stephen blyth’s blog

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 […]

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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 candidates […]

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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) […]

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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 bookfair […]

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Listed in today’s Dominion Post alongside the normal array of city council notices about street closures, planning exercises and evensts like the Malaysian festival on Saturday, was a small notice about a new online tool for citizens. Now available on the Wellington City Council website is an e-Petitions generator.
This new online democratic tool allows […]

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“Experienced and motivated IT professional to take up the first e-Rider position advising and supporting community groups in the Wellington region.”
This is an excerpt from the advertisement we placed last week for the mobile IT professional the Wellington Region 2020 Communications Trust is hiring to work with community and voluntary organisations.
The person we’re looking for […]

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I’ll definitely bring out my dead for the eDay coming up on 29 September. Dumped in forgotten corners around the house we’ve got three ancient laptops with barely a flicker of life between the three of them.
A lot of people got into the spirit of things at last years eDay in September 2006 when 50 […]

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The Wellington City Council has been committed for more than a decade to ensuring that the city is switched onto powerful uses of ICT. Wellington 2020 in it’s different guises has received core funding for much of the period from the Council, and will continue to do so in the future all things being equal.
The […]

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On Monday the Wellington Regional 2020 Communications Trust ran a workshop to test ideas for delivering a new ICT advice and support service for community and voluntary organisations in the Wellington region (the participants are pictured here). Our facilitator, and Trust chairperson, Erina Papp managed to boil the whole two hour workshop into a single […]

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Yesterday we organised a rally to share some of the “thrills” of V8 Supercars in civic square. About 100 people gathered to hear an address by a surprise speaker, who happened to be Kerry Prendergast in drag. After ’storming’ the council building with our portable sound system blaring out the sweet harmonies of V8 racing […]

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