Ti Point Tork

Week 2

A busy week but with little progress on MacLean and Higgins. I did, however, manage the Mix and Mash judging and a trip to Wellington for the Library Information Advisory Commission (LIAC), and managed to informally acquire a new project (codename: Bagley).

Bagley is for a large international company, and will be delivered offshore. I’m helping a friend with it, and it promises to be both large and fun. So far we’ve passed through the “oh my god, it’s going to happen!” stage and are pondering the myriad of details that we will be bringing together. We’ve started the conversations of how many of which type of person we’ll need, which is the fun fantasy part of the project. In the next few weeks we’ll nail down the specifics and budget.

I finally got my kick-off email out with MacLean yesterday. Everyone had informally agreed to participate, but were waiting on me to get infrastructure crap together. The plan is to rough-out the top-level design next week.

Was asked to speak to a newspaper about the Wellington IT plan but declined because I wasn’t familiar with. Did talk to a journalist from the Weekend Herald about startups, what works and what doesn’t. I look forward to seeing what he took from the conversation; my speech and his writing is both acts of translation and not all my original sentiments will make it to the page intact. I’m also keen to see who else he spoke with, as I gave him a list of people much better qualified to talk on the subject.

I’m reading the Wai 262 report. That’s a report on Maori traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights. I’ve read the first few chapters on creative works, and it is excellent so far: easy to read and it appears to take a very sensible and practical tack. I hope to blog about it next week when I’ve digested the later chapters.

Had dinner in Wellington with Kiwi Foo attendees, conversation covering a wide variety of topics. My takeaways: alchemy was heavily practiced in the home by women who were responsible for the health of their family, which reminds me of the near-saturation density of women dispensing homeopathic bullshit around us; I’m not the only person who can be vehement, eloquent, and incoherent about clouds; Wellington can be warm.

Friday was a LIAC meeting. It’s a half-dozen people in a meeting room, each representing different parts of the “library and information sectors”. Highlights of the day: (0) the new Auckland office of the National Library has a haka exhibition that I absolutely must see; (1) the National Library’s services to schools are exquisite and will save me and my schools a huge amount of duplicated effort; (2) having three statutory advisory bodies (LIAC, the Guardians Kaitiaki of the Alexander Turnbull Library, and Archives Council) in one room for a spirited discussion; and (3) being warmly appreciated after the meeting by one of the Archives Council (“you spoke well, thank you!”) and, after she left, being told “oh, that was Anne Salmond”. She’s only NZ’s top historian whose books I’ve read. D’oh!