Introduce yourself to the OS//OS community!

Hey folks, I might as well kick things off!

I'm part of the Enspiral collective, currently co-leading a Govt-backed collaboration called Lifehack which is looking at participative youth-led approaches to shifting the needle on youth wellbeing and mental health.

I've been involved in the social enterprise space for the last 5 years in some form or another. I have followed the rise of "open culture" more than "open source", but have spent a fair bit of time with developers who work with and contribute to open source code communities.

I'm actually pretty excited about the idea of Open Cultural Technologies - facilitation toolkits which mostly live in the offline world, to bring groups of people together to get them working collaboratively - and I don't mean 'Google Docs Collaboration' - I'm talking cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral teams of people actively creating things which none of them could do alone. I believe one of our first versions of this might be launched at OS//OS, so I'm excited about that too.

Chur,

Sam

I'm Dan.

My first experience with OS was building an Apache web server about 15 years ago to host my a personal website. Sometime soon after me and some mates ended up setting up a web hosting company and I sold out.

My next OS love affair was with WordPress. We created some of the first WordPress Plugins (back when they were called WP hacks) and I'm still responsible for setting up local WordCamp conferences.

Our Plugin WP eCommerce (wpecommerce.org) is still going strong even though it is not the dominating Plugin anymore. That makes me sad and I often think "oh if I could only do it again I'd do it this way".

I don't support them because it is kicking my ass but because it was not born out of the good open source spirit that I like to champion and a lot of people got burnt along the way. OS Spirit might sound airy fairy but it is at the heart of most of my decisions and I don't associate or promote OS products that don't come from that place / understanding.

Through this experience and running various projects I have a fairly good understanding of the GPL & MIT licences. Selling GPL products threw me smack bang in the middle of all kinds of controversies and debates around licensing. I survived and I'm more knowledgeable because of it. Beware of people with a little bit on knowledge around the GPL - these people are especially dangerous when you give them tools like the internet.

One of the things I love about the WP community is the community. One of the things that saddens me the most about the WP community is the community.

Unrealistic expectations from OS community users can be a thing if they don't get what they want and you're not clear about what it is you're giving them. If you're not clear your users might think that you're also giving away 40 hours of free customer support and any damn feature that they happen to want. So being clear about your free offering and your up-sells from the start is bloody important. What is dangerous about not doing this is that you open yourself up for attack and it crushes the OS spirit. I've seen many projects come and go under this duress.

These days my main focus is Gamefroot.com and Kiwi.js. Gamefroot is an online level editor for building Kiwi.js powered Javascript games.

Gamefroot uses Google Blockly for constructing Javascript. It is bloody powerful and loved by non-coders and coders alike.

Our next steps are to launch a "publish to Github" feature within Gamefroot. This will mean that people can make games, learn to code and push their games (licensed under MIT) to their own repo.

To be honest I'm not even sure just yet what the most awesome Github integration looks like. I'm hoping to nut this out at OSOS :)

Chur!!!

My love for open source comes from a non-tech background - I'm just someone who recognises the need to hack/re-tool almost every institution/cultural norm that we currently have to enable a more equitable and sustainable life (read: save the planet, and ourselves! ) and FOSS offers a clear path and practice for how to do this.

So there is a very tangible example of collaborative and distributed development. If we can add a values framework to the society stuff, and leverage the existing and emerging tools to help with collaboration then it feels like we can make progress really quickly. It feels important to have this conference as a 'meta' conversation that enables us to be really strategic and share learnings across many different domains of society.

I also love the idea that developers, who live at the code-face might end up being the ones to literally rebuild our society (with a little bit of input from the rest of us!) :-) because developers are by nature 'hunting for solutions', and tireless in this quest.

What a great way to be in the world!

LOL @megansalole there better be a LOT of input from the rest of us otherwise it might look like a mess. Aka I'd much rather MY digital future designed to look smooth and feel like a nice iOS interface as opposed to a clunky awkward feeling Samsung thingy ;)

Without guidance from creative visionaries like Steve Jobs (love him or hate him) it'd be a world with less continuity.

I hope the future brings Open Source developers and creatives together to collaboratively form whatever the most beautiful world possible could look like.

