Kia ora koutou IT Professionals members and supporters. It’s been great to see people taking up the 50 coffees challenge recently and posting their catchups on LinkedIN. We all have such busy lives and work in our silo’s so this is a fantastic way to connect with people, meet prospective clients, employers, employees and friends. With Spring upon us it’s a great time get out and meet people.  

I am so privileged in this role and get to meet people every day. This week I’ve had meetings with CEO’s of government and private sector organisations discussing industry growth, pathways into the workforce and topical issues like Generative AI and Cyber Security. 

I’m also privileged to be paid to read and share information. This week I found this initiative launched by the UK government fascinating, they have formalised an advisory service for businesses launching innovation through use of AI. “Backed by over £2 million in UK government funding, the streamlined service is intended to make it easier for businesses to get the help they need, by bringing together the different regulators involved in the oversight of cross-cutting AI and digital technologies.”

The Australian Government is continuing to outpace us in the Cyber Security space with their Cyber Security Minister (still in awe of them doing this) announcing they will be creating “six ‘cyber shields’ around the nation designed to protect citizens and businesses from cyber-attacks and increase post-breach resilience. This announcement is the latest from their national cyber strategy which they describe as a “big vision” for national response. Their levels of ambition and investment are very cool.
 
Finally today, as we all know the digital divide in Aotearoa is still very real with 20% of our population without adequate internet, devices or skills to participate in modern life. The Digital Equity Coalition Aotearoa (DECA) is undertaking research to understand what price point is an affordable internet connection for those currently without. So I found this article, shared by a member, on the American Affordable Connectivity Programme - and the bipartisan agreement to tackle their digital divide - a timely resource. Fingers crossed we can achieve something similar here in Aoteaora and very soon. 

Thanks to everyone who shares articles with me, please keep them coming.

Survey results - where do we work from 

We asked you to complete a survey on where you are working from these days. 175 people responded and here are the results:

• 50% of us primarily work from an office, 44% from home and 5% from a shared working space
• In a typical week how many days do you work from home - 29% 5 days and a massive 23% 0 days at home
• 60% of us get the choice of where they work on a given day with 31% making the arrangement in conjunction with their employer and the remainder decided solely by their employer
• 41% of us are more productive at home and 42% said it doesn’t make much difference to their productivity where they work

Finally we asked if your employer could do 1 thing to encourage you to work from their office the list was extensive (over 50 different answers), here are some of the key themes:

• Paid travel costs / free parking
• Improved team culture
• More quiet working spaces / less distractions
• People working in the office on the same days
• More flexibility with start / finish times, to leave when need to
• Nothing could ever bring many people back into the office again. 

Bridging the Gap Podcast

Some years ago there was a Podcast called Access Granted hosted by Raj and Mike and focused on telling fantastic stories from the world of Tech, so I was thrilled to interview Raj Khushal for this weeks Bridging the Gap. Raj is still a storyteller, these days focusing on more visual story telling, and this comes across in the podcast, such a great way of painting a picture and describing his journey for us. Raj was recovering from seasonal flu when we did this interview as well. Loved this chat and hope you do too. 

You can listen to Raj here on Spotify and Apple. You can find all of our other great episodes here.

Blogs this week 

AI wrap today - brings you resources on how to learn ore about using generative AI and adopting it for your business. Has articles from the UK and Australia and fascinating insights on productivity improvements, usage by teachers and students and much more.

Peter’s Editorial today is on - Meta’s messaging apps about to go dark - with full encryption coming. He goes on to discuss criminal activity on their platforms and concludes with “When Meta flicks the switch on end-to-end encryption, a company not known to have a strong record when it comes to trust will be running a massive real-time experiment the likes of which the world has never seen.”

Brendan was quite taken by the Walter Isaacson biography on Elon Musk - here is a link to a book review. This particilar paragraph inspired this weeks cartoon - Demon Mode. 
“The prologue to the book contains what in Hollywood writers’ rooms and lesser MFA programmes is called “the inciting incident”. On a playground in 1980s South Africa, Musk was beaten so severely by a pack of bullies that his nose required corrective surgery even decades later. According to Isaacson, his father sided with the bullies. These are acts of violence and betrayal that do have lifelong consequences, as Musk himself has said. What’s both fascinating and depressing is how Musk has internalised these acts of bullying. Twitter (now known as X) was a slime pit of racist and misogynistic savagery even before Musk bought it, but he has given the bullies all but carte blanche and is now planning to remove the block feature, so that users who are being metaphorically punched in the nose will not be able to lift their arms in defence.”

Our friends at TUANZ have continued to release their calls to the next government, here Peter provides an overview of the latest one - Tackle tech skills shortage by attracting diverse talent.

Our guest blog this week - What is geospatial intelligence? A geographer explains the powerful melding of maps and data. Well worth the read and provides insights into improved disaster response.

Events

Our next Cyber Security Incident Response Course will be held on November 14th, this is a half day workshop style and designed for anyone who is involved in Cyber Incident response for your business, communications, legal and privacy staff.

Next week I will be announcing dates for our Summer Webinars - Lunch and Learns and Fireside Chats. So far topics will include insurance, privacy, I will be speaking to a KiwiSaver New Zealander of the year award winner among other passionate people. 

ITP also have an AGM coming up. Members can register here.

Nelson has the Sunshine Wages debate on October 5th.

TechChat Tuesday is on the 3rd of October for members.

And the CITRENZ conference is next week.

Te Reo Māori digital technology terms

Application is Taupānga
Code, Coding - Waehere, Tuhiwaehere
Process - Tukanga

You can find the full glossary here.