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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.

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&hellip;&nbsp;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&#39;t really covered here and got interesting just as it was ending.

It seems as the year draws to an end, we&#39;re having some of the best talks! Damn Christmas&hellip;