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I love this towel, but being white it gets dirty very quickly, so not really sure what to do with it...

I've been sitting on the post for a while, a series of (comical) screen shots on what different people want from a website during it's design process. You may recognise some...

November has been a great month for meet-ups, perhaps everyone wrapping up for the year is making organisers up the ante.

With… Cory Doctorow, Melbourne Writers Festival Director Lisa Dempster and Peter Williams of the Deloitte Centre for the Edge. A main presentation, followed by a panel discussion, which I haven't really covered here and got interesting just as it was ending.

It seems as the year draws to an end, we're having some of the best talks! Damn Christmas…

First up, I find it strange how different sectors describe the same things with different names and have the same problems. It's simultaneously refreshing and depressing that small and large organisations have exactly the same problems with their projects.

A great session tonight with two case studies from local Drupal shops...

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A few weeks ago I quit my job, I&rsquo;d been there for two years but it was no longer right for me anymore.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I&rsquo;m not one to rest on my laurels, so what&rsquo;s next? After a process of figuring out who I am and what I want to do, quite a lot is on the horizon, allow me to introduce you to some of the potentials&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Wrapping up my involvement in Green Renters</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">This has been something that Cate and I have been trying to do for a while and we realised it needed more focussed work than we initially thought and we&rsquo;re weighing up quite what shape this will take, if you&rsquo;re interested in knowing more about that, <a href="https://greenrenters.org/news/time-new-lease" target="_blank">read this blog post</a>.<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Starting a new cooperative organisation</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The shape that this will (possibly) completely take is yet to be decided, but I&rsquo;m resurrecting and changing an old tag line from my past and starting a new Community development and Technology co-operative business called &ldquo;Large Gregarious Mammal&rdquo;, if you&rsquo;re interested in that or want in, <a href="https://largegregariousmammal.com/content/introducing-large-gregarious-mammal#overlay-context=" target="_blank">see this blog post</a>.<p class="p1"><strong style="line-height: 1.538em;">Writing more</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Wether it be on the very blog or on other more established publications, I want to write more&hellip; About technology, ideas, other people&rsquo;s ideas and&hellip; My book&hellip;<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Lean Agile nonprofit</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I&rsquo;ve mentioned this before, but I&rsquo;m stepping up working on my timely and needed (at this time) volume (but also consultancy, blog etc&hellip;) on applying lean and agile methodology to the non profit world. <a href="https://theleanagilenonprofit.com/" target="_blank">Follow those exploits here</a>.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Tools for Changemakers</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Inspired by the reception from my sessions as part of the Chagnemakers Festival I have decided to turn it into an ongoing project, not only more such sessions, but also a website resource that will weigh up and review tools suitable for Changemakers.<br /><a href="https://toolsforchangemakers.com" target="_blank">toolsforchangemakers.com</a><p class="p1">Or I might just get a job&hellip;

Jonathan Teo (originally from Sydney) from General Catalyst Partners, a leading VC firm in Silicon Valley. Jonathan has personally led early-stage investments in 3 of the hottest companies of recent years including Twitter, Instagram and SnapChat, so a body of great knowledge.

<p class="p1">I feel slightly cheeky writing much about the event as I didn&rsquo;t really end up doing very much and felt somewhat humbled and embarrassed by the other attendees.<p class="p1">Anyway, to start at the beginning.<p class="p1">HealthHack 2013 was a weekend hackfest solving problems that medical researchers face. HealthHack brought together medical researchers, bioinformaticians, software developers, data analysts, data visualisers and designers. Together, they created new software tools to analyse, visualise and communicate data.<p class="p1">Organised by a great team in a very welcoming atmosphere it was a surprisingly well attended event considering the niche topic.&nbsp;Read about the weekend and the winners here - <span class="s2"><a href="https://healthhackmelb.com">healthhackmelb.com</a><p class="p1">I turned up on Friday night and enjoyed being very well fed and watered and finally got to meet <a href="https://twitter.com/FCTweedie"><span class="s2">@FCTweedie</a> in the flesh after much mutual twitter stalking.<p class="p1">I listened to the problem statements and must admit it was all a little over my head. I come from a technical background and despite having studied &lsquo;proper programming&rsquo; at University it has been a very long time since I really did any and I realise my web work is very light really. Also the technical scientific nature of the problems was a little out of my depth, I vaguely understand what things like DNA are, but when it comes to reporting, analysing and visualising them, way out of my comfort zone.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Still, I found one talk spoke to me at a level I could understand, which was about visualising the quality of academic papers on particular subjects. Working a lot within content management systems, this seemed like an ideal fit to my skills, so I joined the team. However, mixing with a bunch of far superior programmers to me, it was immediately obvious that they had far more complex (and probably more appropriate) solutions in mind and I was a little lost again&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I meandered around for a bit watching what people where up to and went to see if the organisers needed any help, they didn&rsquo;t, but were incredibly nice to me about everything and we had a very interesting chat about Hack events in general, but I think that&rsquo;s a discussion for another blog post.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Great stuff and congratulations to all involved.

