When I got back to Australia after my long (relatively), and somewhat fraught, trip back to England about nine months ago, one of my jobs was to try to do things that made BVN a leader and not a laggard[^1] in the global computation/ architecture realm. It was pretty luxurious being given such a juicy brief, but it wasn’t going to happen over night.

One of the things that it turns out was possible to make happen over night (relatively) was to get the Australian compDesGrp running. I talked briefly about it here, but in summary it is just a place for people in the architecture realm, who dabble in computation can get together and talk about their work. It started in Sydney, and since that there have been sessions in Melbourne, Auckland and Brisbane. All the faff aside, it has been amazingly easy to set up. It’s as though it was a group that was just waiting for a tiny nudge to get going, and BVN gave me the time to get over that initial faff barrier, and also somewhere to host it (thanks guys!).

The thing that has prompted this outpouring of what appears to be self-congratulatory blurb is that the next Brisbane session, which I have had no hand in organising whatsoever (as far as I know it is all Bianca Toth’s doing) is so much bigger than I could ever have imagined, especially for Brisbane - the city that I thought that it would take the longest time to catch on in!

There’s going to be a book launch, two workshops, and the customary presentations. If you happen to be in Brisbane I can thoroughly recommend that you go along!

[^1] this was a phrase that Ian Goldin used to introduce a podcast at the Martin School recently. I can’t find the link just now, but I’ll come back to it and fill it in when I do!