My name's Hana and I'm a commitee member on the Wellington Regional Council... of LIANZA that is, not the ever-reliable WRC.
I just had a brief musing before, on a Saturday night yes. Nonethless it's worth writing about I think. I was reading through the pages of our LIANZA website presence, (visit it if you haven't already) and came across this thing called Magpie online. I've actually already come across it and wondered what it was, and at the time, suggested archiving it because it was just some wierd thing on our webpages that I didn't know anything about. Funny how you want to get rid of things (in some way or another) that you don't understand or don't want to know about at the time. Anyway, I gather Magpie was some post-print newsletter, pre-blog sort of Wellington region industry updatey thing, and it's interesting to see how time's have changed. As I understand, it was started by a former committee member, Neil Coup. I'll leave the corrections about this and other facts in this post to current more clued-up committee members :)
I'm in the process of writing a web development strategy for our committee, including a style-guide (and the way I'm talking it up, it's going to be ummm pretty far-out!), and it's good to come back to see how things used to be done here in terms of communication. Back in the good ol' days of the early 1990's, there was a format of a "...beige multi-page newsletter..." which is an improvement I gather, from the "...variously-coloured double-sided single page..." previous era.
My how times have changed. We didn't even have consultation regarding if fellow committee members approved of my recent template change on this blog! I'm continuing to read this archive as I type this, as history is so important to document.
By the way, I thought I'd make a note of the reason why this previous regional newsletter was called "Magpie". It's because it included lots of shiny things from around the place. Cute, but doesn't hold a huge lot of relevance anymore and isn't intuitive. I've been trying to come up with a catchy sort of thing for our committee, but yeah, to no avail. Maybe just saying the reo translation faster will make us sound cooler?? Back to basics - we are LIANZA Te Upoko o Te Ika a Maui!
Anyway, it's quite amazing how things change. There seemed to be a bit of documentation back just 10 or 15 years ago in this regional committee. Now I don't see it as much, but I haven't actually seen a committee member pull out a folder full of past minutes during a meeting as I haven't even met my fellow members! (been in Perth, forgive me, I'm still there actually, oh the shame).
So times have changed, yeah yeah, and everything moves a lot faster now, we all love nz-libs, but we love blogs just as much, and RSS feeds and other stuff that I'm sure Timothy can fill me in on. NZ-libs is a stalwart for us I think. I've been keeping up with your conversations, oh yes, and some really interesting stuff is going down on there. I propose (actually Paddy proposes) that we regularly post something controversial up here and let you know about it on nz-libs. Good idea? I thought so too.
Anyhoo, 'til my next musing/aimless ramble - watch out! Stay safe! aaand remember to return your library books on time!
H