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">As part of RMIT&rsquo;s sessions in Open Access week I toddled down to &ldquo;Publishing the Open Access Way: The Change in Business Thinking Towards Open Access&rdquo; and a slightly small crowd&hellip; I&rsquo;m a little behind with blog posts, so this will again, be a little bit of a collection of items with some opinions and thoughts.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The speakers and talks were<p class="p1"><b style="line-height: 1.538em;">Dr Adrian Danks - Senses of cinema</b><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A quarterly academic journal around cinema culture and commentary. To me it&rsquo;s approach seemed fairly conventional. Their open nature means not Peer reviewed. Their 4th largest&nbsp; audience is Australia, which seems to be a constant, many Australian creative organisations have to be successful overseas to make it at home. Dependent on funding bodies, how does this affect the open nature? Is it any better than an advertiser really?<p class="p1"><b style="line-height: 1.538em;">Philip Dearman - Communication, Politics &amp; Culture</b><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">An open access journal, I think the title pretty much tells you what the content is. Seems like some publications just become free because they have no other options or are forced to. Again, the journal is backed by Academia anyway, so it doesn&rsquo;t have quite the same restraints others may have.&nbsp;<p class="p1"><b style="line-height: 1.538em;">Debbie Dickinson - The conversation</b><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">&nbsp;<br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Conversation is fairly well known, again with some academic backing, but seemingly looking into wider sustainable sources of funding and life. Some of the Conversations interesting features and approaches are republishing their content,&nbsp; sharing is positively encouraged leading to strong worldwide access.<p class="p1"><a href="https://www.rmit.edu.au/library/oaw" target="_blank">www.rmit.edu.au/library/oaw</a>

I am excited to be the track chair for site building at DrupalSouth in Wellington next year and it&#39;s time to get your session proposals in!

An ever growing miscellaneous list of travel tips and thoughts that occur to me. These are about travel itself, not my actual travels.<ul><li>After flying international, getting low cost flights for remainder of the journey isn&#39;t worth it.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Don&#39;t always go for the cheapest option for transfers etc, often not worth it the long run.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">British airports suck and so do most of the associated services, they have some of the worst customer service around.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Going off the beaten track is worthwhile.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Hotels are the past, airbnb is the future.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Being an English speaker is an amazing luxury when traveling.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">There is a gap in the market for a decent travelers sim card with good data. <a href="https://www.lebara.com.au/" target="_blank">Lebra</a>, and <a href="https://uros.com/" target="_blank">Uros</a> come close, but still not quite, please let me know if you know of anything better available in Australia.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Is it me or do airlines not want to give away add much alcohol as they used to?</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">One travel power adapter is rarely enough.&nbsp;</li></ul>

<p class="p1">I am travelling on a three stage international flight today, it has a few hours stopover in each transit location, but that&#39;s little enough time that on upset can throw the whole flight out of whack.<p class="p1">I woke up this morning to see Google Now telling me that my first flight from Melbourne to Sydney had been delayed (I love big data and personally don&#39;t rely mind what services now about me, as long as I am aware) by two hours, which would mean I would miss my second and longest flight leg. I checked my emails, nothing from Virgin, no SMSs either. I checked the flight statuses on their website, which confirmed that my flight had been delayed (I&#39;m intrigued to know how you know a flight is going to be delayed in advance, but that&#39;s another discussion), so rang their customer service line to see what was going on.<p class="p1">After a bit of fathing about, which I always seem to get with Virgin customer service, it often takes three explanations to make them understand what you&#39;re talking about, I was informed that I had been moved to a flight an hour earlier. Still no emails or SMS regarding this, so what if I hadn&#39;t had rung?<p class="p1">I was still a little unsure about the change, but I figured there&#39;s certainly no harm in getting to the airport early, so left aiming for the earlier flight anyway.<p class="p1">Finally at a little over 2.5 hours before my new (unconfirmed) flight I finally received a phone call telling me to call Virgin about a flight change, so after ringing their customer services line and more fathing about, it was confirmed again that I had had my flight changed.<p class="p1">I am lucky to live close to the airport and I am also lucky that I have technology telling me my every move before I even know it myself, but what if I had been living a fair way out and wasn&#39;t so connected? Is three hours notice really enough time to get to the airport and checkin to an international flight on time? I guess this is a sign of when automated internal systems can fail.

<p align="left">The speaker line ups and topics keep getting better for the Melbourne geek nights and tonight is no expection.<p align="left"><strong>Ophelie Lechat from Flippa talking about &quot;Tackling the scary content marketing beast&quot;</strong><br />I&#39;ve been doing some of this myself recently, so it was interesting to hear some more in depth on te topic from a commercial perpective, here&rsquo;s what I got out of the session:<ul><li>Content isn&rsquo;t just a blog</li><li>Have editorial calendars</li><li>Content strategy and marketing are best friends as the discipline helps attract seo and web traffic, this in turn reduces demand on customer support and partnerships. good for engagement.</li><li>Assess what content you already have. If it&#39;s not content it may be existing skills or assets.</li><li>Writing for your site can be empowering for team members</li><li>Don&rsquo;t be afraid of ghost and hired writers.</li><li>Decide what will you talk about and don&#39;t just talk to and about yourself. Identify what others don&#39;t do or do badly.</li><li>ebooks of collections of posts are a great marketing idea.</li><li>What to write about - questions that need answering, searches on your site. What conversations are people having elsewhere? If you get stuck, write an outline first.</li><li>Keep your content as short as possible, focus, end with engagement, what do users/readers want?</li></ul>

