thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

As many of you know I have been working on re-development of a significant NZ government related website which focuses on the roll-out of ultra fast broadband over the next few years.

That site Crown Fibre Holdings finally went live a few weeks ago. I’m very proud of the great design work that has been done on a project of such national significance. In replacing the old site the CFH team and my team wanted to re architect the site and improve usability so that it was much easier to reach out to the key sectors.

I’m delighted that the content and the thinking has progressed along and like all great projects there are some more changes to come.

Crown Fibre - Website by dialogCRM

For the WordPress geeks out there the site is a custom theme which uses lots of video and for government related entities – yes – it is running on a Microsoft IIS server.

Individually and collectively as a group there has been a great deal of effort put in to make the website work on as many levels as possible. It is a learning system and I hope and trust it will become a showcase for all the NZ communities it seeks to represent and engage with.

But wait !- there is more. I’m fascinated by all the debates going on – all day, every day on twitter and other forms of media. Comes a time though -when some straight talking is needed.  I work in marketing and communications and so I organise or help with various events and conferences. I much prefer organising parties  and concerts but conference events have their place as there is no substitute for face to face in real time.

With any project what we are really looking for is for real street level moments of truth. One of my tag lines is “ideas into action”. Yes we need the talk – but we also need to share from our hearts about what moves us and what connects us and what makes a difference and that is ultimately measured in actions.

I was delighted to have Poutaua and Nikolasa Biasiny-Tule as presenters at #WordCampNZ 2012 as our keynote speakers only last week. They believe in speaking the truth with love and humour and it shows.

The clip below comes from another event that I hadn’t seen before today. We have video still coming from #WordCampNZ however here are Nik & Taua’s slides Nikolasa & Potaua Biasiny-Tule – DigitalM?ori & WP Magazine Stylz but watch the video below first.

The conversations we have about ultra fast broadband are important. We need to have more of them and we need to be present and really listen to each other.

As always let me know what you think – are we doing enough to be inclusive and enabling with our ultra fast broadband policy ?and the roll-out? – what more can and should be done?

Please also follow @DigitalMaori over at TangataWhenua.com for more from them.

Wordcampnz is all about creating an affirming space with the best coffee, best people & looking for those magic moments and happy accidents.

Why have a musician talk about his website when you can hear him sing a song he wrote ? And why say good bye when you can sing goodbye.

That would be like asking rugby players to talk about their game. No wait MSM does that all the time and it is actually the wrong way around.

Luke Hurley was a (in all but name) lightning speaker but wouldn’t have done it if we had asked him to be a speaker. He was there as a WordPress user whose core content is songs and music. Asking Luke to talk about his website would have been the wrong thing to do. And perfectly ok to take it at the level of “at the end we had this local singer come and play a few songs” but really were were wanting to engage on more than one level.

In my opinion what Luke does best are songlines and these are best understood not by talking about the songs but by hearing them sung. We also wanted to have a counterpoint to the earlier welcome by @digitalMaori so he also performed a mihi for a largely non- Maori* audience in a way that they didn’t even know that is what it was. (*Macron support broken sorry.)

At other NZ wordcamps we’ve wanted to to acknowledge Maori, but not in that fake corporate way that sometimes happens so having Nik & Poutaua do that in a really natural organic way – “priceless” as they say in bank adland.

The reason there were 3 songs is that the last one “Make Room”  was part of the services to the WordPress community award for @radiowammo who is Glenn Williams.

Glenn is a national treasure. But here’s the thing – I’ve been there a few times and if you were to ask a staff member of one of the stations in the building where he works – most staff don’t know who he is or which studio he is in. I love that he is in effect hiding in plain view.

RadioWammo is like a secret project that flies under the radar most of the time.

We know though and the 2,313+ videos on YT plus all of the other projects he does is magnificent contribution to NZ culture and all kinds of exploration and engagement via his radio and video shows.

Glenn Williams gets Community Service award from Wordcampnz. Photo credit: Vaughn Davis

Show us the art, the vision – the big idea – WordPress is an enabler not an end in itself.

Wordcamp is not about “show ussome code” it is show us the poetry – but most people don’t get that part. Luckily there always some who do… It may sound counter intuitive but if a customer visits your website (on WordPress of course) and just wants to talk about your website instead of engage at a series of other levels with you and your content then that is the wrong conversation.

We could argue that other web people want to do exactly that but now all day and after 8 hrs of talks and presentations we wanted to mark the transition with the ukelele and Lukes songs so we could move onto the after party.

Wordcamps should be like the first rule of fightclub; 1st rule don’t talk about fightclub.

So first rule of wordcampnz is don’t talk about wordcampnz sounds crazy but it works better that way & it is not a literal thing and in many ways you have to be there to get the vibe.

Excited About WordcampNZ Rahul Singh (Go Unitec) on storify for Day 1 captures some of this if you read all the pages.

Vaughn Davis ran rings around everyone on twitter – just like he does in that plane of his. You can take him out of the plane but he is going to be low flying that special intersection of insight, plain silliness and laugh out loud stand up.

Vaughn Davis

I’m looking forward to the day we can have a WordCamp where no one mentions WordPress (not going to happen but) that is the territory we are heading into.

WordPress & the best wordcamps work because it/they get out of the way and allow us all to be creative and connected and ultimately transformed by that engagement.

As Giapo says “there is no secret sauce”

Passionate people sharing in a way that works for them with invisible technology support. You get the idea

My coffee this morning was especially great..

Earlier this morning I was privileged to be on Radio Wammo live talking about this years #wordcampnz in Auckland next Saturday 21st of April. We talked about who should come along, why and what it is all about.

The format is q & a with no real script. Glenn Williams does this every day and once the talk is over the video goes up on the Radio Wammo site within minutes.

RadioWammo runs on WordPress (as do many media sites now.)  It is radio with the added zest of being able to watch it either live on ustream or later off the site. Below is my post on the wordcampnz site

“Glenn Williams is a tech media whiz. His @radiowammo show is a treasure trove of radio shows with great people such as Vaughn Davis, Jayson Bryant, Ben Young, Russell Brown and even a very long running series with Sam Hunt.

What is different about Radio Wammo is that Glenn live mixes the video on air. The various shows are on each weekday between 7am & 10am (UTC 1900-2200) and on demand 24/7 at other times.

The show is mostly completely unscripted and completely live with no edits – enjoy. Questions and comments as always are very welcome.”

“P.S – For wordcampers – Glenn will be doing a lightning talk on Saturday afternoon about Radio Wammo see our latest speaker announcement.

I forgot to mention we will filming all speakers on Saturday and making a mixtape DVD of the results for #wordcampnz attendees. BTW – we won’t be live streaming since there are some bandwidth challenges with our particular location although we may try to do some of that if we can.

Sites mentioned in the show:

• TangataWhenua.com    speakers Nik & Potaua see speakers
• Paleo Zone Nutrition speaker Julianne Taylor
• Crown Fibre Holdings speaker (the writer – Jason Kemp)
• NZ Womans Weekly“

Special feature (WordPress example in the show) have a look at the Crown Fibre site. CFH is all about the Ultra Fast Broadband rollout in NZand is a project that I have been working on for quite some time. It has been completely rebuilt in WordPress and I’m delighted to have been the developer on the project.

Will do a separate post about that – please let me know what you think about the video and do come along to #wordcampnz next weekend.