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Australian Web Industry Association – Annual General Meeting

This is a quick reminder that the Australian Web Industry Association Annual General Meeting is on Wednesday 1st August at 6pm at the Velvet Lounge in Mt Lawley.

If you are an AWIA financial member, please come along so you can hear our reports for the last 12 months, as well as vote for the new committee member positions. Their are 5 vacant positions, and the nominees are:

  1. Adrian Lynch *
  2. Ben May
  3. Bronwen Clune
  4. Gary Barber *
  5. Harriet Wakelam
  6. Jamie Lyford
  7. Jordan Brock *
  8. Kay Smoljak *
  9. Piotr Dancewicz *
  • Indicate a current committee member.

If you want to play an active role in the AWIA, you must come along and cast your vote. If you can’t make it, you can download the proxy voting form from the AWIA website.

WebJam is coming to Perth

I have been wearing my Australian Web Industry Association event manager hat recently and have been in secret talks with some friendly people over in Sydney. Those people just so happen to be Lachlan Hardy, Lisa Herrod, Tim Lucas and Anson Parker, AKA The WebJam Team!

So with out further ado, I am proud to announce WebJam Perth!

Where: The Velvet Lounge, Mt Lawley (Where we have the Port80 meetups)

When: 15 August 2007 at 6pm

A WebJam is where the presenters have three minutes to power through a presentation – the presentations are voted on and the winner get fame and awesome prizes. You can see a video of the last WebJam here. They look like they are heaps of fun – so head over to http://www.webjam.com.au read more and more importantly register.

Let’s show the world what Perth can do!

EDIT: Fixed date

What a week!

The past few weeks can safely be described as insane – even when compared to a regular working week for Perth-based web developer.

As hinted in my previous half-arsed blog post, BarCamp Perth has come and gone. The event was amazing. I don’t think anyone could have predicted how smoothly and inspiring the day was. To all the people that put there hand up to help out thank you – I would not have been able to mask my usual lack of organisation with out you. Thanks to Simone and Pascal for sorting out the food, thanks to Jordon for keeping everyone caffeinated, thanks to Gary for all the artwork and the t-shirts and thanks to the helpers that turned up early and setup. The day would have run a lot less smoothly if it wasn’t for you all.

One of the presentations

Unfortunately, I forgot to record one of my presentations – luckily it was the one that I spent some time preparing, so you can download the slides if your fancy is tickled. The (impromptu) Intro to Rails talk that myself and Matt Didcoe did was videoed so as soon as I get the link, I’ll post it.

The synopsis of the day is available on the offiicial BarCamp Perth wiki – go and check it out and click through on the notes that have been posted. We had over 55 attendees which was amazing – and there was a great cross-section of people there from many different fields. We had web developers, designers, librarians, educators, podcasters and bloggers which meant that there were lots of new people to meet. We even had a Microsoft evangelist – Scott Barnes, fly over from Queensland to see what the west coast had been up to. The event has really created a buzz around those communities, which is evident in the number of times I’ve been asked “When is the next one?”. To answer, AWIA there will be organising definitely early next year, but there are plenty of events between now and then to keep you appetite whet.

One final BIG thankyou goes to each of the sponsors: Eduka, Itomic, Millstream, River Designs, Central TAFE, Five Senses Coffee and Microsoft Australia because without them, we wouldn’t have been able to put on the food. A great day had by all.

This week I started work at Norg Media with Bronwen in our new shard office space in the city! We are sharing with Nick and Dave from Softteq and there is still desk space available if your are a start up of small company that needs a desk or two. You can view the guided tour on YouTube.

The new office

If you are interested, drop me an email – we can show you around! Our address is 90 King St.

What’s coming up

The WAWA‘s are in full swing, so don’t forget to buy your tickets! Only a month-and-a-half to go. The AWIA AGM is coming up in August too, so if you want to support the industry association that supports you, it might be a good idea to head along and maybe put your hand up for committee. It will be on August 1 at the Velvet Lounge in Mt Lawley. As a result we aren’t having any mini-talks next month.

As you can see, busy, busy, busy!

Later.

BarCamp Perth – an awesome day

I seriously could not have asked for a better day. I’ll write up a better synopsis later, but now I am just too tired.

Big thanks to all the sponsors, and an even bigger thanks to everyone that came along – with out you guys it wouldn’t have been the great day that it was.

I need some sleep now.

BarCamp Perth is tomorrow

‘Twas the night be for BarCamp

and all through the house

not a creature was stirring

not even my scroll-wheel mouse

See all of you Perth geeks tomorrow

  • Apologies to Clement Clarke Moore

WA Web Awards entries are open – tickets are on sale

Just when you thought the announcement of the Perth BarCamp was too much to handle, the WA Web Awards sub-committee has just announced that entries are now open and tickets are now on sale!

Tickets can be purchased from the Website for $80 (Student AWIA members), $110 (AWIA members) or $130 (non AWIA members) – the last two have been great, and this one is promising to be even better.

Entries can also be submitted via the web site for $30 for AWIA members and $40 for non-members.

