ONE PIC FROM TODAY

Today was the first day of a two-day public symposium I am organising to show people the research infrastructure we are building. The first day of the symposium explains how we got here and outlines projects completed. Tomorrow looks to the future and explains where we are going. You can watch it remotely by clicking the first link.

With catering, stationery, run sheets, assigning jobs, contacting speakers all out the way last week; today was all about time keeping, chasing up slides presenters had not yet provided, running about with a mic, pushing out links on Zoom, briefing MC, meeting traditional custodian who was doing welcome to country and answering all those micro-questions with micro-decisions.

Today we have around 70 people on Zoom and 60 people in person. Nobody is remotely presenting. We are not recording remote presenters, although we are recording the whole thing. That’s a doddle.

But… about three weeks ago, at the same venue in Melbourne I was part of a team organising a Skills Summit, with far more moving parts. On the third day, a Carpentries Connect event, we had in-person satellite events in Perth and New Zealand. People presented from Melbourne, Perth and Wellington to all other locations via Zoom, at the same time as this was beamed into the physical locations. All needing careful coordination, which we did with a local AV company. People contributed via Zoom chat and we had simultaneous workshops on the same topics happening at all venues. Plus recordings. Which needed downloading and editing afterward.

If you want to see an account of the Skills Summit, check out Powering Research Through Skills: Highlights from the ARDC Digital Research Skills Summit 2024. You can even see a pic of me presenting and being called Kit.

You can see the recording of the session I co-presented about What we learned about skills needs in our co-design process (in the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons). In it I describe what researchers said about how they like skills delivered, who should do it and what conditions should support this. This was from a couple of thousand data points shared in 10 different workshops with around 600 registrants. Not all of it was about skills, but there were gems there.

[End of a worky worky work post].

My accommodation – it has a bath! Home does not. I nipped out at lunchtime and bought bath salts. Evening sorted.