Ka hari te Paraire! Happy Friday, I hope you are all safe, well and warm. I broke my own rule today and booked meetings on a Friday, leaving writing this to the last minute so am writing to you with a glass of wine on my desk at 4pm wondering whether ChatGPT can emulate my voice and style yet. 
My plan for this pānui was to write about being courageous and standing up for what is ethically and morally right, especially when power in a relationship is unbalanced as we see often in our industry. I have witnessed examples of courage all week and am proud to have been present and experienced these moments. Given the time of day I will turn those thoughts into a blog post for next week instead. 

This week Peter has written a fantastic editorial on how we are becoming 2nd class social media citizens here in Aotearoa NZ, with the introduction of Meta’s new tick (copying Twitter) and Twitter moving us off text based 2 factor authentication to name a few. He has some advice for them both - provide an ad-free service!

Peter has also provided us with  some insight into “How to talk your way out of a cybersecurity crisis” and communication is key. This is such a hot topic I think it’s worth running a webinar on in the near future. 
The impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle are still top of mind which this article “2Degrees bringing forward Starlink Business launch as interest in satellite surges” discusses. Brendan was inspire by these topics and created us a cartoon this week which converges them all to some extent.

One of my finds in 2022 was AI transcription software. If you haven’t tried yet here is a handy blog on the pros and cons, different platforms and some tips if you want to use one of these products. TLDR: I Think the tools are a great asset but they don’t replace the person responsible for writing minutes or notes completely (yet). They are a little pricey and don’t integrate with other software as much as they could yet. They also struggle in an Aotearoa NZ context with our use of Te Reo Māori. Can AI meeting assistants take decent notes?

Food Security - can you help a Masters student please? 
Rob Steyn, Masters Student of Applied Information Systems at Wintec needs your help. He has a questionnaire on the supply side of food security - moving the conversation beyond it being a poor country problem, discussing food value supply chains, profit driven motives and the role of technology in food security. You can read more about this project here.

Shout out to NEMA for adding your data to the government Zero rated data scheme btw. I only learned this week that there is now a portal (thank you Ministry of Education for provisioning this) of Zero rated government sites. Check it out. https://zero.govt.nz/

Speaking of government. A group of ITP members met online yesterday to discuss what political parties should prioritise in this election year. Among the key topics discussed was the importance of resilience and redundancy in our digital infrastructure and how the recent cyclone has shone a bright light on the limitations and challenges. Other focus areas included the potential for our industry to transform the economy, increase productivity, and create employment opportunities - which is pretty well understood on one level yet lacks government action. Concerns about vendor lock-in, maturity of the industry as a whole and our capacity as a nation to consume new technologies also came out. I was personally thrilled when the discussion turned to other critical issues that require attention, such as bias, diversity, inclusion, and a sense of belonging, especially for those who are typically underrepresented in our workplaces. Overall, it was encouraging to hear such a diverse range of perspectives on the important issues facing our industry and I am really looking forward to seeing how these discussions shape up in the coming weeks. 

Upshot from me - they need to start taking our industry seriously. We are the 2nd largest contributor to GDP and growing yet government barely pay us attention, tiny fragmented pieces of investment doesn’t cut it and 20% of our population are on the other side of the digital divide! This is just too important to ignore. 

Rant over. Until next week. Ka kite anō, Vic