Our Next Event
Hudson Recruitment will host the next WSAF event at their offices, on 1st October 2009, 12:00 noon - 1:30pm.
The Hudson offices are located on Level 6, State Insurance Tower Willis St (lifts for this level are on the Victoria street side). BYO lunch - Hudson will provide tea and coffee.
The topics for this event are:
Got A Question For Laurence?
Do you have a "sticky" political problem? Laurence has kindly offered to try and provide advice on your specific scenarios. Just send in the details of you problem - either to Laurence or care of the WSAF. All correspondence will be treated in the strictest confidence. Feel free to anonymise the details first if you wish. laurence.millar@xtra.co.nz, adrian.kearns@nzta.govt.nz, amir.shevat@datacom.co.nz.
You can get a high-resolution copy of the flyer here.
RSVP is appreciated - but not essential. Please speard the word!
Survey Results
Here's a summary of the results from the survey we ran at the first event. We had 37 attendee's, with 13 people walking in off the street. Not everyone filled in the survay (or all of it) but of those who did:
- Most people (71%) are happy with monthly meetings, a few (20%) prefering bi-monthly, and a small minority thought less often was better.
- Everyone who responded to the duration question thought the current set-up was fine (30 minutes of networking and an hour of formal presentations).
- The way sessions are actually divided up is open to debate, I think it's safe to assume we'll alter the split based on the topic, speakers, etc. For the record the results were:
- 1 dedicated topic - 45%
- 2 topics (50/50 split) - 40%
- 2 topics (75/25 spilt) - 15%.
- Most of you (87%) are happy with lunchtimes.
- Online Presence: there seems to be reasonably wide support for and online group of some kind (53%), as well as forums (33%) and blogs (25%).
- Online Platform: 56% or people would like a LinkedIn group (so we've set one up - see below); this has obvious benefits for those of you already using LinkedIn and is something you can include on your CV. There was also some support for a Google Group (33%) and Facebook (11%).
- 70% of attendees have architect in their job title, with half of those being solution architects, we also had a small but healthy contingent of developers and other roles.
- 35% of those that attended work specifically in public service, and only 20% working in commercial or 'other', leaving 45% who said they worked in a 'mixture'.
The range of topics that you'd like covered is quite diverse - 26 general topics were given, plus 4 specific technologies. In summary we have (taken from 18 responses):
- 56% want to look at technology - either in general or specifically (including The Cloud, SOA, SAAS and ORM).
- The single biggest vote (39%) was for "Patterns" - not sure at what level of granularity though.
- Methodologies got 33%, followed by Open Source (22%) and Soft Skills (17%).
- Other topics specifically listed included (but not limited to): BI, GIS, Coaching/mentoring, best practice, Managing conflict with Project Requirements and client / vendor relationships.
Online Presence
As mentioned, there was support for a LinkedIn group; whilst this has obvious benefits in terms of networking and peoples CV's it's still not clear if it is the suitable choice for a us as a platform for our online presence.
LinkedIn provides discussion forums and "news" articles - which are essentially links to existing pages on the net - the intent for now is to see how this goes.
The LinkedIn WSAF group can be found here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2266264&trk=anet_ug_grppro
Who can join? Anyone. You don't need to be an architect - the whole idea of the group is to support solution and software architects, architects in general and anyone who is interested in architecture (specifically 'aspiring' architects). Don't wait to be invited - find the group and make yourself a member.
You can start discussions and create 'news' items (which seem to simply be links). We strongly encourage you to submit links to stuff you've done - blog posts, and so on; this is your chance to blow your own horn a bit.
Podcasts
We did a low-fi recording of the 1st event (through my laptop mic), there are two podcasts: 1.1 "Agile Architecture" and 1.2 "Cloud Platforms". I'll publish the location of these once I've uploaded them, via LinkedIn.
We kept this quiet in case it didn't work; I'm actually amazed they turned out as well as they did - in terms of quality they aren't quite up there with "Dark Side of the Moon" but they are listen-a-ble (background noise from a fan, etc). Let us know if you know of anyone who could transcribe them.
Future Correspondence
From now on the only emails you'll get from Amir or myself (regarding the WSAF) will be the formal notification (and reminders) of events; we expect this will typically be twice - the initial announcement and a follow-up closer to the event.
All other correspondence will be via the linkedIn group - not sure yet if this will just be posting stuff up there or messages through LinkedIn. Please bear with us - this will be a bit of an experiment for us as much as you. Let us know your thoughts as time goes on.
Regards,
Adrian & Amir
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