This recap was originally posted on the TechSoup Canada blog.

By: Claire Buré, TechSoup Canada Volunteer 

If we compare the two phrases, “Hear John's story on our website” or “go to the website and check out our stats”, which of the two is more likely to encourage you to go to the organization's website? The first one, right? The most compelling stories are those that appeal to emotion: those that are told from the heart, rather than a fact sheet.

Volcanic ash clouds, uni exams and end-of-financial-year busy-ness couldn’t keep us from meeting! Even though the numbers were smaller than our past events, the conversation was rich and inspiring.

NetSquared Adelaide has been meeting now for four months, and each of the monthly meetings has had its own flavour and style. The community has been steadily growing over the months. The format of the first meet-ups were based around hearing from guest speakers, generating a bit of group discussion on the topics raised and then offer some time for networking.

This time around, the meetup was about us, as a community.

This post outlines how Net2Camb hosted it's first livestreamed event, provides information about how view the slides and listen to the audio, and overviews our future plans for providing more live and recorded Netsquared Local event content in the future.

About the event

Our third NetSquared Adelaide event was a great success, attracting people from across the city to find out how technology is impacting the science world. Katie Hannan, from SAcommunity came along and shared her thoughts:

Besides my role with NetSquared globally, I also organize a monthly NetSquared event locally, in Cambridge, UK. The April Net2Camb event was led by David Earl, an early member of the OpenStreetMap team who has helped to record mapping data for much of our region. In his talk, David shared the journey the small OSM team and larger global community have taken to make real humanitarian impact using open source maps.

It's already a month since Adelaide's Inaugural NetSquared Event: Tech for Social Good and this month saw a different format, designed to be much more interactive. There were two main speaker sessions where the group was presented with:

On March 3rd, over forty people from around Adelaide gathered together to discuss how technology can be used for social good. The Inaugural Tech for Social Good Event in Adelaide, South Australia was held as part of the global NetSquared events, which are an initiative of TechSoup Global.

Guest speakers from the Women's and Children's Hospital Foundation and #Quiz4QLD presented compelling examples of how the rise in social media has the capacity to produces amazing results for social good. During the event, tweets were sent out via our @ConnectingUp account using the #Net2ADL hashtag. Participants also tweeted as the event progressed, drawing audiences from interstate and overseas.

Continue reading to find out more!

The August NetSquared Cambridge (UK) event was led by Dave Bower, a software developer who is the driving force behind Lourish.com. Lourish is a newly launched website designed to facilitate swapping of home-grown fruit and veg in the local community.

Besides my role with NetSquared globally, I also organize a monthly NetSquared event locally, in Cambridge, UK. The July Net2Camb event was led by Will Hall, a PHP web developer and open source enthusiast. He discussed the options, benefits, and risks associated with using open source content management systems for SMEs, charities and NGOs.

Will has kindly written a wrap-up of the event to share with you, and included his presentation slides for your reference:

Today we hosted our second NetTuesday event in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne and decided to do things a little differently. I spread some large sheets of scrap paper out on the table and bunched together some textas and crayons in a jar. The atmosphere was informal, and everyone was encouraged to participate whilst sipping lattes and munching on muffins, although I ended up visually facilitating the session (people are afraid that they can't draw!) based on the discussion. The idea was to capture some ideas, experiences and general conversation about ways people are making a difference.