Thursday 22nd in New Zealand

G'day,


I awoke from a good nights sleep ready to pack and leave the south island to fly to Wellington. The people at the home stay gave me a lift to the airport before jumping on the plane for a short journey to Wellington. I say short journey but it was quite a bumpy ride due to a lot of wind travelling over the water and sometimes felt like the plane was travelling sideways.
We eventually landed and I collected my bags, I now needed to look for Matt O'Mara from Wellington City Council, with only a picture to work with I wondered round the airport. It was however Matt who found me first and we jumped in a taxi to hotel Ibis where I would be staying to drop my bags off.

Then back at Wellington City Council I was able to meet the manager of web content and discovered they use Silverstripe as a content management system and have various e-services such as e-petitions and e-payments. I then moved on to look at GIS and the different map views such as 3D or 2D and scenery such as park view or road view. I was also able to see the e-learning at Wellington used to train their employees, both the face to face training and online learning using Kallidus.

I had a great time at Wellington City Council, it was good to see the technology in the capital and meet new people. Afterwards Matt invited me round to his house for dinner, which was a really kind gesture and it really helped me to feel at home. The food was lovely and everyone was great. After food and chats I went back to my hotel for some sleep and I will see you tomorrow.........

Friday 16th in Australia

G'day,

Today is my final day in Australia and I went to visit Sydney Downtown Council. Sydney Downtown Council and the structure in place reminds me a lot of Leeds City Council back home so it was interesting to visit them.

At Sydney I got to meet the web team focusing on e-services and the customer focused applications in place such as e-payments. Also discussing the different practises and careers within Sydney Downtown. I then met the project manager and we talked about different management methods and agile development and e-learning. I then met the mapping team who spend time mapping the whole of Sydney such as locations of trees, buildings, roads and cables to aid the teams on the streets with portable computers. This was very interesting as Sydney is such a big place but the models were well constructed. I was also shown the physical 3D model at Sydney Downtown Council created by professional modellers. This looked really amazing and I will put some pictures on for you guys a long with lots of my trip. I will also be doing a presentation and writing an article of my findings so keep your eyes peeled.

So that concludes Australia, tomorrow I fly to New Zealand, so see you on the other side (or the dark side as the Aussies like to call it)........