Stephen Blyth's Blog

With so many entrepreneurs and start-ups going gung-ho developing Apps for this, that and the other. And with gazillions of bits of web content created every hour or is it now every minute. You’d think I’d be able to find an up-to-date and useful list of meeting venues in Wellington. It seems every single time [...]

I’ve promised to run the inaugural NGO webmasters networking event in a fast paced way. The exact words I’ve used in my promotional messages are “Snappy and fun – no sales pitches – no long speeches.” I’ve attended many networking events and public meetings where things drag on. At worst, it’s half time before even [...]

After the workshop I ran today on making regular usability tweaks and enhancements to your website at the Connecting Up conference in Wellington I really got the feeling everyone would have liked more time to swap notes, share good stuff and raise other nutty problems. With a few exceptions, no one was even close to [...]

So far the move has gone pretty smoothly. Last night everyone was able to find somewhere to sleep in our new place and we’ve all eaten. Most importantly, our cable broadband is installed and working. Much to my relief, things went far smoother than when I tried to switch to TelstraClear last year (see “My [...]

The creche our daughter attends is organising a novel fundraising event. Mix wind, exercise and play to create the inaugural Wellington Windwalk. It’s quite a walk from the Brooklyn village up to the lone turbine which frames the suburb. About 7kms return. But there are buses back to the start, for those struggling with the [...]

Next Thursday at least 125 people will be gathering to learn and talk about using the web for their not for profit organisation. The Engage Your Community conference is being held at Massey University in Wellington on 4 September. The organising team (pictured above) met on Thursday for a final wrap up. Despite the last [...]

Monday night marked a significant milestone for the Wellington e-rider IT service. After all the planning, discussion, highs and lows, we held a big celebration. As the banner and invite said, “We’re up and rolling”. About 50 odd people turned up to help us celebrate at Internet NZ’s boardroom. There was a great buzz, and [...]

With a week to go until voting in this year’s the local body elections close, the turnout has been pretty low. The Dominion Post reported last week that just 13.28 per cent of Wellington’s 132,051 eligible votes had been received, down 2.06 per cent from the same stage three years ago. Most of the mayoral [...]

When I was away sunning myself in Arthurs Pass at the weekend, an unofficial e.govt participatory workshop was held in Wellington. Run on self-organising principles, ala open space technology, about 100 people attended to talk about things important to them in the e-government field. Called a barcamp, the event was similar to other (un)conferences (sic) [...]

I actually struggled to find the Downtown Community Ministry (DCM) page on Facebook. Being a Facebook absolute beginner I found all sorts of other ministries, mostly run by fundamentalist christians, before I arrived at DCM’s page. When I got there I found a very short description of what DCM do, an advert for the upcoming [...]