Events

Vikram and I have been in Dunedin this week for the second unConference organised by the Internet Research Group at Otago (http://irgo.otago.ac.nz/). The theme of this year's event is Resistance and Control.

The unConference attracts a range of people mainly local, and with a good proportion (around 2/3) from within academic life. There are also practitioners and advocates here such as ourselves, and a range of other people interested in the issues. You can read more about the theme at the site linked above.

Earlier this week a horde of Australian comms professionals (and myself) congregated in Sydney for the 2010 Communications and Policy Research Forum.

The Forum is an annual event organised by the Network Insight Institute and is heavily research oriented, narrowing its gaze on the state of media, telecommunications and the Internet.

UK-based academic Richard Collins gave an absorbing keynote on the health of the public media, stressing the impact the Internet is having on traditional public media.

Last night InternetNZ held its first open evening for members and non-members. The evening was held in the function room at Toto Restaurant in central Auckland and was well attended by twenty people.

The evening featured a presentation on ‘social media’ by InternetNZ member Sandra Newton. Sandra runs Essentee, a North Shore-based website optimisation, design and management firm, and her presentation covered off the use of social media in New Zealand.

InternetNZ is organising an "open evening". This is to provide a platform for InternetNZ members to share their knowledge and thoughts with the wider community. The open evening will provide InternetNZ members an opportunity to get to know one another better and to expose non-members to InternetNZ’s work (hopefully some of them will like it enough to join us!).

The first open evening will be in Auckland. If it works well, we will consider holding an open evening in Wellington later this year.

This weekend, InternetNZ is hosting PublicACTA, an event that will allow public scrutiny and critical analysis of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement currently under negotiation (the next round is being held in Wellington next week).

Why are we hosting the event, and why does it matter to you?

ACTA has morphed from a treaty about counterfeiting (a legitimate concern of governments, given the consumer safety issues and real economic costs it causes) to a treaty about how to bring about the tougher enforcement of copyright and trademark laws online.

You may shrug: "Enforcement? That's fine - the rights in the law won't change, will they?" - that is what the government officials close to the negotiations are saying.  

Problem is, it is wrong. (continues over the break)