A couple of weekends ago I made a trip to Christchurch to attend a full day intensive Iaido training day a the Canterbury Kendo Club. We spent the first half of the day teaching all the Kendo students a little Iaido as many of them have never tried (and have usually seen us Iai people practicing our strange moves lol). It was a really good experience to teach, rather than learn or practice, it really tests how much you really know about the art you are practicing.  I taught the first kata of the Seitei set, Ipponme Mae, a very important one as it is always the first one you learn when starting out in Iaido. Sensei Eynon Philips has always told me that knowing this kata inside out is like knowing ALL kata as it contains all the elements that make up all kata. I think I must have done this kata 100's if not 100's of times now over the last couple of years of training! The rest for the day was spent training and perfecting our kata and of course doing the ever popular "make up your own kata" kata, a lot of fun! Since moving to Wellington, I have not managed to find an Iaido club to train at as of yet. Despite enquiring at a few martial arts stores (who all seem to say "yeah someone else asked about that a few months back").  So I am looking into starting the Wellington Iaido "study group" under guidance of the Canterbury Kendo/Iaido teacher and hopefully talk more with the other Sensei at the Auckland Kendo club (where I attended the very first NZ Iaido seminar last year). What I am really hoping to achieve is to bring together all those people that may have trained in the past or are looking to start in Wellington.  I still am yet to find a venue, though the Brooklyn Community Centre is looking promising. So this is a call out to any one in the Wellington area interested in training in Iaido.... get in touch! Email: [email protected] It will be great to get something going and build the art of Iaido in New Zealand even stronger! UPDATE: I have been speaking with the Brooklyn Community Centre in Wellington, they seem very open to the idea of setting up Iaido classes at their venue! Will continue to update once I have met with them and organised some dates and times for possible training sessions. read full post

With the Wellington round of the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) on the table "in secret" this week, InternetNZ  hosted the PublicACTA conference at the Wellington Town Hall Civic Suites, Sat 10th April 2010. I managed to make it along to the keynotes on Saturday morning and also followed it on the live stream throughout the day. The goal was to pull together a declaration to be presented  to the negotiators at ACTA and call for more transparency and public consultation. The so called "anti-counterfeiting" trade agreement really takes more action on digital copyrights, trademarks and patent infringement than dealing with the sort of counterfeiting that we normally associate with the word, that is "he problem of large-scale commercial infringement, for profit, that is direct and intentional" (PublicACTA Wellington Declaration, 2010). Instead it seeks enforce criminal liability, statutory damages and possible Internet connection termination for BOTH commercial and non-commercial "infringements" utilising intermediaries such as ISP's, public Internet access points, workplaces, website hosting to do the dirty work. I could go on about the concerns of this agreement but really it is un-required and will not offer benefits to any parties that it seeks to protect (See Kimberlee Weatheral's  and Micheal Giest's keynotes from Public ACTA available from the PublicACTA website for more information). The key issues, concerns and then subsequently suggestions from the 120 people that attended the conference (as well as many hundreds more following along at home on the live video stream and twitter hash tag #PublicACTA) have been complied and crafted into a concise declaration to what we as Internet professionals, consumers, producers, freaks and geeks would like to see taken on board within the Wellington negotiation round of ACTA. The declaration and petition can be accessed here, please take the time to read through and sign the petition if you are in favour of fair democratic process and your rights as consumers of digital content. Let's start a movement.. like this guy... PublicACTA copyright InternetNZ and is used under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence. read full post

I recently moved to a new city and I have been working from my newly set up home office doing my job completely via teleworking, so far so good. Technically everything is working a treat. Before I moved we had setup a company wiki, project management through BaseCamp from 37 Signals, a bug and issue tracking system called Fixx and the all important VPN enabling me to connect to our main office, files and server.
Technology however is just a tool to help make possible what is really more important in business and company culture, that is communication and relationships. I had many questions when I set about researching, putting together and trialing my teleworking program at the start of this year (2010). Most of these questions were around how to keep the company culture alive, make sure everyone has equal access to information and of course keeping those inter-personal relationships tended to in the workplace... while not being in the workplace.

Here are 3 important concepts in workplace communication with remote teams.  

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