Wow - what a great group so far!

/me name is Jaco.
I'm a Free Culture ardent - so much so that I moved to NZ to immerse myself in a society that I believe (at the time) has a lot in common with the underlying principals.

For my sins, I started my professional life many years ago doing dev in MS-houses, but made then concious decision to start working "The Open Source way", although I don't do as much dev nowadays as I would like (I'm in the process of relearning Python & trying to get my git-fu on).

Some things that I've been involved in of late;
* I'm an New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS) council member, and try to take an active role in the broader local FLOSS landscape.
* Presently self-employed, with the aim of providing FLOSS-centric solutions to local SMB's, but the reception has been... disappointing - mostly because users need & do their work in vertical stacks not available on FLOSS stacks (think AutoCAD)

* A bunch of us started The Meshed Co-operative, with the aim of empowering other small operators in this space to pool resources & address common needs, but that's is staled atm - mostly because people have day-jobs and we lacked the energy & momentum (& largely biz savvy on my own part) to get it to where it needs to be.
* A founding member of TangleBall, a Auckland MakerSpace, and have decided to direct my efforts into growing the local Makers scene, under Makers.org.nz (MoNZ), drawing on lessons learnt from Meshed. I'm immersing myself into this by reaching out & talking to people & groups involved in this community, even would-be commercial sponsors, and getting my hands dirty by helping Vik & Co @ DiamondAge (one of the inventors of the RepRap) in building a local FabLab.
* Serial volunteer - I'm keen to help others in Free Culture who serve the Commons, and so have freely given my time to efforts such as Linux.conf.au, KiwiCon, MultiCore World, etc, and want to do more (also getting into edu space, with projects like Code Club, Coder Dojo, OMG, etc)

I consider myself a bit of a general tech-geek, but will not pretend I'm any sort of expert (/me gets schooled on a regular basis), and feel I can make a more meaningful contribution by assisting others & so create a more rounded environment than "just code-monkeys" (me being part of the latter).

Please note: I use the term "FLOSS" - Free, Libre, Open Source Software - as I believe we do ourselves more harm than good with the word "Free", where the English language (not my native tongue, as is the case for most of the world) creates the expectation of "gratis" ($, not inherently bad in & of itself) rather than the unambiguous "Libre" (freedom), and so I feel the contributors in this environment are not valued enough because they gift their work to the Commons, unless they go work for $BIG_CORP.
I'll reiterate this point in the other thread.

Hi!
I'm just new to these ideas and this scene. I did a BEng in mechanical engineering, realised what a bubble I'd been living in, and after roaming round the world am now a student at Enspiral Dev Academy, which I think will be heaps of fun (so far so good!) and give me some more useful skills to contribute to this OS/OS project. I've been away from NZ for two years and need to catch up on the social and political landscape here. I'm passionate about making the world a better place, and am looking for the next project to engage with. I'm new, with miscellaneous experience across sectors and patchy high-level knowledge, but I'm keen and can learn.
I'll be coming to listen.

I'm Rochelle Furneaux and i have been a lawyer for 20 years. 3 or so years ago I started Enspiral Legal Ltd, and I hope to use that vehicle to realise my dream of bringing some of the Open Source goals and values to the legal profession - or should I say, drag the legal profession to the realisation of the changes around collaboration now possible with changes in technology.

I'm particularly interested in legal informatics, what can and can't be automated in the legal field, and automated mechanisms for sharing information, learning and precedents within the legal profession.

I'm also a Councillor at InternetNZ, and do some work for open source developers. Please send any lawyers interested in these things my way - its a little lonely over here!

Hi guys, I'm an American multimedia artist, videographer, and discussion facilitator. I've done social media, public messaging and internal comms for activism groups. I'm focused on truth in media, organizational ethics, and nonviolent activism in favor of freedom and opportunity for all. I try to facilitate genuine and empathetic connection. (I deeply believe that truth and love lead to the same place.)

I've had open society ideals for a long time, but open source developed slowly for me, after a poor childhood and an arts background rooted in traditional ideas of intellectual property. I quickly adopted freemium concepts, and then crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. After much reflection, I finally betrothed myself to the Commons around the time I first heard about OS//OS. What lovely timing!

