Aha - the start of my blog... for real this time. I've been procrastinating on this for a while now - I read a lot of blogs, but never got around to writing my own. Anyway - I've just got back from Sydney and was really lucky to be around at the same time that Bar Camp Sydney was on. If you don't know what a Bar Camp is - head over to http://barcamp.org and you'll find out, I won't repeat it here. Anyway - a lot of people who attended were bloggers and I guess they shamed me into starting!
Sadly - there was no Bar Camp Queensland this time around, I think Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra managed to Synchronise their events. I really don't know what happened with Queensland - I see no mention of it on any of the lists - strange. Anyway - I thought maybe I'd help set one up on my return home.
I went along to the BarCamp mainly to spectate - but part way through a discussion called "Being an Expat in Singapore" I thought a lot about Australia's place in the world and in particular it's location and size - so I decided to do my own discussion called "The Tyrany of Distance - IT in Australia". A few people turned up and the discussion weaved a pretty interesting path, I originally intended the talk to be about the size of Australia and how we can make it easier to work in other parts of Australia and also participate in global projects from our distant location - but it soon took on a life of it's own!
I think everyone agreed that it was hard to get ahead in Australia. All the usual things came up: Tall Poppy syndrome; Stigma of bankruptcy; Lack of Funding - Venture Capitalists & Government funding. On the final point this is where some different views came up. Personally I have had 1 negative experience with grants (Telstra Broadband grant) - but some people in the group had been more successful and a lot of people suggested there are a lot of grants and funding that were very under-utilised. We all agreed that it's a little difficult to find out all the places to look though, so I have started to build a list of these at my page IT Funding in Australia. Please contact me or comment below if you have any more.
Going back to the original topic, I am still interested how we can connect the smaller capital cities and Regional Australia into the IT economy. Personally, I live on the Gold Coast and commute to Brisbane every day and find it very frustrating that the here is no interesting and well paid work on the coast - even Brisbane itself is quite limited.
Nick interviewed me after the discussion and you can find this on youtube. If you are interested in taking part in a BarCampQld later in the year please go to the wiki and sign up.
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