Social Media, yMedia and Your Organisation - Wellington

We ran our first workshop for community groups at Natcoll in Wellington on Monday.

Pamela Minett from yMedia spoke about changing technology and how to successfully involve tertiary students into community groups (NPOs, NGOs, charitable trusts). She introduced web 2.0 and discussed exciting web 2.0 tools that are potentially valuable to community groups in New Zealand. See her presentation below!



Anthea Whittle, Project Manager at Terabyte, talked about her experiences in last year's yMedia Challenge. She introduced and explained web concepts such as blogs and RSS. See her presentation below!

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Sigurd Magnusson (Siggy) from SilverStripe demonstrated how SilverStripe's open source CMS can be used to design websites.

After a short break, we went "hands on" and everyone signed up for Gmail and explored Google Reader, iGoogle and Google Docs.

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Thanks to Natcoll for the venue and thanks to the people who attended from the following organisations:

• NZ Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisations
• Council of Trade Unions' Learning Reps Programme
• Whitireia Community Law
• Arthritis NZ
• Alzheimers NZ
• Diabetes NZ
• Churches Education Commission
• SCOPE
• Downtown Community Ministry
• Kapiti Women's Centre
• Pablos Art Studio
  
• Helping you help animals trust
• Save the Children New Zealand

Technology and Social Change - Auckland

Last Thursday yMedia ran the first Auckland based student workshop for 2008 at Media Design School on Queen Street.


Our first speaker was Steve Martin, Creative Director at Terabyte who gave students an insight into the web industry - a place no longer just for "coders", but for Project Managers, Copywriters, Communicators, User Experience experts and Designers. He talked about how websites should be designed to be accessible by a wide audience.


Next, Bon Virata, Web Programmer at gardyneHOLT and 2007 yMedia Challenge participant spoke about his experience bridging the gap between tertiary studies and working in the industry. Students listened to Bon's inspiring story about how he worked with Te Waipuna Puawai Mercy Oasis and helped them to develop their own website during the yMedia Challenge, before graduating and being offered a full-time position at gardyneHOLT. He demonstrated that success can be achieved by following your passion and understanding one another. His moving conclusion asked the audience "what's your story?" See his presentation below!

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Lastly, Brendan Jarvis, General Manager at Chrometoaster and blogger for BusinessDay presented the 9 things he has learnt in the industry. Students were encouraged to choose their respective workplaces carefully - a creative and supportive workplace will do wonders for graduates in their first job. Brendan succinctly explained the importance of "knowing your audience" and "becoming part of the conversation" with reference to his experience in the web industry. See his presentation below!

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Thank you to everyone who helped to make the workshop possible and to everyone who attended!

Quick catch up on last few weeks...

I've been working on this year's yMedia Challenge for a couple of weeks now, I'll do a quick recap of everything so far. I pulled Sheena in with me on the first day, Sheena is studying with me at Unitec and we did the Industry Internship course together. It was coming up to Uni holidays and Pamela had asked me to recruit anyone I knew to help out.

The yMedia office is totally cool. Terabyte gave us an area in their York St, Parnell office as an in-kind contribution to the yMedia Challenge. We have a big space with wooden polished floors and open-planned desks. All that we had on the desks so far were felttip pens and A3 paper, must be in brainstorm mode.

/skip forward a week/

Pamela and I are here meeting Brendan Jarvis from Chrometoaster. We're at the Strawberry Alarmclock in Parnell. I hadn't had my morning coffee yet, but Pamela had already taken 3. Brendan didn't know what had hit him, Pamela spoke at 100 miles an hour, Brendan asked a few questions and I interjected every now and then. It was a pretty successful meeting, certainly economic on time.

Brendan is quite a big deal, a General Manager at the Chrometoaster Auckland office. One of his major clients is NZ Trade and Enterprise. He also blogs on BusinessDay about digital media and design. Check his blog at http://www.businessday.co.nz/blog/playingtowin. Since our meeting, he's volunteered to judge the yMedia Challenge projects and is offering an internship opportunity to students coming through the Challenge. Awesome!