Not an AWIA member? Then sign up.

More details on the WA Web Awards website.

Edit: When I first posted this story, I had entries listed as $25 – they are actually $30. Sorry about that!

Perth Bar Camp #1 is on!

Just a quick announcement that Perth BarCamp #1 is finally on!

Where: Central TAFE, 140 Royal St, East Perth WA 6004

When: Saturday 30th June 2007 9am-5pm

Cost: TBA (Probably around $10)

So get your thinking caps on, your laptop batteries charged and read up on what it is all about!

After that, go and register.

AWIA/Port80/WA Web Awards news for this month

Thankfully the goings on of the WA Web Industry Association and the WA Web Awards is a little more exciting than this blog post title.

The April mini-talk podcasts and slides are up – unfortunately, the podcast gods decided to send Nick’s recording to the Bahamas on a junket, leaving Bronwen’s talk to fend for it’s self. Thankfully, he supplied his talk notes, which should give you a fair idea of what is going on.

This month’s talks will be Richard Giles from Scouta with his talk “Digital Social Networking, For Fun and Profit” and Stephen Carrol on “Government grants and assistance”. For those of you who want get in to the wonderful world of Web 2.0 social startups, and want some advice the talks are on Wednesday 2 May 2007 at the Velvet Lounge behind the Flying Scotsman in Mt Lawley from about 6 o’clock. Talks will start at 6:30.

We (we being the WA Web Awards sub-committee) have quietly launched the new WA Web Awards website for 2007. We will loudly announce it in a couple of weeks once tickets and entries are open to the public. I would suggest heading over and subscribing to the RSS feed and newsletter, so you can receive the loud announcement.

We are looking for sponsors for said awards at the moment, so if you think your company would benefit exposure to a couple of hundred web developers and designers, drop me a line and I can hook you up with a proposal.

When too much web is never enough…

What a week in web (well for me anyway). Kay, Miles and myself were invited to a Tuesday morning breakfast put on by the Perth Conference Bureau. The reason? The PCB gives out grants to help start; and to help bid for conferences which is of great interest to us as AWIA committee members. Anyway – the exciting part: There was a $2000 door prize, which can be used by the winner to attend any conference in Australia. Guess who won? That right! Me! So it looks like Web Directions 07 is now on the cards! So thank you Rebecca for inviting us! There will be no doubt much shenanigans to be had.

Tonight was the inaugural Dinner 2.0 , graciously organised by Bronwen of PerthNorg fame. Some how my little ol’ time tracker got enough attention to garner me an invite. It was the who’s who of the Perth Web 2.0 fraternity: Scouta, Buzka and Minti all had representatives come along. It is great to see Perth startups who are getting recognition from the industry, it really gives me hope that our remote little city hasn’t, for once completely missed the boat on something cool.

Good times had by all! Bronwen was taking happy snaps so I’m sure they will appear on Flickr soon enough.

Calling future speakers!

There has been a lot of debate recently about diversity in Web conferences. It is a topic that seems to rear it’s head on a semi-regular basis. As some of the players in the conference circuit have pointed out, maybe we as potential speakers can make the conference organisers’ lives a bit easier.

It is hard to encourage diversity when the pickings are thin – this isn’t to say that the talent from all realms isn’t out there, maybe the people who put on the conferences just haven’t heard about them?

Kevin Lawver has blogged about How to Get to Speak at Web Conferences and point #2 has given the inspiration for this post. Below are a list of some of the events which encourage people to get up and speak about what they love. The list is Australian-centric, mainly because that is the circles I hang with, but I would love to hear of similar things going on around the world (Hint: leave a comment and sell your event!).

So maybe you, oh humble reader, should sign up to a event near you and get your name out there – you never know who might be listening.

  1. AWIA Mini-talks – Ok, I have a vested interest in these because I organise them… Currently Perth based, but AWIA is looking to expand them Australian wide. Two speakers get 10 minutes to speak on a topic of their choice on the first Wednesday of the month. Check out the podcasts.
  2. WebJam – The WebJam organisers have just announced a second WebJam event which is on in a couple of days. WebJams are even more fasted paced – 16 speakers get three minutes!
  3. BarCamps – These “Un-conferences” encourage collaboration and knoledge share – they provde a great opportunity to speak in front of a group and show others what you know. There are BarCamps coming up in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide next week – Check out the Wiki web site for details of who you can get in contact with.
  4. Melbourne (and soon to be Sydney) based Tequp is kind of similar to BarCamps, except they are weekly (And I thought organising monthly meet ups was hard!)
  5. The web standards group will often have speakers at their meetings, and I’m sure you local organiser would be more than accommodating.
  6. A number of big conferences have experimented with open-mic type session: The Future of Web apps had one, New Zealand based Webstock has it’s 8×5 seminars which looks like it is something similar.

Not a bad list, but I am sure I’ve left off heaps and heaps – I want this list expanded people!!!

Edit: SomeoneMeri Williams has created a wiki aimed at mentoring people that want to get into the speaking biz.

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