The OS//OS vision resonates completely with my views on sustainable culture, economy and government. I've been brainstorming about healthy, sustainable media and networking practices for building a sharing economy. I look for an "all of the above" approach to change, and as a self-styled populist, I'm especially interested in outreach to diverse audiences.

OS//OS already makes me very happy, and I hope to give back to it!

Hi I'm mix, I like:

• exercising imagination / reflecting on society via sci-fi
• working digital magic
• conversations in small groups/ while walking/ in trees
• using analogy/ story to compress knowledge
  
• concise comms
• telling friends when they have spinach in their teeth

here's what play + learning look like to me:

Hi,
I'm Phil and I've been working the IT recruitment space for the past 7 years.
Over the past 4 years I have working with industry colleagues and people in the IT space to make recruitment better. The way we engage, the value we add and how we can change the standard "bums on seats" model that plagues the industry.

I love OS, especially the design thinking around community building and collaboration.

I am a fledgling techy having only just started tinkering with WordPress and a few coding languages.

As well as getting a better understanding into what makes the OS community tick, I am extremely interested in how communities of knowledge and skill are built in different areas.

I have a passion for coaching and industry growth so the work Enspiral has done with LifeHack is a big drawcard for me.

I've been a professional programmer for 15 or so years and have been deeply inspired by the culture surrounding open source software. I think the balance between private and public is a bit off in our economies. I'm a big fan of collectives and holding assets in the commons and would like to see more collective stewardship.

I do a lot of work with self managed companies and learned a lot by launching Enspiral 5 years ago. I currently spend most of my time with Enspiral Dev Academy and am particularly interested in applying learnings from the open source tech community to open source education materials.

It makes me sad that so much energy goes into making platforms because they can make money when it was protocols which made the internet possible and I dream of a day when we can build stronger financial models for people contributing to the commons. Protocols over Platforms is a guiding star for my work these days.

I am publishing a book called 'The Creation Movement' which encourages everyday ordinary people to come together in unity and build solutions that their communities and the greater world could do with. Rather than relying on the government or wasting time getting upset at big business, we can explore ways to create solutions that the world needs then do it together.

I'm also working to create a series of cartoon characters called PAN, BAM & FRIENDS who are baby animal superhero role models. Each of them have gifts and a meaningful role to play in adventures around the world. PAN & BAM hope to find ways to move around in games, educational apps & web tools, and tell inspirational stories through media..

Let's unite on something and create!

Hey Stephen. I'd like to see these characters PAM & BAM. We might be able to help bring them to life in Gamefroot :)

Passion alone !== OS
I want to see talks and workshops by people that have already done and delivered OS products and services :)

Catalyst do cool things. Helen Baxter is AMAZING and written a book about Maker Movement. She would be a draw card for me.

WGTN has OS rock stars that I want to meet and hear them :)

Hi Dan,
Stoked to hear from you!
CHARACTERS: www.panbamworld.com/2253-5144/
We did make a simple game -
GAME: www.panbam.com/fun/
Thanks for introducing yourself :)

@panbam - some of that stuff looks pretty cool :)

Would you consider in providing the PAN & BAM graphics into Gamefroot so that people can use them in their own games?

Out of curiosity what bits of your business are open source. I was surprised to see that all your work is copyright on that page as opposed to creative commons or something comparable - only mention it because we're in the OS/OS chat :)

Hi all, great to see this collection of advocates for openness coming together! I started writing up a post to introduce myself and decided instead to turn it into a blog post: http://lane.net.nz/blog/dave/my-open-history

Look forward to meeting all of you in April!

Hi Dan,

I like your blog and am stoked to hear from you.

Am interested in the OS space.
I have a massive interest in the future of education, and have started a few projects around the open sharing of educational resources in schools ( http://nz.unitlink.org/ ) [UnitLink started 2009] & developing career planning software using big data ( http://www.surfaceproductions.com/career/ ) [Career Programme started 2011].

Yes, I'm happy to provide the panbamWORLD characters for games.
The reason that all of the characters are Trade Marked and Copyrighted is because the cute little animals have a licensing revenue model - so we are making them available to be used on particular products. We also want to know where they are going (for example: We don't want PAN & BAM to end up in a cruel hunting game, etc).

