Discuss, share, and connect with peers

We have a few different groups for sharing information and links, and starting discussions with us and your peers. Check out the options, choose your preference, or if you’re new to all these then perhaps try a new network out and see if you like it. We welcome feedback on how useful or not these networks are, and let us know if you have any other suggestions.

Share your favourite bookmarks in our Ma.gnolia group:

Here you can share useful web links and start discussions (this group is open to the public, anyone can join). Ma.gnolia is built for bookmarking your most useful links and seeing what other people and groups have added. When you add each new link you can tag them which helps you and others explore and find relevant links in the future.

I’m quite excited about this one as I think it could prove to be a really useful tool. I’ve just started using it and it’s really easy to use and is helping me keep of all the useful things I find on the web, I’m planning to pull in the tag clouds onto this site from our ma.gnolia group when things get going too.

Connect with professionals and join our LinkedIn group:

LinkedIn is a professional networking site that offers you a way to connect with colleagues and make industry contacts. We’ve created the group to provide another way to stay connected with other LG Web Network members, and it also has a facility to start discussions within the group. (Anyone on LinkedIn can join this group.)

Join in with the discussions in our Google Group:

We have set up a private Google Group which is an email discussion group and is open to government, public sector, and not for profit people. (Sorry to all you other industry professionals, whilst we value your involvement in the network we need privacy in this case so we can share sensitive data.)

News and updates from the LG Web Network

Keep in touch with news and updates about what we’re doing and interesting things we think are worth a mention:

• Subscribe to news and interesting things we find posted on our TumbleLog (via RSS or Email), or if you’re on Tumbler you can follow us. We’re using Tumblr to post short messages with links, videos, and other mixed media quickly. Here we post news, events, new tools, useful articles, and anything interesting we stumble across on the web.
• Subscribe to blog posts via RSS or EMail, and if something sparks your interest please comment on the post.

And don’t forget Twitter if you want a bit of all the above!

No post on how to stay connected would be complete without mentioning Twitter. I personally find it a great, low resource intensive way of keeping generally abreast of webby things, and in touch with peers and people I am interested in. Many bloggers post their latest blog posts to Twitter - as do we! Whilst I’m a great fan of RSS feeds, the list of feed updates tends to pile up when I’ve got a big project on and I often find that Twitter is how I find out about the latest happenings.

We post all our blog posts and TumbleLog posts to Twitter, as well as posting small messages, and answering quick questions. So essentially Twitter gives you a way to keep up to date with our network, participate in discussions online, and connect with your peers and other network followers.

Follow us on Twitter!

The prize, which was started in 2006 in memory of Australian web and open source pioneer Nigel McFarlane is open to any Australian web developers or development teams, for a site completed between August 1st 2007 and August 31st this year.

Entry is free, and very simple. Just visit:
http://mcfarlaneprize.com/nominationform.html
and fill in the form. You may nominate your own site, or any site that meets the simple criteria listed there.

Last year the award was won by Michael Koukoullis for http://andrewsmustresign.com

Michael was also one of the developers who worked on the LGSA 2008 Cultural Awards website, along with Tim Lucas, and Cameron Adams (who are speaking at the “We Believe in Community” conference in August).

This prize is set apart from other website awards as it rewards the quality of the design and development of websites, giving web developers and companies an incentive to strive to improve the underlying quality of their sites.

Nominations close 31 August 2008.

Still interested? Here’s the long version:

Perhaps (and I hope) this isn’t the case for all of you, but I’m sure some of you will relate… in my initial days coordinating web projects I felt rather alone in the challenges I was facing. I had the IT guy and the Marketing Manager to help me coordinate the total re-design of our corporate website. They came from quite different view points which left me a little confused at times in choosing which path to follow. It turned into a bit of a solo project partly due to the IT guy trekking off to Europe for the longest 3 months I’ve ever had. Many late nights later, we (the IT guy returned) somehow got the site live and fully populated with content in time for Christmas, just. The biggest thing I learned from the whole process was how much more I needed to learn.

The following year I started to go to more web conferences and found that I wasn’t the only one feeling a bit in the dark. People would come up to me hoping that as the LGSA web coordinator, I might have the answer to their variety of problems - some of which I did, many of which I didn’t. In fact I was facing many of he same difficulties that they were. Increasingly I began to think that there was a need for sharing knowledge, and started thinking about how I might go about this.

Over the last year I’ve been introduced to a wide Sydney web community that I hadn’t really been aware of previously. I’ve been going to all sorts of meet-ups, conferences, and something called jelly (that isn’t edible), all of which has made me grow a new enthusiasm for working on the web. I’ve learned a lot (and still am) from the people I’ve met. I’m hoping that’s something we can do here.

This new found enthusiasm, and the encouragement of my partner in crime - Reem, has pushed me into finally getting organised and starting this blog. Reem came to have similar ideas about building up a network of knowledge in her role as the Local-e Program Director, with an increasing number of queries and requests that were outside of the Local-e realm. So we decided to combine our efforts and create this network for Local Government web coordinators/IT people/marketing and communications staff, anyone really whose role involves working with the web.

The Conference

After putting our heads together we decided we wanted to hold a conference, as although its great to have something online like this that exists outside of the short lifetime of a conference, its very hard to replace the excitement generated from face to face meet-ups. So for our first conference we’ve chosen a theme that we believe is at the heart of what we’re aiming to do - “We Believe in Community”. We want to make this something you will enjoy and learn from, and in particular, be inspired by. So if you think you might want to go read more on the conference, and please fill in our survey so we can try and make it something YOU will enjoy. (Don’t worry it’s a short survey, we know you’re busy.)

What’s next?

Well our current plan of attack is to make sure everything useful Reem and I know about is on here. Then we’re hoping you’ll share with us what you know, what you want to know, and what you like or are frustrated by. Please comment or email us with your ideas, vent at will, or blow our minds with your incredible knowledge. Make sure you stay in the loop by subscribing to updates via RSS or email for your convenience.

So, enjoy reading and start getting excited about the conference, before you have to get back to working on the web.