There was a slightly strange feeling to this meet up, in some ways it felt a little insular (I guess those who are actively involved with BitCoin are a small and intriguing community), but it could also just be because it was for once a crowd of folks I didn't recognise. There was an underlying feeling of "Everything old is bad" and "Everything new is good", which isn't always completely true or as black and white as that. I find Bitcoin interesting technically and as a concept, if you think about the history of money, then bitcoin is no different really, it's an agreement to trust that a concept has a mutual value between people. The money we use everyday is no different from BitCoin really, it's just decentralised. This could be an entire post in itself, so take a read of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money" target="_blank">Wikipedia's History of Money article</a>. Back to tonight, which contained several interesting discussions:<ul><li>BitCoin Point of sale units - These are emerging in a couple of places, such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/jun/23/britains-first-bitcoin-pub" target="_blank">pubs in the UK</a>, but also soon to arrive here thanks to Mikey Nelson.</li><li>How useful BitCoin could be for foreign travel and exchange</li><li>A Bitcoin association is being founded in Australia</li><li>The BitCoin ATM, a <a href="https://lamassu.is/" target="_blank">Lamasu</a></li><li>If you want BitCoins to be accepted in certain stores, then ask for it, if more ask, the more chance it will happen.</li><li>Apparently Elsternwick high st may be attempting a street wide acceptance of BitCoin.</li></ul> Interested in knowing more, then join the Melbourne BitCoin meet up - <a href="https://www.meetup.com/BitcoinMelbourne" target="_blank">meetup.com/BitcoinMelbourne</a>

There seem to be more events not running free catering, is this due to a lack of sponsors or a change to methodology? A thought to ponder on…

<b>Drupal 8 won't kill your kittens - Lee Rowland</b><br />There have been a lot of discussions around changes in the Drupal core team and that many old names are leaving for a variety of reasons, however there have been many new people coming on board and any community should be able to move on from it's originators. I'm currently going through the same process myself right now with Green Renters and it can be a difficult but worthwhile process. This was a  great oversight of what is new in D8, watch presentation<br />Remember Lee's final words… _"We will accept any help"_<br /><a href="https://previousnext.com.au/blog/drupal-8-wont-kill-your-kittens" target="_blank">See the presentation here</a>

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/MobileMondayMelbourne" target="_blank">Mobile Mondays Melbourne</a> has been running for 8 years, which in the tech event space makes it something of an elderly character and with the plethora of new events happening around town all the time, I have had the increasing feeling that some of these older events are wondering how to keep themselves relevant.

The Web Directions - <a href="https://wdyk-melb-sept13.eventbrite.com/" target="_blank">What do you know events</a> are always a fun night and tonight was no exception with many running 'jokes' about some of the appalling policy decisions just announced by the coalition that will affect our industry, one which has been a boom area for Australia, but largely unrecognised on the larger national scale. Anyway, enough of Politics, what were the talks? Bear in mind there were 10, so this will be very brief...

Drupal for Education and elearning by James G Robertson and Bill Fitzgerald

One of the things that frustrates me the most in the non profit sector is the lack of collaboration between organisations and the duplication that often occurs instead.

The <a href="https://www.ted.com/tedx" target="_blank">tedx</a> model is a slightly strange one, fraught with as many positives as negatives for organisers, however it does create a fascinating ecosystem around the world. Tonight had a packed room, but was unfortunately fraught with technical issues and joins several other local tedx events around Melbourne.

Tuesday was a productive day capped by two intriguing events. A stupendously early breakfast session with <a href="https://www.graniteconsulting.com.au/" target="_blank">Granite consulting</a> at their networking breakfasts, with Dan Weis of <a href="https://kiandra.com.au/" target="_blank">Kiandra IT</a> covering 'Security and Real World Threats' and the <a href="https://uxmelbourne.org/category/movie-nights/" target="_blank">UX Melbourne movie night</a> covering 'Lean UX' with Jeff Gothelf.

An event that can be as specific as an event for the use of Drupal within government demonstrates a growing interest in Drupal (and maybe openness generally) within government and its great that such an event can attract nearly 150 people.

One of the challenges of my new attempt to blog about all the events I attend is that some events are hard to write about there and then on the spot. Networking events being one of them, you can't keep whipping out a notebook/tablet to jot down conversations and, well, you may not find anything you want to write about.

Three presentations tonight, followed by usual natters at the lovely Last Jar afterwards.

I love pitch events, I love hearing ideas good and bad and watching people's passion in what they do… This will be the first I attempt to summarise and my first attempt at live blogging, of sorts.

Over the past year I've been slowly building a list of gotchas, mistaken assumptions and potential slip ups that have hit projects I've been involved with several times, or seemed so blindingly obvious after the moment that they just had to be documented. This is one of the many articles I have that may grow over time as I discover more useful tidbits.