seen playing out the moves that the computer programs suggested, with the computers effectively playing &lsquo;each other&rsquo;. The concept of the computer playing a human is still seen as a crazy idea and the computer winning, even crazier. In fact, one of the plot twists is that a particular chess program, actually performs better against an &lsquo;unpredictable&rsquo; human instead of a &#39;predictable&#39; computer.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">At the complete other end of this is Her, a film that I equally loved and/or hated depending if it was satirical or not. In Her, most are seen in almost completely subversive relationships with their technology, entrusting just about everything to them. It was a reality that wasn&rsquo;t too far in the future from our own, but the scariest thing about it was how self absorbed everyone was, even away from their technology, all they did was talk about themselves and their problems. Again, I&rsquo;m not sure if this was intentional satire or just an americanisation, but it showed just how comfortable people were with having their technology interact with them.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">This got me thinking about &lsquo;Computer Human Interaction&rsquo; as opposed to the more traditional &lsquo;Human Computer Interaction&rsquo;. Of course, for as long as we&rsquo;ve been interacting with computers they&rsquo;ve been interacting with us,&nbsp; but as we have more services and products like Siri or Google now that pre-empt us and often are the initiator of an interaction, we need to think about new paradigms for those interactions that are helpful, but not creepy.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Interesting times.

<span style="line-height: 1.538em;">For many, 2013 has been an intense and not always good year, but personally it&#39;s been pretty good and I&#39;m looking forward to building upon the foundations from this year into 2014. Here&#39;s some reflections and highlights for you all to enjoy/endure.

I've been learning to drive (again) recently, with an aim to finally actually take my driving test, I'm also a keen (legal) cyclist… None of this has any real bearing on me deciding to attend tonight's event, that was more to do with my fascination in knowing about and understanding the various data sets that are available from our government agencies.

Joomla! Day Melbourne 2013 polo shirt, very nice but a little large for me.