What we can do is open the characters up for use in the development of games without any costs involved -
- What do I do to submit them to Gamefroot?

• What format do you want the images in (1650px by 468px .PNG with transparent background)?

• Where else should we put them?

I would like to hear from the people that wish to use PAN, BAM & FRIENDS and can get new graphics created too. We have a large library of cartoon backdrops, including mountains, objects, etc.

Steve

I'm helping to bring this whole event together - really loving meeting all the people from the OPEN community!

I am an active member of Enspiral and one of the co-founders of Chalkle.

As a non tech - I am loving discovering all the systems and processes that the Open tech community use.

Looking forward to meeting you all in April!

So great to meet all you VR! One of the ideas/aspirations that I had for the conference is that together we could co-create an Open Society Manifesto, as a legacy from our time spent together thinking and hacking our way around the challenges and opportunities.

It would be in the spirit of creating a new ‘operating system’ for the 21st Century - "beyond Capitalism" if you like, providing a more participatory, generative and egalitarian platform for humanity.

Ideally, its something that all our participants have a chance to touch. My request is that one of you can put up your hand to initiate the process (on Loomio) and throughout the conference we will engage people to actively to contribute to various sections of it so that we can launch at the final session on Friday night.

In the spirit of open source, it will then be gifted, tweeted, blogged to the world - and people will be invited to further edit/contribute to it.

Has anyone got a fire in their belly for kicking this off? The organising team don't have capacity unfortunately - besides, this is about our community making something together...

Here are my initial thoughts:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SKsFuzQAaSxVvlmZlDzVpY2hil7qU7YgWWwWTVw3ipg/edit

Hello.

I'm Dean.

I am a venture builder, currently associated with Javasparks (SG/PH), Dungeon Innovations (HK/PH), and Citi IO. As opposed to being a venture capitalist, I do not have that much money... Cheers... :D

Really, our group loves to be in the thick of things and just imagine and execute our way to solving problems.

We have been operating and building solutions in a way which we discovered is called as social enterprises, around in the community.

Doing good and well, not in the typical corporate social responsibility way or as an afterthought to success, but doing meaningful things which is success, in and of itself.

Two or three in our team may be able to fly to Wellington for the OS//OS; hopefully, I get to be one of them, schedules allowing.

We'd be very glad to just pitch any effort we can contribute: logistics, manning booths, covering, tweeting, writing articles, asking good questions, answering questions if we've got answer to it, clean ups, making the most of the event and not waste people's time by learning as much as we can (and sharing it), just being a jolly-good participant to make the event experience richer. :D

Would personally love to contribute to the Manifesto.

Good luck everyone. Cheers.

@megansalole I'm moving my response to the grand Open Society Manifesto concept over to the document itself. :)

Hi folks,

I'm Craig, a programmer with Enspiral Craftworks with a long interest in open source software projects. These days I try and work on social enterprise projects where possible, and try to hangout with people doing inspiring things. I live at Atamai Village where I do a lot of process and facilitation work.

Hey,

I'm Nick. I work as a web developer for Powershop, mostly doing Rails and JavaScript stuff.

I'm a graduate of the first cohort of Enspiral Dev Academy. I'm passionate about open source, and release all of my own personal projects on my Github.

I'm currently working on a decentralized version of Reddit in clientside JavaScript. I'm deeply interested in how we can lever open technology to better distribute power throughout society.

Looking forward to the event, and meeting y'all.t

Hi all, I'm Jay. I'm interested in the human, experienced dimensions of the open movement, and how these are located in intellectual/organisational frames and paradigms that enable social change.

My background is colourful, including postmodern critical theory, NGO management and sector development, integral study and practice around presence, scuba diving, startups, and more recently founding Nest Coworking in Melbourne. I work in storytelling, branding and communications (largely with social enterprise). I can talk up a storm, and I listen very intently :)

I'm drawn to the open movement for its offerings of alternatives to traditional organisational/knowledge structures, as well as its alternative to the sometimes narrow frame provided by startup and disruptive business culture.

I believe that people are wonderful, and that the institutional scale and structure of many endeavours let us down by producing (mostly) unintended consequences that undermine quality. In commerce, in government, in social change.

