Canberra IA Community

We had a fairly successful evening last Thursday, 30 August 2007:

• Andrew mentioned that the Oz-IA Conference would be on 21-22 September 2007 - and it was noted that three of the presenters (Donna Maurer, Steve Collins and Matt Hodgson) were present at the meeting.
• Stephen Hall led a discussion on the wonders of modern Tablet PC technology for the working IA – he can sit and take notes, record voice, and tag components of each with different terms for later reference – sitting in a conference, he was able to self-categorise and access notes with tags to the effect of “websites to see” “books to read” and “interesting ideas to follow up on”.
• Donna Maurer demonstrated freebase – essentially a topic map for the whole web, which will be very interesting once it gathers enough momentum/content/users
• We had a discussion on the future of the “Canberra IA Community” group – currently this exists purely as a mailing list for the IA Cocktail Hours. We decided last night to become more representative of all people interested in IA – not a rival to ACTKM or WSG but something a little more formal. Plans are to work closely with WSG and WIPA, with Steve Collins and Ruth Ellison to help out with promotion of meetings, and Andrew Boyd will revamp the iacanberra.org blog to become something that we can all be proud of. We discussed the potential for there to be a WebJam in Canberra in October (TBC), and a WebBlast at the Canberra SMS office in early December.
• Next meeting: we’re formalising on the third Thursday of every month from now on - next meeting will be on Thursday 20 September 2007 - Ruth Ellison will be presenting a case study (details TBA).

From now on it is proposed that we publish an advance notice prior to the meeting as well as a follow-up report like this one here in the IA Canberra blog.  Eventually there will be a newsletter plugin incorporated into the blog such that it can replace the canberra_ia_community@yahoogroups.com.au mailing list.