[@OKau] All day event May (Sydney) feedback sought

Sat Apr 4 19:51:36 UTC 2015

Hi all, 
I'd really like some feedback from potential attendees about whether it makes a difference whether the event at the end of May is on a weekday or a Saturday? I'm trying to sort a venue and I need to know how much of a difference it makes to people.
I am not planning an 'unconference' as such although it will be participant lead and it will not be overly structured. I would like the focus to be on inequality within Australia and there is scope for global inequality but that will depend on interest. 
The event I'm envisioning will have presentations from topic experts in the morning and then informal hacking/planning for the remainder of the day with input/feedback from the topic experts. 
I have contacts with people working in the areas of health inequality, welfare, disability and related professions and I will be inviting them to give short presentations on their area of interest on what data is available for use and what problems they would like to see addressed with it. I'll be contributing another article to Croakey (health blog for Crikey.com) calling for participants. These people are fairly tech savvy but as yet there has been no overlap between these communities and the open data community (other than my collaboration with them).
I am aiming for 60 participants with at least 30 hackers which leaves plenty of room for topic experts and others.
The idea is not so much on trying to force people to finish projects within a day but on setting up ongoing projects where people can work together over time through the ongoing meetups that I hope to set up in the wake of this initial event. I assume the topic experts would be keen to remain involved as these projects develop and I think that is an important aspect of what I am aiming to achieve - collaborative projects that bring diverse skill sets together rather than projects that are solely designed and produced by programmers alone. 
I need to settle on a date and venue so need to know if people would be able to attend such an event on a weekday or weekend or if it makes little difference in terms of your availability.
thanks in advance,

Rosie Williams BA (Sociology)________________________________________

 NoFibs.com.au - Open Data Reporter InfoAus.net - Founder and Developer 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-au/attachments/20150405/fe1214a0/attachment-0003.html>