I'm interested in integrating strong frameworks of curation, held space, and leadership with organic, informal and biomimetic processes of collaboration. I'm interested in how the social movements of coworking and social enterprise can interact and support each other.

I'm currently working on a social enterprise model for an alternative to creative agencies. The idea is for communities of independent creative professionals to present and monetise their collaborative abilities to clients in a way that offers the best of creative agency offerings, while preserving independence, openness, flexibility, and supporting professional learning and development.

For me, this draws upon organic frameworks of collaboration, and asks questions of how flat and open structures can be enabled by integrating leadership and frame-setting. And how open commerce is integrated into it all.

I'm broadly aware of the open movement, but I haven’t dug very deep yet. It seems an enormously rich frame. I love the values-based drive it inspires, and the roving intellect with which it’s synonymous. I work closely with Open Food Network here in Melbourne, and its inspiring founders and team have really turned me on to the open movement.

I'm hugely excited at the learning opportunity of this conference! Hugely excited to meet people, hugely excited to share and learn from the wisdom of the group.

As a coworking founder, I'm also really interested to experience Enspiral and its people, and better understand its game-changing models. Enspiral is the coworking space that most interests me in the world, so I am stoked to be visiting!

Nest Coworking has been deeply involved in collaborating with social enterprise since it began early last year, but as a self-funded startup, I'm only just finding the oxygen for me to lift my eyes from daily work and connect beyond the community that's grown around Nest.

For me, coming to this conference is an intuitive step towards relationship that I hope will connect with a community engaged with a lot of the work I am doing and am yet to imagine!

Thanks for reading, looking forward to meeting, learning and creating together!

Jay

Wow, there are some amazing people from different backgrounds on this forum!

My name is Lena and, as a student, I am more or less of a baby when it comes to Open Source. Long story short, I finished my design degree a year and a half ago and went on to do some work with lots of different people, then realised my passion for the power of code as an extension of all the other digital stuff I've been exposed to, and am now studying web development and rapidly discovering hundreds of amazing projects and communities.

My first conscious experiences of Open Source probably came in the form of looking at licensing for project resources at design school and playing with Libre software to try out new techniques and expand my understanding of "digital".

Simultaneously, I was also spending a bit of time working with community groups and sharing knowledge with other young people, because growing our skill-base as a group just seemed to make sense (and still does). I have a deep appreciation for community-driven knowledge-building and am particularly interested in "Open Source" as an education mechanism because I think that without sharing and collaborating, most industries would become incredibly bland incredibly quickly.

I try my best to learn new things not only so that I can make better, more interesting work, but also so that I have more to share with the people around me.

All in all, I have a lot to learn, so I'm very excited to see more Open Source projects, listen to people's ideas and dreams for the future, and find out more about ways students and young professionals can contribute and help initiate meaningful change.

Thanks for reading and I am looking forward to meeting you all!

Cool story Lena,
I'd like to talk to you about open source and education, plus other stuff :)

Hi,
Amazing line up of speakers and attendees! Im Camia and coming up from Christchurch. Im particularly interested in learning more about core principles of what it means to be Open Source so I can apply it to a new business Im setting up around open source building development. I look forward to attending/sharing/expanding.

Bravo to all those organising!

Kindly,
Camia

My background is in supply chain and project management in the electronic product design and manufacturing industry, and my interest in open source principles centres around the development of collaborative rather than competitive enterprises.

Kia ora koutou

I'm an Enspiral Member and currently working for the Foundation as one of three organisational Catalysts. I'm also leading out on a project to document and share our Cultural Technology as an organisation in a way that makes it highly transferrable to other orgs. In Enspiral I also work in a team called The Purposive Collective doing creative community activation around social and environmental causes.

I'm most excited to be coming to OS // OS to talk to people about this idea of Open Source City-Making. I've recently moved to Christchurch and getting involved in some really exciting projects with the likes of @camiayoung to see if we can redemocratise the creation of our build environment and urban Commons. I'll be hosting an Open Space session on day 2 of the conference that I'm hoping people will be interested to join in the discussion for!

Chloe, that sounds incredibly cool. I'm definitely behind the idea that urban spaces should be owned and shaped by their inhabitants, so I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on the subject!

