Stephen Blyth's Blog

It wasn’t exactly hidden in the fineprint. The guidelines for running a mini-conference session clearly included something called a back-up plan. Most of my other classmates on the Facilitating Online Communities (FO09) course referred to some sort of alternative should things go astray during their session. Based on intermittent access to Elluminate, the online learning [...]

Not all the resources I’ll be taking along to share at the workshop I’m leading at the Engage your community conference on Friday 13 November are actually finished. My copy of a “Website owner’s manual: the secret to successful websites” by Paul Boag is available online as an unedited draft. It comes as an e-book [...]

It’s a busy time in the community ICT world here in Wellington. I thought I’d share details of some of the things that are happening soon. e-day, 12 September 2009: annual collection of unwanted computers and other electronic equipment (or e-waste as it’s known in the trade). There is a drop-off point in Wellington, one [...]

In the list of websites in the photo above you’ll find the curious saying ‘browse like a sheep’. Doug, a tutor at WelTech, didn’t share a favourite, interactive website during our round of introductions. Instead he described his appetite for websites in these omnivorous terms. I was reassured to see that people still surf the [...]

Most of the activist and grassroots community organising I’ve been part of has struggled with some of the basics. It was something that took up a surprising amount of effort. Where are going to meet? Are there enough chairs? Can we make a cuppa after the meeting? I don’t remember a time we ever had [...]

I’m finding lots of distractions as I try to finish a write-up about the presentation I gave at the Connecting Up 09 conference yesterday. Straight in front of me is this green void – “a digital design drived from nature realized in lightweight frabric using the latest digital fabrication and engineering techniques, creating more with [...]

After a heated discussion about privacy at the Connecting Up conference, I headed off to the Apple Store to get a replacement power adapter. I’d left my one behind on the kitchen bench. When I handed over my credit card to the young salesman he blithely asked if I’d like the receipt emailed to my [...]

The first thing to go when our son was born in December was not sleep,  but writing posts for this blog. No matter how much I’ve willed myself to jump online and blog, the ink has’t flowed. Today, the hiatus is officially over. For good reason – I’m at the webstock 09 conference at Wellington [...]

To learn all you want to know about Drupal, and probably more, head along to DrupalSouth. The two day event is aimed mainly at developers but there’ll be lots to learn for anyone using the open source content management platform. I’m wondering if it might be too technical for me, but as I’m currently working [...]

I’m glad I wasn’t running a session on Slideshare at the Engage Your Community conference. When I went to upload the presentation I made at the conference it didn’t load first time. I tried an hour later, then the next and a day later. There was no explanation from the folk at Slideshare about any [...]