Public records, MVP, Drupal in India and mobile entrepreneurs

It’s been a busy week and I haven’t quite found the time for a daily blog, so instead, lets have a quick weekly round up…

On Monday I went to Mobile Mondays, a session on entrepreneurs and startups. 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 Seera (a competency framework for recruitment), but generally I couldn’t quite figure what a lot of them actually did and why mobile was relevant.

Tuesday was Drupal Melbourne. Stuart Clarke gave a talk on maintaining a Drupal distribution 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 Drupal in India 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. :)

Wednesday was a special session for the typically intimate Product Anonymous, with a very large turnout, different venue and sponsorship. The subject was ‘Minimum Viable Product’ (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.

At a slight tangent, on Saturday I went to the Public Records of Victoria (PROV) open day and feel it’s worth mentioning here. I found it fascinating that we still have so many paper records, in fact just 1% of Victoria’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 VERS standard. Finally I learnt about the Genealogical Society of Utah who are a branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and perform a massive amount of support  for records offices all around the world through their FamilySearch brand.