Awesome @lenaplaksina I'll look forward to connecting this week :-)

@chloewaretini I look forward to the discussions and brain-pong to come, see you at the Open Space session you are hosting.

Just love the diversity of people and interests represented here! I'm a bit diverse myself, bringing together a background in chartered accounting, christian ministry and community development. Currently I am a director and part owner of a software company Audit Assistant Ltd (auditassistant.com), which provides cloud-based software to Chartered Accountants doing audit work. We are also moving towards working in the social enterprise space, currently creating software for governance and financial reporting for smaller not-for-profit entities plus also wanting to develop tools for micro-enterprise, co-ops and other groups on the social enterprise end. I'm very interested in the financial reporting end of sustainability as per Jane Gleeson-White. I'm from Whangarei in Northland and my wife (a youth drug and alcohol counsellor) and I are involved in promoting development of resilient local economy through localisation (localise.nz). We are part of a network within Northland that is promoting open-source style, collaborative economics. I enjoy drawing from a variety of disciplines and find that the insights gained from one tend to be vastly informative of others. I blog on the crossover of theology, sustainability, community and culture at http://desertwatch.typepad.com/desert_watch/.

Hi everyone, I'm part of Enspiral and lead an Enspiral Venture called Metric Engine (www.metricengine.com). We help 60 councils in Australia share operating metrics.

As a separate thing, I'm interested in helping make national election campaign contributions more transparent. If anyone knows of anyone at the conference who's working in this area, please let me know....

I am Charles Hett - very interested in Open Society (on Board of Transparency International), don't know much about Open Source.

I have an enduring interest in longer-term perspectives; I am a qualified actuary and advise insurance, banking and financial asset management busineses. I be,I've there is a much better way to provide many of these financial services to society.

I am looking forward to OS//OS and Thur/Fri; I guess my starting point for Open Society are the ideas of Karl Popper.

Charles

Hey all,

I'm Cam and I look after building a great community environment for SilverStripe open source developers. I have a web development background and have also spent the last 5 years studying the social/culture side of the IT industry. In particular I'm interested in a thing called communities of practice and how they act as social knowledge storage and learning systems.

Looking forward to the conference and I'll be part of the "govt should open source all the things" panel. If you have a moment feel free to propose some questions and discussion on on the other loomio thread about this.

https://osos.loomio.org/d/xKYJIeFm/panel-open-data-open-gov-t-the-government-should-open-source-everything-hosted-by-silverstripe

hi all, i'm Mikey. =^.^= i'm a full-time open sourcerer, i do mad science at Enspiral and sometimes i help teach cyber wizardry. i'm interested in building free and open socioeconomic technology for human networks.

Hi everyone, I'm Serenity and I arrived here in Wellington this morning - one more sleep, so exciting! I believe that the open movement is where we're creating patterns for new economic / human systems: a changed world. I know this in my gut when when we're continuously coming up against really hard stuff that's sometimes uncomfortable and feels unsafe - sign that we're on the right track to smashing some deeply held / unconscious patterns! In my life I like to keep a good balance between smashing/confronting old structures and creating new elegant/beautiful ones. I'm an anarchist at heart (as an ex-bureaucrat what other option is there, really), but one that sees the use in all sorts of structures/patterns in different contexts. I am the sort of person that is curious about everything, however, my focus for the last several years with my partner, Kirsten Larsen, has been working in the food domain. I come from a farm (all my great-grandparents & grandparents were farmers - my parents are still farmers!). Kirsten and I founded the Open Food Network (it's more like a child that's about to finally be born) which is an online marketplace for local food (and much more!) We're on the cusp of launching the full service in Australia. It's a not for profit and open source project. We are working with partners in UK (launch there in June) and Norway (pilot over their summer) and are also working on development of a project in Africa. We are grappling with some big governance/institutional design questions around the open source project and the business and I'm drawn to Enspiral and this conference for inspiration and input. openfoodnetwork.org.au (beta site) dev.openfoodnetwork.org (info for devs).

Hi all, my focus for the last few years has been on helping people develop software better and faster. I'm working with Assurity. I'm the project lead for the Open Source Concordion project, and also run the Wellington Continuous Delivery meetup.

