I have volunteered and helped out a good number of professional, sporting and community groups over the years; up till now I have never really questioned why I do it. I guess it’s just the drive to make a difference. Now with my 2 year stint as the Treasurer of the Australian Web Industry Association coming to a close maybe it’s time to reflect on why I nominate myself for such things and what the benefits of volunteering for your community are:
Sometimes you come across something that you just have to share. The other day I got the chance to go back in time. Back in the past, to feel and to see something of raw beauty that I personally have not experienced before.
Im talking about the work that I found in an exercise book and the craftsmanship in some Victorian era books.
The work in the school exercise book was lovely completed by a middle class Irish 10 year old, under English rule at the time. Those 03 dates on this work are not from 2002, but 1902, all the way back to the Edwardian era.
Now Perth can be busy place, with lots of professional networking events every month, seems that there are even more now with this financial hiccup, as people scramble for those networking contacts.
Funny thing is that most of the new ones now want to sell me something or get me to join some exclusive networking group that will bring me riches and world domination by afternoon teatime. All I have to do is just sign over a few thousand dollars a year and feed thew group them all my business contacts for good measure. Now I don’t know about you but the only bugger getting rich here is the person that set that scheme up in the first place. Pyramid anyone, just without money.
Cloud computing is all the buzz at the moment, another trendy topic, but it isn’t that new in relative terms, either is the SaaS models, having grown out of the ASP model of the last century.
But you know despite being immersed in all this web “stuff” from day to day, I just have this nagging feeling about the information we put out in the cloud. Is it really that safe!
At the Edge of Web Conference colleague Stephen Collins in his Enterprise 2.0 – A New Age of Aquarius? talk touched on the social aspect of SaaS and that most of his software that he uses is in the cloud. Leaving very little in terms of desktop software.
Gary Barber
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