Looking forward to meeting you all :)

Kia ora koutou

So I attempted to put in a profile well before the conference. Did it on my phone... seems it never loaded
:-(
Anyway as an experiment I'm putting this up now to see if anyone's using / looking at this anymore. If you see this, do something that lets me know you have!

Kia ora I'm Isabella.
I'm a Wellington native, from the Porirua hills and Cook Strait coast. One of the greatest compliments I've received was "You're neither fish nor fowl, but you can talk with both and get them talking together".

I'm happiest at the boundaries and the interfaces of social groups, communities, cultures, worldviews. My trades are stakeholder engagement, facilitation and ground-level communications (not media wrangling but "translating" between groups of real people).

If on my deathbed I can say "Well, at least my time on earth made this bit of the world more socially, environmentally and ecologically sustainable"... then I'll die happy.

Things I like:

I'm interested in ways to bring out the good aspects in all of us humans (and minimise the bad tendencies we all have). Culture change, regulation, fear vs love vs desire to belong, nudging and choice architecture, advertising, law...

I'm an information omnivore with a taste for sustainable urban development and transport, civics, natural resource management and sustainability, science and society. I did law and environmental studies at varsity, and would still love to do economics, and behavioural psychology and New Zealand history and te reo and engineering and...

I love learning new things and learning what the moving parts are - the physics, thermodynamics, ecology of societies, professions, organisations, cultures, domains. (I've still a way to go understanding the digital world's "moving parts"!)

So yeah. This conference seems like a great bunch of very diverse brains, worldviews and talents all mingling like hell and cross-pollinating. (and post-conference I can confirm: it was - it was amazing!)

Hi Isabella!

Yep, a few of us are still here! Keen to continue the discussion. Isabella, you've got a broad range of interests and between us, I reckon if, from a basis in reason, we decide on the areas of the gobal ecosystem and human ecology we want to be unreasonable about, we might just change it for the better. (as they say, it is unreasonable to think one can change the world to suit ones own views. Therefore it is implicit that all change in the world is the result of people being unreasonable.)

Hello! :-D Huzzah!

The OSOS attendees from LINZ and the OPen govt Data programme are giving a talk to the organisation on what we learned at the conference, and I wasn't sure if anyone was still using the Loomio resources. Delighted that at least one smart person is!

That should say TWO smart people :-)

Hooray!

Any chance you can make it three?

Charles Hett+64 21616040

For those of you keen to see the community conversation and learnings continue check out the role we have created and opportunity to further the connections created: http://blog.opensourceopensociety.com/are-you-our-osos-community-champion/

Thanks Silvia - been putting it out to good people

Isabella Cawthorn,
You have the power to ignite.
I'm keen to continue this discussion - and underneath it all, while we are all interested in creating, we have somehow yet to see who we can be!

I encourage you to think about possibilities, and where you'd like to be.
It doesn't matter if you don't actually feel like it's possible to get there!
There is great value in opening up to talk about this stuff..

Kia ora! I love connecting with people, connecting other people and collaborating to build beautiful systems to serve our society in a holistic way. I'm contracting as a web developer and facilitator with @gabrielleyoung.

In three weeks we start a 3 month Code for Aotearoa project with Code for Australia, Wellington City Council & LINZ (@camfindlay1, are you involved with this?). Keen to chat about how we can do a really excellent job helping Wellington City Council open up to create richer opportunities for engagement and public empowerment.

Hi @petejakey I'm not directly involved in this initiative - it's being run by Code for Australia however the team I'm currently working with over at LINZ is supporting Alvaro Maz from Code for aus to get the first set of fellows together :thumbsup: It's a staring point to prove it's useful, then do more of what's working and good once proven. A good iterative approach :nz:

Ok great! Looking forward to hearing your talk on licences at OS//OS, and look forward to hearing your vision for opening government for collaboration and civic engagement!

What is code for aotearoa?

http://www.codeforaotearoa.org/ - the pilot of a NZ equivalent of http://www.codeforaustralia.org/ and https://www.codeforamerica.org/. We could do something a bit different too :) Thinking it's a great chance to continue introducing tech ideas and culture to councils and then govt...